Richard Teng has spent more than three decades in financial services, working at different times as the Singapore Exchange’s chief regulatory officer and CEO of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority at Abu Dhabi Global Market.

Along the way, he became more and more intrigued by the promise of crypto and stablecoins to bring about long-sought changes in finance, including driving financial inclusion and reducing remittances fees for consumers.

He eventually joined Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, in 2021, rose in the company’s ranks and was named CEO in late 2023. Today, his company partners with Mastercard to combine the innovations of crypto with the customer experience and protections Mastercard built up over decades to infuse new concepts into both crypto and traditional finance.

Wearing a black Binance t-shirt, Teng in early June sat down for a video interview with Mastercard’s newsroom while he was in Dubai. He talked about what needs to happen to grow mass adoption in crypto, his focus areas as the new leader of Binance and how he got into crypto in the first place.

Here’s our Q&A, which was edited for length and clarity.

Teng: Binance’s vision from day one is to support the freedom of money globally. This is something that we are very passionate about. People should have the ability to make use of their money in the fashion that they wish to, wherever they wish to.

But that's not the reality that we face. In many parts of the world, financial inclusion is still a big problem. People have no access to payment systems locally, to remittance services, to banking systems. I've traveled the world extensively, to many frontier markets with 10 to 20% financial inclusion.

Today, financial inclusion is a big problem – 1.4 billion people are not within the financial system. Crypto exists to solve many of these pain points.

Teng: The reality is that crypto is the easiest form. It exists 24/7. It’s decentralized. It doesn't discriminate. It's not subject to trade wars. It's very neutral.

I have seen how crypto changed the lives of so many people. In fact, when I travel to many parts of this world, I get thanked very often by people coming up to me to say that crypto and Binance has been a lifesaver for them, because that's the only way that they can receive remittances from their loved ones. If you look at traditional remittance methods, many of these firms charge north of 10%. But if you use crypto, instead of waiting for two to three days for the money to reach your loved ones, they reach them in an instantaneous basis, and at minimum to no cost.

Imagine, if you want to remit $500, $75 goes to fees, which is very common. The loved ones only received $425 and that means a lot of money to underprivileged people.

In the last few years, especially where many countries go through a hyperinflationary scenario, by holding stablecoins, they are so much better off as a store of wealth, and by holding onto bitcoin, that's outperformed every asset class for the last few years.

Teng: I got involved in crypto in 2017. At that point, crypto adoption was less than 1%. And for me, I was very clear. I have two hypotheses for crypto to go mainstream and for mass adoption to take place. You need two elements to come into play. The first is you need clear regulations. If I bring you back to 2017, none of the regulators want to regulate crypto because, to them, it’s a very small sector. They don't have resources to devote to understand this new sector. So there are a lack of rules and clarity.

And the second element that has been coming to play is institutional adoption. If you think about FX, commodities, stocks and bonds, it's always the institution adoption layer that comes through first, then goes down to corporates, high-net-worth individuals, and, finally, retail gets access. Crypto is the only asset class where retail believed firmly in it, embraced it for more than 16 years and, for the longest time, institutions were saying that this passing fad would go away. But we saw that sea change last year, firstly with the approval of ETFs in the U.S. and then subsequently around the world. Finally it gave crypto the credibility that it well deserved, and we saw sharp take up in terms of adoption. Fidelity, BlackRock, Charles Schwab and even JPMorgan went from huge crypto skeptics to now believers and offering crypto products. So that institutional wave is coming through.

So you can argue that we are still at early stage, but today, we are close to 7 to 8% crypto adoption. When we reach that stage, the next 10% will come through quickly.

I can give you some numbers to back it up. Binance started 2024 with 170 million users. Today, we are 275 million users, so we've added more than 100 million users in the span of less than one and a half years. And a lot of those are not only retail, but a lot of institutional, family offices, even sovereigns wishing to set up strategic crypto reserves. So if you look at where we are, our numbers are pretty close to Netflix. We onboard, on average, more than 150,000 new users a day onto our platform since 2024, so that huge momentum is coming through.

Teng: I've been in the financial services sector for more than 31 years. I've always been in financial services, traditional finance and the regulatory side of things. So in 2017 I got to know crypto, actually, in the United States. I attend a yearly event called the Futures Industry Association. It’s a big powwow of global regulators and exchange platforms. That particular edition which I attended, I see a lot of crypto boys coming through, and that got me interested to understand this sector. And the more I deep dive into this sector, I discovered that it can actually solve a lot of pain points that we in traditional finance have been trying to solve for the longest time, but have not been making much headway, including the financial inclusion issue that I've mentioned.

So when I was CEO of Financial Services Regulatory Authority at Abu Dhabi Global Market, we in 2017-2018 became one of the first in the world to develop a comprehensive framework to start regulating crypto. We became one of the first in the world to embrace that, and I'm glad that my effort plays a small part in really supporting the crypto agenda and development.

Teng: When I became CEO in the end of 2023, I had three key focuses. The first one is to make sure that Binance continues to be the best platform for crypto users and offering the best product, the best security, the best compliance for users. The second priority is to work with global regulators to uphold standards. And by now, we are the most regulated exchange. And third thing I want to focus on is partnership, because we are still at a very early stage of adoption. The more we can work with partners to support crypto adoption and deployment globally, the more we can make it a vibrant ecosystem, the more utility that we can inject into the ecosystem and the industry, the better off we will be. So there are many strong use cases. Stablecoins is one of them. Payment obviously is another. So we are looking forward to working with Mastercard as a payments partner.

We introduced Binance Pay about two years back. By now, there's more than $27 billion going through Binance Pay [since launch], and based on what remittance are charging we have saved our users more than $1.75 billion in terms of fees. We introduced with the Kingdom of Bhutan recently. Now people can use Binance Pay for anything from visa applications to accommodation to their meals to buying things from local vendors.

Triple-A, the payment service providers, had research to show that crypto holders are people that actually want different experiences. So if you look at their spending pattern, they tend to spend much more. They tend to travel a lot more than those of non-crypto holders. So imagine all these people traveling the world with a partnership between us. We can really support a lot of them in terms of their experiences going internationally and having different payment experiences and supporting that adoption.

Teng: As with any asset class, we will be subject to changes in macroeconomic conditions, interest rate environment — none of the asset classes are immune to all this global environment. But if you compare to the past, we are in a very different stage of development. I mentioned crypto is the only asset class that has been embraced by retail, but for the longest time all the other categories of investors were not coming through. There was just one category of investors or traders. Market cap was much smaller in the past. Smaller market cap assets tend to be much more volatile.  

Today, with institutional adoption, you have holders and traders ranging from countries to foundations to trusts to institutions to corporate treasuries, family offices, high-net-worth individuals, and all of this in different categories of investors who have different risk appetite. They have different trading strategies, they have different holding strategies.

And that makes for much more diverse and dispersed holding structure. And today, if you look at the crypto space, the market capitalization is much bigger compared to the past. So all these things added together — and given the fact that we are still in the very early stage of adoption, many of the financial institutions, family offices, corporate treasuries are still doing their own due diligence to decide how much they'll allocate — the drivers are very strong. When we see the type of volatility that we see in the past, my view is [it’s] unlikely [to repeat], but it's all subject to macroeconomic changes and conditions as with any other asset class. I do think that with early institutional adoption, the pathway is very bright.