The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange keeps getting bigger. Hong Kong-based Binance.com is adding “a couple of million” registered user every week with 240,000 people signing up in just one hour Yesterday, CEO Zhao Changpeng said in an interview to Bloomberg Television. Demand is so high that company is limiting new customers said in an interview and that exchange will reopen in few weeks.
World’s Top-Ranked Crypto Exchange Adds 240,000 Users in One Hour
“We did not expect this kind of growth to be honest,” Zhao said from Tokyo on Thursday.
Binance was the world’s most active crypto exchange over the past 24 hours, according to Coinmarketcap.com, hosting $6 billion worth of digital currency trades. The most popular asset was Tron, which accounted for 11 percent of volume.
Zhao said his average customer was male and aged 25-35, though Binance is “beginning to get a lot of interest from institutional investors.”
Professional money has largely shunned the frenzy accompanying cryptocurrencies, with Warren Buffett becoming the latest name from the world of high finance to voice doubts, saying on Wednesday that “they will come to a bad ending.”
Zhao said he was unfazed by the comments.
“Warren Buffett is a guy I truly respect from an investment point of view,” he said. “But I do not think he understands cryptocurrencies at all. It is what it is. I still respect him in other parts of his expertise. But I think on cryptocurrencies he’s making a big mistake.”
Server Limit
Traffic on Binance has been so high that the company hits the limit of servers per account permitted by its cloud provider Amazon.com Inc. “every day,” Zhao said. Amazon Web Services is the world’s biggest provider of cloud computing services, powering large companies such as Netflix Inc.
“We have a guy whose full-time job is just requesting servers,” he said. “Every day they say, ‘OK, here are 200 more,’ but we just ask for more.”
Representatives from Amazon didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Source: Bloomberg