Gen Z has become the largest single cohort across Binance's TradFi product suite, according to new research from the exchange, accounting for 44% of Direct Stocks and bStocks users and roughly 45% of TradFi-Perps users. Yet despite generating the highest aggregate trading volume of any generation on the platform, Gen Z remains the least leveraged: only 5.9% of the cohort's trading volume involves leverage, the lowest share among all age groups measured.
The pattern holds specifically in the products where leverage is available. Binance found that 88.2% of Gen Z accounts avoid leveraged or inverse products in TradFi-Perps, and 98.9% do the same in bStocks, its tokenized stock offering. When leverage is used at all, it makes up the smallest share of Gen Z's trading volume compared with Millennials, Gen X and older cohorts.
Emerging markets are the entry point
More than 90% of TradFi users in every generation are based in emerging markets, with Gen Z at 95%. Roughly 13% of Binance's Direct Stocks users are Gen Z investors from emerging markets holding less than $2,000 in equity assets — for many of them, Binance's tokenized-stock products represent first-time access to US equities rather than a supplement to an existing brokerage account. The full Binance Research report puts the cohort's year-to-date TradFi trading volume at roughly $80 billion, compounding at about 24% a month even though Gen Z holds the lowest capital per user of any generation on the platform.
A generation that says it was taught to trade carefully
Binance's data also points to a possible explanation for the caution: 77% of Gen Z investors surveyed reported having received formal financial education, the highest share of any generation, compared with 69% of Millennials and 58% of Gen X. The exchange frames this as evidence that younger traders are entering markets with more structured risk awareness than older cohorts had at the same stage, even as they trade in significantly higher volume overall.
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The finding cuts against a common narrative in crypto markets, where younger traders are often assumed to chase outsized leveraged positions. Binance's own share of newly onboarded TradFi users from Gen Z has in fact risen steadily, from 41% in January to 47% in July — a sign the exchange reads as growth momentum rather than a saturated segment, even as that growth comes with comparatively conservative position sizing.
