Binance: Trading plateform

Binance Holdings Ltd., branded Binance, is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies. Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, a developer who had previously created high-frequency trading software. Binance was initially based in China, then moved to Japan shortly before the Chinese government restricted cryptocurrency companies. Binance subsequently left Japan for Malta and currently has no official company headquarters. According to data from blockchain analytics company Arkham Intelligence, Binance is the largest crypto-holding entity in the world with over $200 billion in digital assets.

Binance has been the subject of lawsuits and challenges from regulatory authorities throughout its history. As a result, Binance has been banned from operating or ordered to cease operations in some countries, and has been issued fines. In 2021, Binance was put under investigation by both the United States Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service on allegations of money laundering and tax offenses. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority ordered Binance to stop all regulated activity in the United Kingdom in June 2021. That same year, Binance shared client data, including names and addresses, with the Russian government.

In November 2023, the company pleaded guilty in a US federal court to money laundering, unlicensed money transmitting, and sanctions violations. In March 2025, Wall Street Journal uncovered that the company was in talks with the family of Donald Trump about business dealings. In August 2025, Wall Street Journal found that Binance was quietly administering a trading platform for the Trump family's World Liberty Financial.  In October 2025, President Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao who had been convicted for enabling money laundering on Binance.

CEO Changpeng Zhao founded Fusion Systems in 2005 in Shanghai; the company built high-frequency trading systems for stockbrokers. In 2013, he joined Blockchain.info as the third member of the cryptocurrency wallet's team. He also worked at OKCoin as CTO for less than a year, a platform for spot trading between fiat and digital assets. He was hired at this position in 2014 by Yi He, with whom he co-founded Binance several years later.

The company was founded in 2017 in China but moved its servers and headquarters out of the country in advance of the Chinese government's ban on cryptocurrency trading in September 2017. Zhao asked He to join Binance, and she helped rewrite parts of the white paper for Binance's $15 million initial coin offering.

In January 2018 it was the largest cryptocurrency exchange with a market capitalization of $1.3 billion, a title it had retained as late as April 2021, despite competition from Coinbase, among others. In March 2018, Binance announced its intentions to open an office in Malta after stricter regulations in Japan and China. In April 2018, Binance signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Bermuda. Months later, a similar memorandum was signed with the Malta Stock Exchange to develop a platform for trading security tokens. In 2019, the company announced Binance Jersey, a Jersey-based exchange which offers fiat-to-cryptocurrency pairs, including the Euro and the British pound.

In June 2018, Binance and three other firms raised $65 million for sports blockchain company Chiliz.  In July 2018, Binance acquired Trust Wallet, a decentralized cryptocurrency wallet for an undisclosed sum composed of a mixture of cash, Binance stock, and BNB tokens. In August 2018, Binance along with three other large exchanges raised $32 million to fund the stablecoin project Terra. This was intended to facilitate cryptocurrency transactions with less volatility.

In January 2019, Binance announced that it had partnered with Israel-based payment processor Simplex to enable some cryptocurrencies to be purchased with debit and credit cards.  On 7 May 2019, Binance revealed that it had been the victim of a "large scale security breach" in which hackers had stolen 7,000 bitcoin worth around $40 million at the time.  Binance halted all transactions for one week while investigating. Binance also pledged to reimburse customers from an emergency fund.

In June 2019, the company announced it would prohibit US passport holders as well as anyone residing in the US, and would set up a new entity binance.us to support those customers. Later in 2023, Forbes leaked a document allegedly from Binance titled "TaiChi" that proposed this regulatory solution to reduce US regulatory risk. Binance subsequently denied the document, sued Forbes for defamation, and subsequently dropped the lawsuit. In September 2019, the exchange began offering perpetual futures contracts, allowing leverage as high as 125 times the value of the contracts. In November 2019, Binance announced it was acquiring Indian bitcoin exchange WazirX, which became disputed in August 2022 when Binance founder Zhao claimed the deal was never signed.

On 21 February 2020, the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) issued a public statement responding to media reports referring to Binance as a Malta-based cryptocurrency company. The statement noted that Binance "is not authorized by the MFSA to operate in the cryptocurrency sphere and is therefore not subject to regulatory oversight by the MFSA." The MFSA added that it was "assessing if Binance has any activities in Malta which may not fall within the realm of regulatory oversight."

In July 2020, Binance announced a "strategic partnership" with a Chinese state-owned enterprise under the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council and that Binance had joined a group "aiming to facilitate" the Belt and Road Initiative. On 28 October 2020, Forbes staff released leaked documents showing that Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, created an elaborate corporate structure designed to intentionally deceive United States regulators and secretly profit from cryptocurrency investors located in the country. Binance officially blocks access from IP addresses located in the United States, but "potential customers would be taught how to evade geographic restrictions", Forbes claimed.

In May 2021, it was reported that Binance was under investigation by both the Internal Revenue Service and the United States Department of Justice on allegations of money laundering and tax offenses. In February 2022, Binance took a $200 million stake in Forbes.  It's unclear if this investment was ever completed. In May 2022, Forbes Global Media Holdings halted plans to go public via a merger with Magnum Opus Acquisition Ltd, a Hong Kong-based special-purpose acquisition company. Zhao said the plan had "changed a little bit, but I believe that's still in discussions." In February 2023, Zhao tweeted his disappointment that Forbes "continues to write baseless articles" about Binance. In March 2022, amidst the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Zhao refused to ban users from Russia, citing "financial freedom".  Binance later softened the tone of their opposition but not their policy, and also pointed to their donation of $10 million for humanitarian needs in Ukraine.

Over 2022, Reuters released several investigative reports on Binance. In January, Reuters documented multiple instances where Binance had withheld information from government investigators and business partners and had ignored warnings from their own compliance teams regarding money laundering risks and poor know your customer compliance. Binance disputed the accuracy of this report.  In June, Reuters found that Binance had acted as a conduit for the laundering of at least $2.35 billion from hacks, $780 million dollars laundered from the Russian darknet market Hydra, and €800 million from investment scams. The report also found that Binance had been used by the Lazarus Group to launder funds stolen by North Korea to support its weapons program. Binance dispute these findings. In April, Reuters reported that, in 2021, Binance shared information with Rosfinmonitoring about funds raised by late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's network.

In March 2023, the exchange banned Russian residents from buying euros and dollars through its p2p service. In turn, European users lost the ability to buy rubles.  In September 2023, Binance announced it was leaving Russia and selling its business to the CommEX platform, which had been launched the previous week. Binance accounts of Russian users were able to transfer to the new platform until March 2024. CommEX shut down on 10 May 2024.

On 27 May 2022, Binance announced the registration of its legal entity in Italy and plans to open offices in the country. At the time, the company was also seeking registration in more European countries, such as Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, and Austria. Binance registered to operate in Spain in July 2022, and in Sweden in January 2023.  On 13 June 2022, Binance announced that for an unspecified period of time users would not be unable to withdraw their funds held in bitcoin, as the value of cryptocurrencies suffered serious declines. Bitcoin withdrawals were allowed to resume later the same day.

Binance sponsored the Africa Cup of Nations in 2021. It is also taking crypto education to many countries on the continent. Binance invested US$500 million towards the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk that completed in October 2022. Following the investment, the company announced the creation of a team to work on how blockchain and cryptocurrencies could be helpful to Twitter. On 8 November 2022, Binance offered to buy rival cryptocurrency exchange FTX's non-US operations (FTX.com) to help cover the latter's liquidity crunch.  Binance backed out of the deal the next day citing concerns about FTX's business practices and investigations by US financial regulators.  On 30 November 2022, Binance purchased Sakura Exchange. The acquisition allowed Binance to re-enter the Japanese cryptocurrency market.

In July 2023, several senior executives resigned from the company. The Wall Street Journal reported that Binance had cut its global workforce by as many as 1,000 staff. CNBC reported that the number of staff cuts could total 3,000 by the end of 2023.  Zhao did not deny layoffs were occurring but claimed both the reported numbers and the reasons for the senior executive departures were not accurate. In June 2023, Binance had 790 million US dollars in outflows after the SEC announced its lawsuit and Forbes reported that the company had 120 million users globally.  On 21 November 2023, a US judge convicted Binance on multiple charges—including violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, money laundering schemes, unlicensed money transmitting, and sanctions violations. As part of the plea deal, the company agreed to pay $4 billion in fines, and Changpeng Zhao stepped down as CEO with a $50 million fine. Zhao was succeeded by Richard Teng.

According to a 2024 report in The Wall Street Journal covering 2023, Binance fired several members of its internal investigation team who were tasked with investigating market manipulation such as pump and dump schemes and wash trading. According to The Wall Street Journal, an internal investigation within Binance found that a VIP client of the company, a trading and investment firm named DWF Labs, had previously advertised its ability to manipulate the market by generating "believable" artificial volume to increase the price of tokens. The investigation also found examples of DWF Labs selling tokens its founder had promoted causing a crash in those token's price, which is consistent with a pump and dump scheme, and is against Binance's terms of service. In response to this report, Binance fired the investigators and retained DWF Labs as a client, saying that the self trading could have been accidental and that the internal team collaborated too closely with one of DWF's competitors. Binance has denied any wrongdoing.

According to a 2024 study by John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Binance is the most popular exchange used in pig butchering scams. Binance has occasionally cooperated with US law enforcement to return money lost in such scams. In November 2024, FTX filed a lawsuit against Binance Holdings Ltd., Zhao, and other Binance executives, seeking to recover nearly $1.8 billion that FTX alleges was fraudulently transferred. The case centers on a July 2021 stock repurchase transaction in which Binance sold its stakes—approximately 20% of FTX's international unit and 18.4% of its US-based entity—to FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

The lawsuit is one of many filed by FTX against its former investors, affiliates and clients in the bankruptcy court of Delaware. Other defendants include former White House communications officer Anthony Scaramucci, digital-asset exchange Crypto.com and political groups such as the Mark Zuckerberg-founded FWD.US. Nigerian authorities filed a lawsuit suing Binance for $81.5 billion for economic losses and back taxes, alleging the company has a significant presence in the country (despite not being registered), and is therefore liable for corporate income tax.

In March 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that the family of Donald Trump through World Liberty Financial had entered into talks with Binance to acquire a stake in the US arm of the business. This coincided with a push from Zhao to receive a presidential pardon for his felony conviction. According to unnamed sources cited by the Wall Street Journal, Trump advisor Steve Witkoff was involved, although his office denied this. According to the Wall Street Journal, a pardon from President Trump would simplify a revival of Binance's presence in the US. On March 12, 2025, it was announced that the Abu Dhabi government-backed investment fund MGX Fund Management Limited had made a minority $2 billion investment in Binance. On October 23, 2025, Trump pardoned Zhao, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying that Zhao had been the victim of persecution by the Joe Biden administration.