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ToggleLet's start with the numbers for Binance Online 2026: 50,000 pre-registrations, 300,000 simultaneous online viewers, 4 hours and 44 minutes of uninterrupted streaming, and 16 speakers taking turns on stage—far exceeding the scale of traditional crypto summits, it felt more like a meticulously rehearsed industry manifesto. Late on May 13th, Taipei time, this live stream wasn't just Binance's self-introduction, but rather a collective declaration of the crypto industry's future in 2026: the dream of 3 billion users, a $10.5 trillion stablecoin flood, the impending regulatory hurricane, and a mysterious cryptographer who had never heard of B-money 30 years ago, rewriting global financial history.
He Yi's insane calculations: the first 100 million yuan took 5 years, the last 100 million yuan only took 18 months.
The first person to take the stage was He Yi, He Yi-CEO of Binance. She didn't mince words, immediately stating the number: 3 billion users .
"Think big, think a little crazy." When He Yi said this, her tone wasn't like she was making BTC, but more like she was assigning homework. It took Binance a full five years to reach its first 100 million users; the next 100 million was compressed to two years; and the next one, only 18 months. This curve isn't an arithmetic progression, it's exponentially accelerating—her subtext is clear: the tipping point for encryption adoption is approaching, and Binance needs to dig its moat as deep as possible before that inflection point.
However, He Yi also pointed out that the biggest bottleneck is not technology, but talent density . Compliance, risk control, product, and engineering—each line of work must simultaneously pursue two things: maintaining the original core execution culture while meeting the increasingly detailed requirements of global regulators. She emphasized that Binance's DNA has never changed—user-first, execution first, thinking later—but now, putting a compliance cloak on this DNA is no less difficult than starting a business from scratch.
Her "1 big bet" is AI: enabling retail investors to engage in quantitative trading. In the past, institutions relied on algorithms, quantitative models, and computing power to overwhelm individual investors, but the emergence of AI is tearing down this barrier. He Yi believes that in the next 18 months, Binance's AI trading tools will be the most crucial lever for narrowing the gap between institutions and retail investors.
Richard Teng's defenses: 1,600 compliance personnel covering 20 jurisdictions.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng then took the stage, tasked with convincing the outside world that Binance is no longer the old platform in the "regulatory gray area."
The numbers speak for themselves: licensed in more than 20 jurisdictions worldwide, with over 1,600 compliance personnel, accounting for more than 20% of its global workforce. Teng calls Binance "the most regulated exchange," a statement that sounds like an advertisement, but it is backed by specific institutions.
Even more noteworthy is his narrative of transformation: Binance is evolving from a pure crypto exchage into a multi-asset platform , encompassing precious metals, petrochemicals, US stocks, and 24/7 trading. He cites a statistic—1.4 billion people worldwide still lack bank accounts, while crypto adoption has climbed from 1% to 7-8%. Teng's meaning is clear: the next growth pool isn't in already developed markets, but in the phones of those 1.4 billion people.
Brad Garlinghouse criticizes Coinbase's "public exit," which leaves a four-month regulatory vacuum.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse was the most fiery speaker in Part 1. He didn't warm up the audience; he went straight to calling on the speakers.
"In January, almost at the finish line, Coinbase publicly withdrew, creating a vacuum effect, followed by a massive influx of opposition over the next 3-4 months." Garlinghouse directly pointed to the impact of Coinbase's last-minute withdrawal on the entire lobbying campaign during the Clarity Act legislative process. He didn't name names, but his words were a rare public attack in the industry.
Despite this, he remains optimistic about the bill's passage: the market currently predicts a 70% chance of passage , with Trump expected to sign it before the end of summer. For Ripple, this is not just a boon for the industry—the passage of the Clarity Act directly determines XRP's compliance status, and Garlinghouse's bet is obvious.
He also presented a figure that silenced the traditional financial industry: stablecoin transactions reached $10.5 trillion in January alone (citing Juniper Research). This figure surpasses the annual processing volume of most traditional payment systems. He added insult to injury: Morgan Stanley's BTC ETF was the company's most successful new product launch in history. The fact that this statement came from the founder of Ripple made the image particularly interesting.
Garlinghouse also used the analogy of ATMs to refute the fear that "AI will take away jobs"—after the invention of ATMs, the number of bank employees did not decrease but increased because the convenience expanded the overall market. He believes that the impact of AI on employment will be similar.
Lily Liu: RWA involves stakes of 100 trillion, and AI bots need to pay in crypto.
Solana Foundation Chairwoman Lily Liu took the stage and presented the most comprehensive map of the live broadcast.
Her core argument is that RWA (Real-World Asset Tokenization) is an asset class worth between $100 and $500 trillion , while the current on-chain RWA is only $100 to $200 billion—meaning a penetration rate of less than 0.01%, and the entire sector is practically still in its infancy.
Even more interesting is her second argument: the AI robot economy needs a crypto payment track. She points out that micropayments executed by AI agents—a few cents, a few milliseconds—are simply beyond the capabilities of credit card systems; only the instant settlement of cryptocurrencies can support this new transaction model. Solana is building the payment infrastructure for this "machine economy."
She also pointed out an opportunity overlooked by most discussions: 180 countries worldwide lack large-scale capital markets, and blockchain can build entirely new financial infrastructure from scratch, such as energy markets and computing power markets, which simply did not exist in the past. This is not improving the old system, but reinventing the wheel.
Chamath: My billionaire friend is out of touch with reality, who should I listen to?
Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya's entrance involved a self-deprecating joke before getting down to business.
"The billionaires in my social circle who are 50 to 60 years old are too rich and out of touch with reality to be trusted to predict the next big thing." This statement, coming from one of Silicon Valley's most well-known investors, is itself an accurate social observation.
His four main investment themes are: first, the vertical integration of AI data centers from land to tokens; second, lithium iron phosphate batteries and rare earth minerals related to physical AI; third, AI control layer software (he revealed that his portfolio company 8090 is in this field); and fourth, distributed computing.
He also mentioned an interesting new venture: partnering with major U.S. homebuilders and Nvidia to make home mini data centers a standard feature in homes. This concept means that computing power will no longer belong solely to enterprises, but will enter every American home—it sounds like science fiction, but investors are already betting on it.
CZ's Counterattack: AI Financial Advisors Understand You Better Than Humans
The appearance of Binance founder CZ CZ brought the most down-to-earth dialogue in the first half of the live broadcast.
Regarding his investment portfolio, CZ revealed that 70% to 80% of his personal assets are still invested in crypto and Web3 , with the remainder in AI infrastructure: data centers, power, and customized chips. His logic remains consistent—first lay the foundation in Web3, then use AI to amplify it.
He didn't mince words when it came to traditional financial advisors: "They give you the same old advice and don't understand your background. AI Agents do a much better job." This wasn't just a casual criticism—he went on to say that Binance has launched an AI trading bot feature with a segregated wallet design, and user feedback has been positive.
His ultimate prediction is that in the future, there will be no "Web3 vs. traditional finance" opposition, only "finance," with the two merging into a new system. This narrative is highly consistent with Richard Teng's multi-asset platform strategy—Binance is reshaping itself from a crypto exchage into the infrastructure of a global financial super application.
BNB Chain's hard numbers: 40% of global stablecoin transactions are completed here.
Nina Rong, Executive Director of Growth at BNB Chain, presented the most intensive on-chain information of the entire live stream.
The blockchain has bridged in $138 billion in assets, 10% of which are stablecoins; it has accumulated 832 million unique wallets and 4 million daily active users. Most impressively, 40% of global stablecoin transactions are completed on BNB Chain , serving 20 million stablecoin users monthly.
In the RWA sector, the BNB Chain has reached a scale of $4 billion, with over 500 asset types and 60,000 holders. The number of on-chain AI agents has reached 179,000, accounting for 60% of the global total.
The technological upgrades were equally swift: the new hard fork compressed block time to 450 milliseconds , final confirmation to 650 milliseconds, and TPS from 6,000 to 20,000 . Nina Rong dropped a bombshell – the fourth chain will be unveiled within weeks. No further details were provided, instantly creating a tense atmosphere.
Binance Pay brings stablecoins into everyday life: 15% cash back, zero conversion fees.
Thomas, Binance's VIP and Head of Fiat Payments, took the stage not to present a vision, but to showcase products that have already been launched.
He said that Binance's next step is to transform from a trading platform into a super app for everyday finance, "making payments a hygiene factor"—meaning that payments should be as ubiquitous, seamless, and unnoticed as tap water.
Specifically, at the product level: Binance Card's stablecoin promotion offers 15% cash back, zero conversion fees, and zero foreign exchange fees , running until the end of May 2026. Binance Pay has also integrated with local QR code payment systems in various countries, already launched in Brazil and Vietnam—allowing users to pay directly with stablecoins at physical stores without first exchanging them for local fiat currency. This is the most direct demonstration of a stablecoin's "real-world use case."
Coin Bureau's Cold Eye: How Much Saylor Buys Determines How Far the Market Goes
Guy Turner and Nick Baird, the two presenters at the British crypto media outlet Coin Bureau, took turns offering sober macro analysis rather than optimism.
Guy Turner points out the biggest obstacle to the Clarity Act: strong opposition from the banking industry. Allowing users to earn yields on idle holdings directly threatens the core business model of banks—this is not a technical issue, but a conflict of interest. He also observes the recent strong performance of privacy coins Zcash and Monero, which stems from a growing understanding of how blockchain works, thus creating a greater need for privacy-preserving tools.
Nick Baird's data is even more straightforward: Bitcoin has a long-term correlation of 90% with global liquidity , and its correlation with tech stocks peaked at 70% this year—BTC has essentially become a macro asset, rather than just a hobby for the crypto community. He points out that BTC is currently hovering around 82K, with resistance between 83K and 86K.
What's even more troubling for the market is PIMCO's warning: the US may still raise interest rates this year. The yield on 30-year UK government bonds just hit a 28-year high. If oil prices remain above $100 per barrel, the Federal Reserve will face a policy dilemma: unable to intervene in supply-side inflation—raising rates would curb inflation while simultaneously suppressing growth; not raising rates would lead to runaway inflation. Caught in this macroeconomic maelstrom, it's virtually impossible for the crypto market to move independently.
Ryan, Head of Research at DeFi Llama, put this macro-level observation more concretely in his words: "A lot of market movement depends on whether Saylor bought this week; this week he only bought $43 million, not $500 million." This wasn't meant to mock Saylor, but rather to describe a fact—the marginal buyers of Bitcoin are becoming highly concentrated, and the market structure is different from three years ago. He also announced that DL Research officially merged into DeFi Llama this week, changing its name to DeFi Llama Research, and launched the Llama AI product, which uses on-chain databases to directly answer market questions.
The crisis of encrypted identity: How many people really want "decentralization"?
Messari Research Director Average Joe Crypto's remarks were the most honest self-examination of the entire live stream.
He calls himself a "cypherpunk and libertarian," but then he changed the subject: "I don't think many people still want to decentralize those things." After he said that, there was probably a moment of silence from the audience.
He cited the Bybit hack as an example—after the incident, Arbitrum was able to change the state on-chain and recover funds. From a technological purist perspective, this is a betrayal of the "immutability" principle; but from a user protection perspective, it demonstrates the system's self-healing ability. Brother Qiao didn't provide an answer, but the question itself is sharp enough.
His analysis of the BTC bottom was relatively straightforward: after falling to around $60,000 in February, the price did not break below that level despite a series of bad news – this was an important bottom confirmation signal from a technical perspective, indicating that the bulls' defense was stronger than expected.
Adam Back: Satorusi never read B-money; this history needs to be clarified.
Part 3 opens with Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream and inventor of Hashcash, who delivers one of the most valuable first-hand testimonies in crypto history.
When Satorusi sent out the draft of the Bitcoin white paper in August 2008, he had no idea that Wei Dai's B-money existed . Adam Back revealed that he introduced B-money to Satorusi after reading the draft, and Satorusi only contacted Wei Dai the next day to confirm the citation format.
This episode changed many people's understanding of Bitcoin's "sudden emergence" narrative: Satori was not a giant standing on the shoulders of giants, but rather someone who, with completely independent thinking, reached the same destination again. Adam Back concluded that Bitcoin was a "discovery" rather than an "invention"—the design space was extremely narrow. Between 1995 and 2005, many people tried similar systems and all failed. Satori's success on his first attempt showed that the precision of the design details was close to the laws of physics, with little room for error.
Regarding the quantum threat, Adam Back offered the most sober assessment: current quantum computers are "still in the vacuum tube era," and it will take at least another 10 years to reach the level of capability that threatens ECDSA. Blockstream has already deployed a post-quantum signature scheme, a variant of SPHINCS+, on its Liquid sidechain; this is a proactive technological move, not a panic reaction. He also calculated a long-debated figure: of the approximately 2.5 million Bitcoins mined in 2009, about 1 million could be attributed to entities other than Satorusi—the true upper limit of Satorusi's holdings may be far lower than the commonly accepted 1 million.
Ella Zhang's contrarian prediction: The most valuable Web3 companies may choose not to issue their own cryptocurrencies.
Ella Zhang, former head of Binance Labs and founding partner of YZ Labs, took the stage. Her main bet is RWA, and her first portfolio project is Plume.
Her favored sectors include: on-chain pre-IPO stocks (SpaceX and OpenAI tokenized stocks are among the targets she specifically mentioned), and the phenomenon that stablecoin penetration in some cutting-edge markets has exceeded 50%—this is not the future, but already happening now.
But what really caught people's attention was her contrarian prediction: "The most valuable blockchain companies of the future may not necessarily need to issue tokens; they may choose to IPO on the traditional stock market instead. Crypto Twitter will laugh at me." This statement required a certain amount of courage to say, because it directly challenged the fundamental beliefs of the entire Web3 community.
She also revealed a detail little known to the outside world: CZ stated in Davos that he was in talks with at least 12 governments about cooperation on the tokenization of national assets. If true, this is not an experiment in one or two countries, but a systemic wave of sovereign assets being put on the blockchain.
BlackRock's word cloud analogy: Bitcoin is the largest word, but there are very few actual participants.
The final speaker was Rob Goldstein, COO of BlackRock, who represented the institutional perspective of the company's $14 trillion in assets under management.
His two-way bridging strategy is no longer just a concept: on the one hand, he packages digital assets into ETFs (IBIT is the fastest new product in BlackRock's history to break $50 billion); on the other hand, he tokenizes traditional capital market assets (the BUIDL fund has been deployed on BNB Smart Chain).
Regarding AI, Goldstein offered the most vivid analogy of the live stream: "AI is like discovering alien technology on Earth." He believes that AI and digital assets are two sides of the same coin—both are underlying technologies that redefine how humans interact with capital, not tools, but the foundational infrastructure of a new civilization.
His "word cloud meeting analogy" is worth pondering: BlackRock convened a meeting with institutional clients to ask about their most pressing concerns, and the word cloud showed Bitcoin as the largest word—but he added that the actual percentage of truly actively participating institutional investors in the room was extremely low. The market is still in its very early stages, and most institutions are still at the "word cloud" stage regarding Bitcoin, without any real action yet.
The global RWA market is currently only $30 billion, and Goldstein says this is "not even the first game" yet—future growth will be measured in multiples, not percentages. He believes the biggest obstacle to institutional adoption is not technology or regulation, but education . If clients don't understand, they won't act. What BlackRock is doing is not just providing products, but redefining the knowledge framework for institutional investors.
The crypto narrative of 2026 will no longer belong solely to the crypto community.
In 4 hours and 44 minutes, 16 voices discussed the most important things for this industry in 2026.
What was said was that: the scale of stablecoins has entered a macro landscape that is "not to be ignored"; RWA's penetration rate is still 0.01%, but institutions like BlackRock are already laying the groundwork; BNB Chain is seizing the technological high ground with hard forks and on-chain AI agents; and the narrative of Bitcoin's bottom is reinforced by Adam Back's first-hand historical account.
The questions that remain are: Does the ideal of decentralization still have a market? How far can privacy coins go under global anti-money laundering pressure? How long will Saylor's continued buying last? Will Ella Zhang's prediction—that the most valuable Web3 companies will choose not to issue their own tokens—be confirmed by Crypto Twitter a few years later?
Goldstein's "word cloud analogy" perhaps best explains this: Bitcoin appears on every institution's keyword list, in the largest font, but only a small minority actually engage with it. This disparity represents both the biggest opportunity and the biggest uncertainty for the next few years.
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