Exchange concentration in crypto markets has not improved since FTX imploded in November 2022 — it has worsened. While regulators and industry participants spent the intervening years debating proof-of-reserves and custody reform, trading volume has continued to consolidate around a diminishing number of venues, with Binance maintaining a dominant share of global spot and derivatives activity that, by most third-party estimates, has remained substantial for extended periods in 2025 and 2026. The structural question this raises is not whether concentration risk exists — it demonstrably does — but whether the market has priced it.
This is not a novel observation. The concern is that it has become a normalised feature of the market rather than a recognised warning signal. When a single private entity intermediates the majority of price discovery for a global asset class, the failure modes are not merely financial — they are infrastructural. A venue outage, a regulatory enforcement action, a liquidity withdrawal, or a solvency event at Binance would not simply affect Binance customers. It would impair the reference prices used by every derivative, ETF, and institutional desk that touches crypto globally.