Binance Bygone?

Crypto is in the news a lot, again. This time it's not a weird currency that's taking the store by fire but rather regulators trying to prevent that from happening.

Earlier this week, regulators in the U.K. announced that Binance, a popular crypto trading app, is now banned in the U.K. This is another action in a string of moves that U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority has taken against crypto trading platforms.

I've looked at Coinbase, another popular crypto trading platform, a whole bunch of times before but not at Binance so much, so let's do that:

Since the beginning of 2020, Binance was downloaded 1.78M times, with downloads split almost evenly between the App Store and Google Play according to our app intelligence. Rival Coinbase, by comparison, was downloaded 1.88M times, edging Binance out by about 100K downloads over two years.

If you're curious about why the FCA is making its moves now, look no further than the trend of downloads of both crypto exchanges. The two were not very popular for much of 2020, but as Bitcoin started spiking, things got more intense and both kicked off 2021 with a massive increase in demand.

FYI - If you've searched for Binance before, you know there are a few apps that carry the name and logo, but they aren't all the same. That's why the chart focuses on the U.K.

So what? Cryptocurrencies entered the mainstream just recently, and their popularity as an investment opportunity for mere mortals has been skyrocketing. This move attempts to curb this excitement by forcing the mere mortals to acknowledge that it's speculative and unpredictable. In other words, it's not necessarily a good place to invest your hard-earned money.

I think it's hard to just say not to this trend, so I expect we'll hear more about this in the very near future, and what comes out of it could be critical to the evolution of crypto as a real currency.