Binance’s Institutional Clients Remain Optimistic on Crypto Amid Tough Market

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by market value, said its institutional clients are optimistic on the outlook of crypto for the next year and beyond, according to a survey it conducted between March and May 2023.

The study, conducted by Binance Research and Binance VIP & Institutional team, surveyed 208 of their clients from March 31 to May 15. More than half the respondents, 52%, had crypto assets under management (AUM) of less than $25 million and 22.6% had AUM larger than $100 million.

63.5% of respondents said they are positive on the outlook of crypto for the next year and 88% said they are optimistic for the next decade, according to the report.

The survey also found that despite negative market events in the past year, respondents maintained their crypto allocations. 47% of institutional investors kept their crypto allocations over the past year and more than a third increased their allocation. Just 4.3% said they expect to reduce allocation to crypto in the next 12 months.

Institutional clients appeared positive in Binance's survey despite the regulatory crackdown against Binance and Coinbase from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month and a continued bear market that started last year.

Read more: Kraken’s Head of OTC Options Trading: Investors Are Still Interested In Crypto, Staking

In terms of areas of interest for investing, 54% of investors saw infrastructure to be the most important, closely followed by layer 1 and layer 2 projects with 48% and 44%, respectively.

Web3 infrastructure has been an investor darling from the beginning of this year following last year's FTX implosion. The term – infrastructure – is used broadly and can range from inter-blockchain portals to on-chain wallets.

Read more: What Are VCs Funding After FTX? More Decentralized Infrastructure

Most recently, blockchain infrastructure provider LayerZero Labs raised $120 million in a Series B funding round at a valuation of $3 billion, tripling its valuation from its $135 million round in March 2022.

On the flipside, NFTs, metaverse and gaming sectors were least important for the institutional investors, according to the survey.

NFTs and metaverse experienced a meteoric rise in popularity during the bull market of 2021, with eye-watering NFT sales like "Beeple’s Everydays: the First 5000 Days and Facebook rebranding to Meta to focus on the metaverse. Since then, the hype has dwindled due to an continued bear market that saw lower NFT trading volume and a stagnant growth for metaverse.

However, Apple's most recent mixed reality headset brought some short-lived optimism back into the metaverse industry.

Read more: Apple's New Headset Could Change the Way We Design the Metaverse

UPDATE (June 30, 9:25 UTC): Adds link to report in first paragraph.