Bitcoin exchange-traded funds took in $3.5 billion in August. In July they took in $172 million.
Most of the year's money went somewhere else — commodities in the first quarter, equities in the second — while crypto sat still. Richard Teng says what brought the money back was buyers purchasing the asset outright rather than borrowing to bet on it, which is the opposite of how the last few crypto rallies were built.
"I believe that the demand is still very strong. The long-term prospects are extremely bullish in my view."
Teng runs Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world, and he says it holds about half of everyone on earth who owns crypto — a book big enough that David Lin used its August flows as a stand-in for the whole market.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 39 minutes of audio, 20 minutes of reading.
Here are the 15 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Richard Teng, Co-CEO of Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world, which he says has about 330 million users
🎙️ Host: David Lin, a former BCA Research macroeconomics researcher who now runs The David Lin Report
📰 Published: 9 September 2026 on YouTube
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 39 min | ✅ Time saved: 19 min
Key Takeaways
August's crypto rally came from spot buying rather than borrowed money, which is what makes Teng think it holds
Bitcoin ETFs took in $3.5 billion in August against $172 million in July
Binance's own users shifted their money into crypto within a single month
Crypto's share of what users hold in combined crypto and equity accounts went from 64% to about 72%
Teng's read of the trigger is the long end of the bond market, not anything specific to crypto
The fastest-growing business at the world's largest crypto exchange this year is trading in traditional assets, not crypto
Perpetual futures on stocks, ETFs and commodities did more than $400 billion in each of July and August, from a January launch
Traditional exchanges are open eight hours a day and company news is not, and Teng says selling access to that gap is the business
40% of trading on one of Binance's 24/7 products happens outside US market hours
Teng corrected the host's headline number: 741 million people own crypto worldwide, and Binance has about half of them
That is about 330 million users, not 741 million
Growth comes from places conventional banks never served, where fewer than one person in five has proper access to banking
AI and crypto are complements rather than rivals, because AI processes data and blockchain keeps a record that cannot be altered
His example is an agent that cuts a trader's position overnight
Teng says policymakers he speaks to have started to worry about losing control of AI
US residents still cannot use Binance, and Teng would not say whether a multi-asset platform changes that
The stated ambition is 3 billion users
1. ETF Inflows Hit $3.5B
Lin opened with the price. "Bitcoin is holding near $79,000 this morning, September 9th, after rebounding from $60,000 in August. It's already climbed 30% since its July lows." He then put a flows question to Teng: do fund inflows set the price, or follow it?
Teng did not answer that directly. He answered with Binance's own August data instead.
The month's exchange-traded fund flows were roughly twenty times July's. "August ETF inflow reached 3.5 billion that you saw on that front and that's up significantly from July." He put July's figure at $172 million and called August the strongest inflow month since October of last year, which he noted was the all-time high in the price.
Spot trading volume on Binance roughly tripled. He put crypto spot volume at "about five billion on a daily basis" at the start and about $14 billion by the end of the month.
That mix is the part Teng thinks matters, because it means the rally was funded with cash rather than borrowing. "So you can see a significant part of that comes from really renewed spot demand instead of leverage."
Binance's share of spot trading across centralized exchanges was 46%. "We accounted for 46% of the spot trading volume across centralized exchange." He credited the same source Lin used for his own numbers, the on-chain data site DefiLlama.
The clearest single piece of evidence he offered was an allocation shift inside his own user base. Binance now lets the same account hold crypto and equities, so it can see how customers split their money between the two. Crypto's share of those combined holdings "rose from 64% to about 70%" during August, and "by end of August we reach about 72%."
Teng dated the breakout to 19 August and put the gain at about 27%, saying it was one of the sharpest rallies of the last five years.
He said the move was not a bitcoin story alone. "So this rally is pretty broadbased with a few dimension at play and is a interesting narrative that's forming." Lin pulled up a bitcoin price chart, and the walkthrough on screen made the same point — the rally began in the middle of August and was not limited to bitcoin, which was being used as the example.
Lin also read Binance's balance data at him: according to DefiLlama, he said, "Binance added $2.6 billion in Bitcoin balances through August, while the US ETF market added about $3 billion." His framing was that "Binance alone added nearly as much in Bitcoin market cap as the entire US spot Bitcoin market in the same period, which is about $3 billion."
2. Long Rates Drove the Turn
Lin supplied his own explanation for the 19 August date, and it had nothing to do with crypto. "That was the day that the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that he would intervene in the bond markets if necessary doubling bond buybacks from $2 to $4 billion per operation." His inference: "And if so, perhaps what was keeping Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto markets down throughout the entire year was a prospect of higher interest rates."
Teng accepted it as one factor and then widened it into a rotation argument.
His account is a year of money moving between asset classes and arriving at crypto last. Petrochemicals and commodities traded well in the first quarter, equities traded well in the second, and each pulled back as it got expensive. Crypto, meanwhile, had been in what he called "consolidation mode" for most of the year.
The interest-rate logic he gave is the standard case for holding assets that pay no income. "If interest rate especially in the long end goes up, it impacts bonds, it impacts equity. I think is very favorable to assets such as gold and crypto."
He put regulation alongside rates as a reason people re-ran the numbers, naming the CLARITY Act moving through Congress and what he described as the US moving aggressively to become a crypto capital.
The conclusion investors reached, in his telling, was a valuation one. They decided crypto was "an undervalued asset class" and that it was "the time to do greater allocation into this." He was explicit that this was his own read of the situation rather than a measured finding.
3. Where the Cash Came From
Lin pressed on the composition of the new money, citing average daily spot volume at Binance rising from $4.75 billion to $13.6 billion — a 188% increase, and the only exchange in the data he had that cleared $10 billion a day. Was it new customers, or existing ones rotating out of stablecoins and smaller tokens?
Teng's answer was that all three happened at once. "Well, it's a mix of everything." New users arrived, dormant users came back, and existing balances moved.
The rotation he singled out was out of stablecoins, where holders had been parking money for yield. "We have users that convert their stable coins that they're holding for yield purposes into crypto again."
Some of it came from inside the platform's other markets. Because Binance now trades equities and other asset classes as well, he said some users moved out of those and back into crypto.
4. Trading When Markets Shut
The interview then turned to Binance's fastest-growing product line this year, which is not crypto. Lin showed a FinanceFeeds chart putting perpetual futures on traditional assets at "$445 billion of volume hit in July versus about $30 billion in January." Perpetual futures are derivative contracts with no expiry date, so a position can be held indefinitely.
Teng said the product line is less than a year old. "This is a new product class that we only introduced this year." It started with commodities and petrochemicals, then added contracts on individual stocks and on exchange-traded funds.
His overall futures share rose over the same stretch, from about 38% at the beginning of the year to about 44% year to date.
The first problem he says the product solves is access. "Many people around the world have no access to all these products." He drew the line between developed markets, where he and Lin live, and emerging and frontier markets where ordinary investors cannot buy US equities at all.
The second is the clock, and this is the argument he returned to repeatedly. Traditional exchanges run eight hours a day, he said: "They don't operate at night. Don't operate on weekends. Holidays, they're closed. But news flow is 24/7." Institutions, companies and retail investors all need somewhere to take or cut a position when the news arrives, and he said that until now they had no option.
On the scale of it, he said Binance is now the clear market leader. He put weekly average volume at more than $100 billion, with July and August each above $400 billion, and its share of the market rising from about 35% at the start of the year to more than 50%.
He also named pre-IPO contracts as part of the same access argument — exposure to private companies before they list.
5. Direct Stocks Cross $1B
Asked to split the volume between traditional products and crypto, Teng said the figures he had been quoting were traditional-asset products only, and that crypto volumes have always been strong.
Direct stock trading has passed a billion dollars in assets under management. "Our equity AUM has now surpassed 1 billion increasing very quickly."
The tokenized version of the same thing is at $600 million. He put bStocks, Binance's tokenized stock product, at $600 million across the platform and on chain, which he said shows "there's huge demand for tokenized equity exposure."
Round-the-clock demand is measurable on the tokenized products. On one of them, he said, "40% of the trading happens outside of US trading hours." His explanation is mechanical rather than speculative: US companies release results after the close, deals are announced overnight, and global events do not wait for the opening bell.
Pre-IPO contracts are the clearest version of the access argument, and he named SpaceX among the companies users can take exposure to before a listing. His point was that most investors worldwide cannot reach those names before an IPO and often struggle to reach them afterward.
6. One App for Every Asset
Lin made the point that Binance's size makes it "a proxy for the entire market," then asked whether the volume surge was people hunting for alternative routes into traditional products or people returning to crypto after a year and a half of "what they call a winter."
Teng's answer was that it is both, and that the two feed each other. "Well, I think is multi-pillar growth." A warming crypto market brings traders to the deepest pool of liquidity, and he said the firm has shown it can repeat that in equities, commodities and petrochemicals.
The commercial argument he made for size is execution cost. Institutions and companies trading with Binance, he said, understand they save substantially over time by getting better prices in a deeper market.
The company has moved from a crypto exchange to a multi-asset trading platform, in his framing, so that a user does not have to open several apps in several jurisdictions to reach different products.
The newest addition is equity options. "So we are adding options on a thousand plus selected US stocks and ETF for eligible users."
7. Smart Money Went First
Lin reminded Teng of a line he gave Reuters in July: "Well, earlier in July, you told Reuters that every time people say that Bitcoin is dead, that's the time I'll go all in." He paired it with a figure Teng had cited alongside it, that "Binance recorded a 9% increase in institutional clients being onboarded this year compared to 7% increase in the platform." So who reawakened the market in August?
Teng said institutions and retail investors both, and gave the institutions the credit for moving first. "So the institutions are smart money." Looking across asset classes, he said, they find "crypto is relatively undervalued" against everything else on offer, and that is when they start allocating.
He treats fund flows as a retail indicator, not only an institutional one. Exchange-traded fund inflows are, in his phrase, "a barometer of retail inflow as well."
He was careful not to call the recovery finished. "we are now in the building phase" — meaning, in his account, that the industry has to add usable applications and integrate with AI before the price move means anything durable.
8. The Data He Watches Next
Lin asked what evidence would tell him whether the three-week surge was permanent.
His list is macroeconomic before it is crypto-specific. "Well, I will continue to look at, you know, the ETF inflows for one. I'll continue to look at macroeconomic data." He picked up Lin's reference to the US 30-year Treasury yield, and added geopolitical tensions, the path of interest rates and inflation data.
He drew a distinction between the driver and the reaction. All of those inputs move every asset price, he said, and different asset classes react differently to the same news.
On crypto he was direct about the direction, with his own hedge attached. "I believe that the demand is still very strong. The long-term prospects are extremely bullish in my view."
The one piece of blockchain infrastructure he pointed to as proof of real use was stablecoins, whose growth he called exponential, and which he offered as the demonstration that the technology has a purpose beyond speculation.
He wants the CLARITY Act passed and expects other countries to follow if it is. He said he hopes "the Clarity Act get passed in the US," after which policymakers elsewhere would have to "sit up take notice" and "see how they benchmark with the US" to stay competitive.
9. The Only 24/7 Asset Class
Lin flagged the obvious hole in the story: every reason given so far for the rally was American, and Binance does not serve US residents. Why did the rest of the world buy?
Teng's answer is that the asset itself is borderless in a way the others are not. "Well, so if you look at it, crypto is the only truly universal asset class where anybody in the world can have access to it on a 24/7 basis." US macroeconomic conditions move the price, so non-US holders get the benefit without needing access to US venues.
He said traditional banks are now adopting the plumbing. "So if you look at recent news JPMorgan and DBS bank just did a tokenized deposit over the weekend." His point was that instant, round-the-clock value transfer is something crypto has done with stablecoins for years.
He read institutions' motive back in their own voice. They are concluding that crypto rails are "a much more superior form of infrastructure," and saying, in his rendering, "Let's introduce it into our space."
He cited Nasdaq's move to near-continuous trading as the same catch-up, saying it has announced 23 hours a day, five days a week — by December this year, he thought.
He wants more of this rather than less, on straightforwardly commercial grounds. The more asset classes go on chain, he said, "the better it is for all of us," because every asset tokenized is another asset Binance can list.
10. The 741M User Correction
Lin quoted Binance's own nine-year press release: from fewer than 6 million crypto owners in 2017 to more than 741 million now. "Binance now holds a record of about half of all crypto users in the world," he said, and asked where growth comes from once you have half the market.
Teng corrected the reading before answering. "So just a minor correction, the 741 million users that you mentioned just now are just total number of people that have exposure to crypto. So we capture about half of that. So we have about 330 million users on that front."
The growth is regional, and it is not in rich countries. He named Asia Pacific, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East as the sources of what he called robust demand.
The mechanism he gave is banking that never arrived. He said many countries have "financial inclusion less than 20%," and spelled it out: "So meaning 80% of the people have no proper access to payment, banking system, saving system."
His retention claim rests on that comparison. Once people have used instant transfer and saving through crypto, he said, they will "not go back to traditional financial product," because they have learned the crypto tools first.
He was clear the customer mix is no longer only retail, naming institutions, family offices and corporates as part of the same growth.
11. Why AI Needs Blockchain
Lin's follow-up was sharper than the first: with investors and attention moving to AI, is 741 million the plateau?
Teng rejected the premise that the two compete. AI is good at accessing and processing large amounts of data quickly, he said, and crypto adds something AI does not have, which is a record that cannot be altered after the fact.
He put the combination as an industrial claim, not a trading one. "My view is that you can redesign finance, you can redesign commerce, you can redesign shipping using a combination of digital technology."
Binance's own answer to this is Agent OS, a platform he described as bringing the firm's AI tools together and giving software agents access to market data, trading, wallets and payments.
The use case he chose is risk management while the user is not there. If volatility rises sharply overnight, the agent works out which positions and orders are affected, summarizes the exposure, and can cancel existing orders or "reduce a position or place a protective order."
The payment case is the one he says only crypto can do, describing "continuous payment at a fraction of the cost" as something outside what conventional rails allow.
12. Why Stocks Keep Growing
Late in the interview Lin returned to the traditional-asset numbers, using figures from an article he flagged as unverified. Binance launched its first traditional-asset perpetual contract in January 2026, starting with gold and silver, at monthly volume of $3.3 billion to $3.5 billion; by June 2026 the article put it at $387 billion to $393 billion, which Lin called "117 times growth in six months." He said traditional-asset perpetuals now make up 37% of Binance's total perpetual contracts, six percentage points above the average across other exchanges, and that they now do double the volume of the bitcoin-to-stablecoin pair.
He hedged the whole thing openly: "If those numbers are correctly cited in this article, Richard, then we're looking at potentially more growth coming from TradFi Pers than BTC or USDT per."
Teng would not rank the pillars against each other. "Well, all these different assets are important pillars for us." Asset classes rotate through peaks and troughs, he said, which is the reason for holding several.
On direction he was unambiguous, and the reason is arithmetic. "If you look at the universe of TradFi products out there is much bigger than crypto products." He expects growth in traditional-asset contracts to continue, alongside the newly launched options and the pre-IPO products.
He restated the super-app framing as the point of it all. The goal is "a multi-asset class all weather platform." In his words: "So instead of opening four, five app, you now go to Binance for all your financial services needs."
He gave the two assets-under-management figures again as evidence of speed rather than size. "If you look at direct stock trading in terms of asset under management, it has crossed 1 billion in a very very short period of time," and he said bStocks had crossed $600 million, again "within a very short period of time." He attributed both to user support rather than to the product.
13. No US Users, For Now
Lin asked the regulatory question twice. First: if the super app rolls out, could US users trade traditional-asset perpetuals on it without touching crypto?
The answer was no, with no qualification on the current position. "currently the US users cannot access binance.com," and "we are not servicing US users."
He left the door open without saying anything about the timing. The US is the largest capital market in the world, he said: "So, we keep it under constant review on the strategy going forward."
On whether becoming a multi-asset platform might make US regulators more willing, he declined to speculate, telling Lin he is closer to the US than Teng is. "But as you know every jurisdiction will have their own consideration," and Binance has to "respect the US framework and the regulations."
14. Helping Countries Tokenize
Asked what the next five years hold for the economy, Teng refused the question first and then answered a narrower one.
He would not give a forecast, and said nobody credible would. "I don't have a crystal ball," and "I think most economies wouldn't dare to even do a one year or two years outlook on that front" because "things are so volatile." In his words: "There are so many different dimensions at play and interacting with each other."
What he would predict is government behavior. Policymakers will keep competing to hold up domestic growth, keep unemployment low and fight inflation, and part of that competition is moving toward a digital economy.
That is where he positions Binance, and it is a business line rather than a public service. "We have a strong competitive advantage. We're actually helping many countries around the world on that front. Firstly, in terms of developing regulatory framework to support digital assets and secondly helping them with tokenization of their assets so that more assets can be put on chain for trading purposes. So those are win-win propositions throughout the world."
The company target he gave is roughly a ninefold increase on the user number he had quoted minutes earlier. "Our ambition is to reach three billion users globally."
15. Agents Take Over Trading
Lin narrowed the closing question to how AI changes trading and investing, and how Binance is adapting.
On the trading floor, he expects agents to become the default. "So, if you look at trading, agentic trading is going to become more dominant going forward." That runs across both traditional and crypto desks, he said, and everybody has to adapt to it. Users are already running their own agents for analysis and allocation.
The open question he named is not capability but permission. Models keep improving quickly, and he said it is worth watching for the point at which governments decide the environment needs controlling.
He said the policymakers he speaks to have begun to worry about losing control of AI. "I think government will be very concerned if AI continue to develop in a way that they cannot quite control and it go wrong. I think that is something that when I speak to policy makers around the world is something that starting to bother them quite a bit."
Asked how Binance itself adapts, he said the work is already done. "Oh, that's very simple for us. We have already adapted to that and we will continue to invest and adapt very greatly." The platform was built before customers asked: "So if even without being asked, we have developed those for our users." His justification was demand — "This is something that users want, and we'll continue to offer it to them."
Bonus Insights
Teng put the round-the-clock argument in institutional terms as well as retail ones: companies and institutions need a venue to hedge and offset risk when news breaks outside market hours, and he tied that specifically to agentic AI arriving on trading desks, which does not keep to a session either
Asked where to follow him, Teng pointed to Binance's own accounts across social platforms and said he is on them too
On the next milestone worth watching, he gave no product: "To me, every day is exciting." The date he did name is corporate: next year, he said, "we're going to celebrate our 10 year anniversary," alongside continued expansion of the firm's global footprint
Teng's bottom line is that August's rally was funded with cash rather than borrowed money and therefore has further to run, and that the more consequential change at his own firm is that the fastest growth is now in round-the-clock trading of stocks, commodities and pre-IPO exposure for the large share of the world that cannot reach those markets any other way.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Binance (Teng's exchange — he says about 330 million users, 46% of centralized-exchange spot volume in August, and a product line that now runs from bitcoin to stock options)
DefiLlama (The data source behind both Lin's Binance balance figures and Teng's own trading-share numbers)
bStocks (Binance's tokenized stock product, which Teng put at $600 million in assets across the platform and on chain)
Binance Agent OS (The platform that gives software agents access to Binance market data, trading, wallets and payments — his example is an agent cutting a position overnight)
SpaceX (Named as one of the private companies users can take pre-IPO exposure to on the platform)
JPMorgan and DBS Bank (Their tokenized deposit, done over the weekend, is Teng's evidence that banks are adopting crypto infrastructure)
Nasdaq (Its announced move to 23-hour, five-day trading is his example of traditional venues catching up to 24/7 markets)
FinanceFeeds (Source of the chart Lin used for traditional-asset perpetual volumes — $445 billion in July against about $30 billion in January)
Stablecoins (Teng's chosen proof that blockchain has a use beyond speculation, and the balances users converted into crypto in August)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Binance Marks Nine Years (The press release Lin quoted for the growth from fewer than 6 million crypto owners in 2017 to more than 741 million — the number Teng corrected on air)
The CLARITY Act (H.R. 3633) (The US digital-asset market bill Teng named twice as a reason capital re-rated crypto, and says he hopes passes)
Richard Teng's July interview with Reuters (Where he said that every time people call bitcoin dead is when he goes all in, and gave the institutional onboarding figures Lin read back to him)
Richard Teng's previous appearance on The David Lin Report (The earlier conversation both men refer back to when discussing the super-app strategy)
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