Binance Says Crypto Platforms Fill In for Banks in Emerging Markets

New research from Binance finds that users in emerging markets are fueling global cryptocurrency adoption.

Emerging markets (EMs) accounted for 77% of new users on Binance, according to a report last week from the world’s largest crypto platform. These users’ activity goes beyond just trading to include things like investments, savings and payments.

“The constraint that has historically limited financial inclusion — the cost of physical distribution against geographically dispersed demand — has been substantively relaxed by mobile-device penetration and on-chain settlement infrastructure,” the report said.

“Cost, access and yield gaps that have proven persistent under conventional banking arrangements are addressed at the infrastructure layer rather than at the institutional layer.”

Roughly 28% of users with portfolio balances of at least $10 hold at least half their portfolio in stablecoins, a pattern in keeping with “savings-oriented usage,” the report said. The prevalence of this behavior has risen from 4% of users in 2020 to 28% this year.

“The preference is more pronounced in EM, where 36% of users exhibit the same allocation pattern, and 73% of all stablecoin savers globally are based in EM,” Binance added.

The company said the patterns it had seen are most obvious in markets with the largest financial confusion gap, in keeping “a thesis of substitution at the margin rather than displacement at the center.”

“Whether the trajectory translates into a permanent shift in financial-system architecture will depend on regulatory clarity , on the resilience of stablecoin and tokenized-asset infrastructure under stress, and on the extent to which conventional providers internalize the cost structure that on-chain rails have demonstrated,” the report said.

In other digital asset news, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde last week called on Europe to build its own modernized settlement solutions based around central bank money , arguing that stablecoins on their own have structural weaknesses.

In a speech at the Banco de España LatAm Economic Forum in Spain, Lagarde said that euro-denominated stablecoins could provide short-term gains in financing conditions and international reach but that those benefits would be overshadowed by concerns related to financial stability and monetary policy transmission.

“If we want to strengthen the international appeal of the euro, stablecoins are not an efficient way of doing so,” Lagarde said.

“The best solution remains the same: more integrated capital markets through the savings and investment union, and over time a safe asset base that matches the scale of our ambitions for the euro’s international role,” Lagarde added.