Binance is, by almost any measure, the dominant force in global cryptocurrency trading. In 2025, the platform processed $34 trillion in total trading volume — a figure that puts it in a league of its own among crypto exchanges. It serves over 300 million users across more than 180 countries, holds $162.8 billion in verified user assets, and has expanded from a simple trading platform into a sprawling financial ecosystem that includes its own blockchain network, lending products, savings instruments, and an NFT marketplace.
It is also, simultaneously, a company that pleaded guilty to criminal charges in 2023, paid one of the largest corporate penalties in US history, had its founder imprisoned and subsequently pardoned, and continues to operate under a consent agreement with US federal authorities. Understanding Binance clearly — what it offers, how it works, what it costs, and what risks it carries — requires holding both of these realities at once.
This article aims to do that.
What Binance Is and How It Started
Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao — universally known in the crypto world as CZ — and within 180 days of launching had become the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume. The ascent was not accidental. Binance entered a market full of technically limited, slow, and expensive platforms and immediately offered something different: a faster matching engine, a far broader selection of trading pairs, and fees that undercut most competitors.
The strategy worked at a scale that surprised even Binance's own founders. Within a year of launching, the platform was processing more trading volume than established competitors that had been operating for years. By the mid-2020s, it was consistently handling more daily trading volume than the next several exchanges combined, according to data tracked by CoinMarketCap.
Understanding Binance today requires understanding that it is no longer simply an exchange. It has evolved into an ecosystem — a term the company uses deliberately — that encompasses spot and derivatives trading, lending and borrowing, savings products, a native blockchain network, and a launchpad for new cryptocurrency projects. The fee revenue from trading remains the core of its business, but the range of products and services has expanded well beyond the founding model.
How Binance Makes Money
Binance generates revenue primarily through trading fees. The baseline fee for spot trading is 0.1% per side — if you buy $1,000 worth of Bitcoin, Binance takes $1 from the buyer and $1 from the seller. At a platform level, this fee multiplied across billions of dollars in daily trading volume becomes substantial. The platform reported $16.8 billion in revenue for 2024.
Users who hold Binance Coin (BNB) — the exchange's native cryptocurrency token — receive a 25% discount on trading fees. This creates strong incentive to hold BNB, which in turn supports demand for the token. The relationship between Binance's fee structure and BNB's value is a deliberate feature of the platform's economics.
Beyond spot trading fees, Binance earns revenue through futures and derivatives trading, cryptocurrency loans, staking services, NFT marketplace commissions, launchpad token sales, and its Binance Card. The diversity of revenue streams is structurally significant: Binance is not solely dependent on trading activity, which means market downturns that reduce trading volume affect its revenue less severely than they would a pure exchange business.
Fee tiers are structured based on 30-day trading volume and BNB holdings, with VIP tiers beginning at high monthly volume thresholds and receiving progressively lower rates. This is standard practice across professional trading platforms.
What Binance Actually Offers
Most users encounter Binance as a place to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum. That understanding significantly undersells the platform's scope.
Spot trading is the foundation — buying and selling cryptocurrencies at current market prices. Binance supports more than 350 cryptocurrencies across thousands of trading pairs, giving it one of the broadest selections of any exchange. This is particularly relevant for users who want access to smaller-cap cryptocurrencies that are not available on more limited platforms.
Margin trading allows users to borrow funds to amplify their positions, increasing both potential gains and potential losses. Futures are contracts that allow users to speculate on price direction without owning the underlying asset. Options provide more complex derivative exposure with defined risk parameters. These products are suited to experienced traders and carry significantly higher risk than spot trading — a fact that Binance's own platform acknowledges prominently.
Binance Earn is the platform's passive income suite. Users can stake proof-of-stake assets, participate in flexible savings products (similar to a money market account in traditional finance), lock funds in fixed-term deposits, and contribute to liquidity pools. Annual percentage yields vary by asset and product — typically ranging from lower rates on stablecoins to higher rates on more volatile assets. Higher yields invariably carry higher risk.
Binance Launchpad hosts initial exchange offerings (IEOs) — essentially crowdfunding rounds for new cryptocurrency projects, accessible primarily to users who hold BNB. Some Launchpad projects have generated significant early returns. Past performance in any financial market, particularly in cryptocurrency, provides no reliable indication of future results. This is not a standard disclaimer — it is a meaningful caution in an asset class characterised by extreme volatility.
Binance Academy provides free educational content on cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, trading basics, and security. It is one of the more genuinely useful free educational resources available in the crypto space, regardless of whether you use Binance itself.
BNB Chain: Binance's Blockchain Network
In 2020, Binance launched the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), a blockchain network designed to run smart contracts — the self-executing programmes that power decentralised applications (dApps), decentralised exchanges (DEXs), and the broader decentralised finance (DeFi) ecosystem. It was later rebranded to BNB Chain.
BSC's launch was controversial because it was designed as a competitor to Ethereum while being substantially more centralised — relying on a small number of validators rather than the thousands that participate in Ethereum's network. Centralisation in a blockchain context carries real trade-offs: it makes the network faster and cheaper to use, but reduces the decentralisation and censorship resistance that are core features of public blockchain systems.
Despite the criticism, BSC achieved rapid adoption because it was fast and cheap. During periods when Ethereum transaction fees were extremely high, BSC offered a substantially cheaper alternative for DeFi activity. The network has processed billions of transactions and supports a significant ecosystem of decentralised applications, though its centralisation and various security incidents involving projects built on it have been persistent criticisms from the broader crypto community.
The Regulatory History: Essential Context
No honest account of Binance can omit its regulatory history, and the scale of that history is significant enough that it warrants treatment as essential context rather than a footnote.
In November 2023, Binance and its founder CZ reached a landmark settlement with the US Department of Justice, pleading guilty to anti-money laundering violations, sanctions violations, and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Binance agreed to pay approximately $4.3 billion in penalties — at the time, one of the largest corporate criminal settlements in US history. CZ personally pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an adequate anti-money laundering programme and, in 2024, served a four-month prison sentence. He also received a lifetime ban from serving as Binance's CEO or in any management capacity.
The DOJ's characterisation of the conduct is worth quoting directly: prosecutors alleged that CZ had told employees it was "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" and that Binance had "prioritised growth over compliance with US law." The settlement requires ongoing compliance monitoring for five years, and material violations during that period could trigger additional consequences.
Richard Teng, formerly a regulator in Abu Dhabi and subsequently Binance's regional markets head, took over as CEO and has emphasised regulatory cooperation as a strategic priority. In 2025, Yi He — Binance's co-founder and head of Binance Labs — was named co-CEO alongside Teng. Under this leadership, Binance has expanded its compliance team to 650 experts, handled approximately 65,000 law enforcement requests globally, and secured regulatory authorisations in 21 jurisdictions.
A significant development in late 2025: US President Donald Trump granted CZ a full executive pardon. The implications of this pardon for CZ's future involvement in the cryptocurrency industry remain a subject of active speculation and legal analysis.
For US users specifically, Binance.US is a separate entity from the global Binance platform, operating under different regulatory constraints and offering a significantly more limited range of products. Users in several US states, including New York, Texas, and Florida, face additional restrictions on access.
How to Get Started: A Practical Overview
Creating a Binance account requires an email address or phone number, identity verification (KYC — Know Your Customer documents including a government-issued ID and a selfie), and agreement to the platform's terms of service. The verification process typically completes within minutes using automated verification systems.
Once verified, users can fund their account via bank transfer, credit or debit card (which typically carries higher fees than bank transfer), or cryptocurrency deposit from an external wallet. The Binance Academy provides detailed guides for every stage of this process.
Security practices that Binance recommends — and that anyone using the platform should follow — include enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) using an authenticator app rather than SMS (SMS-based 2FA is vulnerable to SIM-swapping attacks), setting up an anti-phishing code that displays in all official Binance emails, and enabling withdrawal address whitelisting so that funds can only be sent to pre-approved wallet addresses.
The security of funds on any centralised exchange is a function of both the platform's security and the user's own security practices. No exchange — including Binance — is immune to hacks, platform failures, or regulatory freezes. The principle of not holding more funds on any exchange than you can afford to lose is not paranoia; it is standard risk management in the cryptocurrency space.
Is Binance Right for You?
Binance is best suited for users who want access to a large variety of cryptocurrencies, competitive fees, and a comprehensive product suite beyond simple buying and selling. It is less suited for absolute beginners who may find its interface overwhelming, or for users in US jurisdictions where Binance.US restrictions significantly limit available features.
For beginners, alternatives with simpler interfaces include Coinbase — which offers a more straightforward user experience, stronger US regulatory compliance, and a more limited but curated selection of cryptocurrencies — and Kraken, which has a strong reputation for security and regulatory compliance alongside a broader product range than Coinbase.
For intermediate to advanced traders who want depth of liquidity, breadth of product, and access to a large cryptocurrency selection, Binance remains the global benchmark by most measures.
The Chainalysis Crypto Crime Report provides annually updated context on the broader landscape of exchange risk, security, and compliance — useful reading for anyone planning to hold significant assets on any centralised platform.
An Honest Assessment
Binance contains genuine contradictions. It has built the most powerful trading infrastructure in cryptocurrency, demonstrated technical and commercial achievement that the industry has not seen before or since, and provided access to financial markets for hundreds of millions of people in countries where traditional financial services are limited or unavailable. It has also, by its own admission in a criminal guilty plea, operated for years in ways that prioritised growth over legal compliance, facilitated transactions that violated US sanctions law, and failed to implement adequate controls against money laundering.
Both of these things are true simultaneously, and anyone using or considering using Binance deserves a clear-eyed account of both.
The settlement and subsequent compliance restructuring have made Binance a different institution than it was in 2022. Whether those changes are sufficient, durable, and genuine is something that will be revealed over the five-year monitoring period — and through the ongoing behaviour of the platform in jurisdictions around the world.
This article is informational only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency investment carries significant risk, including the potential loss of all invested capital. Readers should conduct their own research and consult a qualified financial adviser before making investment decisions.
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