Binance.com added 240,000 new users in just an hour

The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange is adding a “couple of million” members every week as the crypto-craze shows no sign of abating.

Hong Kong’s Binance.com added 240,000 new users in just an hour on Wednesday, after the company lifted a temporary suspension of new registrations it had put in place due to high demand.

“We did not expect this kind of growth to be honest”, chief executive Zhao Changpeng told Bloomberg TV.

According to Coinmarketcap, a website that tracks cryptocurrency markets, Binance was the most active cryptocurrency exchange over the past 24 hours with $6.1bn (conversion) worth of trades.

The most popular digital token trading on Binance was TRON, accounting for 10 per cent of their trading, while bitcoin was only the third most popular digital currency on the platform.

Mr Zhao said the majority of the 4 million accounts he oversees on Binance are largely male customers with an average age of 25-35.

“There’s a lot of guys with a lot of money”, he said. “[I see] $10,000 to $100,000 each day, some even bigger.”

Mr Zhao moved to Toyko from China because of a ban placed on cryptocurrency exchanges in September 2017 by Chinese premier Xi JinPing.

He said trading on Binance has substantially grown in Japan, US and Korea and described trading volumes for the UK as “big”.

The rapid rise of cryptocurrency’s such as bitcoin has attracted criticism from Wall Street executives.

Billionaire Warren Buffet told CNBC on Wednesday that cryptocurrencies will “almost certainly…come to a bad ending”; while JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said on Tuesday he “regretted” calling bitcoin a fraud.

Mr Zhao told Bloomberg that it was “good that Jamie Dimon admitted he was wrong” and warned finance chiefs about speaking on cryptocurrencies.

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.”