Binance Research: Crypto as Financial Infrastructure for Underbanked

Binance Research released a report titled “Finance Without Frontiers” arguing that crypto’s next growth phase will be defined less by speculation and more by its role as financial infrastructure for people and markets underserved by traditional banking. According to the report, around 1.3 billion adults remain unbanked globally, while structural gaps in financial access are far wider: 4.7 billion adults lack access to credit or loans, 3.6 billion adults in low- and middle-income countries do not use digital payments or cards, and 1.4 billion savers in those markets earn no interest on deposits.

Mobile Access Reshapes Financial Inclusion

Binance Research identifies mobile phones as a critical enabler for financial inclusion. The report states that 900 million unbanked adults own a mobile phone, while 530 million own a smartphone. This widespread mobile ownership shifts the bottleneck from building physical financial distribution to creating compliant, reliable, low-cost digital access tools such as wallets, exchanges, and stablecoin payments.

Stablecoins Target Cross-Border Payment Costs

The report highlights cross-border payments as the strongest practical use case for crypto-based financial infrastructure. Traditional SWIFT transactions carry a minimum cost of $20 and settle over several days, while stablecoin transfers on high-performance networks can cost as little as $0.0001 and settle near instantly. This cost difference is particularly significant for low- and middle-income markets where remittance amounts are often small and fixed fees become highly regressive.

Binance Research notes that adjusted stablecoin volume surpassed Visa in 2024 and is approaching $8 trillion in monthly volume, based on Artemis data. The report frames stablecoins as increasingly functioning as settlement rails rather than just trading collateral.

Tokenization Expands Investment Access

Binance Research connects financial inclusion to broader investment access. The report states that around 630 million adults hold an online brokerage account, while access to U.S. markets remains materially lower despite the U.S. equity market representing roughly half of global market capitalization. Tokenized equities and real-world asset products could reduce this mismatch by enabling fractional ownership, extended trading hours, and access through crypto-native venues.

According to the report, seven-day rolling trading volume in TradFi perpetuals has grown 16x in 2026, while tokenization market value has expanded by around 180% over the past year.

Private Markets Remain an Access Gap

The report identifies private markets as a widening divide between institutional and retail investors. Binance Research cites data showing that 87% of U.S. firms with more than $100 million in revenue are privately held. Additionally, companies are staying private for longer, with the median age at IPO rising from 8 years to 14 years across 2024 and 2025.

Binance Research estimates that tokenized private credit and private equity currently total around $2.7 billion on-chain, still small relative to the broader private-market universe but directionally important.

Emerging Markets Drive Multi-Product Crypto Usage

Binance Research’s internal data reinforces the financial inclusion thesis. The share of Binance users from emerging markets has increased from 49% in 2020 to 77% in 2026. Users engaging with two or more products account for 24% of total active users, while users engaging with three or more products account for 14%. Of this multi-product cohort, 83% are based in emerging markets.

Stablecoin behavior reflects similar patterns. Approximately 28% of users with portfolio balances of at least $10 hold at least half of their portfolio in stablecoins, up from 4% in 2020. In emerging markets, that share rises to 36%, while 73% of stablecoin savers globally are based in emerging markets. This suggests users are treating crypto platforms for savings, dollar exposure, payments, and broader financial management, not solely as speculative venues.

AI Agents as Economic Participants

The report introduces AI agents as a newer category of economic participants requiring programmable money, permissionless identity, and composable settlement. Binance Research states that more than 17,000 agents have been launched since 2025, around 19% of on-chain activity is automated or agentic, and 76% of stablecoin transfer volume is bot-driven. The report frames this as adding another layer to the infrastructure argument: if autonomous software agents begin transacting at scale, low-cost programmable settlement could become more important than traditional card or banking rails.

Regulation and Infrastructure Resilience Remain Critical

Binance Research concludes that on-chain infrastructure now deserves to be part of the financial-inclusion conversation, though crypto has not yet solved financial inclusion. The report notes that stablecoins, tokenized assets, and crypto-based savings products still face regulatory, operational, custody, liquidity, and consumer-protection risks.

The report states that the future path will depend on regulatory clarity, the resilience of stablecoin and tokenized-asset infrastructure, and whether traditional providers adapt to the lower-cost model demonstrated by on-chain rails. For the financial industry, the message is that crypto adoption in emerging markets is increasingly linked to real gaps in payments, savings, yield, credit, and investment access. If those gaps remain unresolved by traditional institutions, on-chain finance may continue to grow as a parallel layer of global financial infrastructure.