Binance Research: Crypto Users Bring $5T in Equity Capital

Crypto exchanges are increasingly becoming the gateway to the global stock market. That is according to a new report from Binance Research, in which the company expresses high growth expectations for the coming years. Users from emerging markets play a central role in this.

Binance Research is available at OKX and Bybit.

300 million new equity investors via crypto exchanges

According to the report, the crypto sector could bring as much as $2 trillion in additional capital and nearly 300 million new investors to the global stock market by 2031. In the most optimistic scenario, the figures go even higher: crypto users could generate $5 trillion in incremental equity capital annually within five years.

Binance Research bases these estimates on a model that starts with the total global number of crypto users. It then accounts for the reach of exchanges, user suitability and adoption rate to calculate the number of active equity traders. Multiplying that figure by the average position size gives a total estimate of capital deployed. Notable detail: around 93% of users already trading stocks via Binance come from emerging markets.

Stablecoins and tokenised equities lower the barrier

The report also points to the role of stablecoins and tokenised equities in making cross-border investing more accessible. Through stablecoin settlement of equity trading and tokenisation of stocks, the costs of international transactions can be significantly lowered. This makes investing much more feasible for users in countries with limited access to traditional financial services. Earlier, Binance already announced a partnership with Alpaca for trading stocks and ETFs, which aligns with this broader strategy.

Furthermore, Binance Research states that TradFi-linked perpetuals now account for approximately 10% of total stablecoin trading volume. This shows that the separation between traditional financial markets and the crypto world is blurring further. Other players in the sector are also moving in that direction: for instance, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard recently launched a joint stablecoin platform.