Binance Faces Market Share Decline as Crypto Market Surges – What’s Going On?

Binance, the crypto exchange that for long has dominated global crypto trading, has seen its market share continue to decline even as the overall market has surged higher.

The continued decline in market share for the world’s largest crypto exchange was pointed to in a recent opinion piece by The Block’s Frank Chaparro, where he said that Binance’s market share among exchanges without USD support has fallen from 74% in December last year to 50% as of this month.

The decline in market share has happened as Binance has continued to lose key employees, with at least 16 executives leaving the firm over the past couple of years, a fact that was also pointed to in Chaparro’s piece.

Perhaps most notable among them was the departure of then-CEO of Binance.US, the former regulator Brian Brooks, who abruptly left the company in August 2021 after serving only three months as CEO.

Brooks later revealed that the real reason he left Binance.US was because he was “not actually the one running this company,” noting that Binance’s global CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) was the one who was really charge.

Following Brooks’ departure, Brian Shroder took over as CEO of the exchange, before he also quit in mid-September this year in the midst of a regulatory storm around Binance.US.

In addition to these CEOs, executives including Binance UK Head Jonathan Farnell, chief risk officer Sidney Majalya, and Citadel veteran Seth Levy have all left the company within a short period of time.

Executive departures causing nervousness

Not surprisingly, the departures have caused some degree of nervousness among Binance users who still have last year’s collapse of FTX fresh in mind.

In his piece, Chaparro quoted a professional crypto options trader as saying that the regulatory actions taken against Binance has scared trading firms from committing too much capital to the exchange.

“It is tough for institutional guys to commit resources given the headline risk. [High frequency trading] guys have outsized volume due to the nature of the trading style,” the trader was quoted as saying.

At the time of writing, Binance had a “normalized” 24-hour spot trading volume of $4.6 billion.

This compares to the $1.3 billion in normalized spot volume that rival exchange OKX boasts, CoinGecko data shows.