Binance

If you are in the United States, the exchange you can open an account with is not the one this page is mostly about. Binance.US is operated by BAM Trading Services, a separate company that licenses the brand, and the difference is not cosmetic.

The scale gap is the clearest way to see it. Binance global handles over $30bn of spot volume a day; Binance.US handles roughly $20–25m. That is a ratio of more than a thousand to one, and it is the number that matters most, because depth is what determines whether your order moves the price. The asset list differs accordingly: around 150–190 assets and roughly 191–240 markets on the US platform, against 500-plus assets and thousands of pairs globally. Binance.US also remains unavailable in several states, New York and Texas among them.

Using a VPN to reach the global platform from the US is not a workaround. It breaches the terms you agreed to, and the consequence when it is detected is a frozen balance at a venue that has no obligation to unfreeze it quickly — which is a much worse outcome than paying a slightly higher fee somewhere you are permitted to be.

When people ask whether "Binance" is safe, they are usually asking about one of two companies with different owners, different regulators, different liquidity and a thousandfold difference in size. Nearly every comparison article collapses them. The rest of this page is about the global platform, which is the one our rating measures.

Binance holds the strongest and the weakest evidence in our rating at the same time. Its SAFU fund is one of the very few exchange protection funds that has actually paid out, which is the only test of such a fund that means anything. Against that sits a $4.3bn guilty plea, one of the largest corporate penalties in US history.

On reserves it publishes a proof, and in January 2026 it corrected that proof after it had been overstating its own reserve ratio. Read that two ways at once, because both are true: an exchange that finds and publishes an error in its own favour is behaving better than one that never checks, and an exchange whose reserve ratio was wrong is an exchange whose reserve ratio was wrong.

The pardon of Changpeng Zhao on 23 October 2025 was widely reported as closing the matter, and it did not. It ended his personal record after he had served his sentence. The company remains bound by multi-year monitorships and compliance obligations, and civil litigation continues — terrorism-financing claims in Raanan v. Binance Holdings and a revived securities class action in Lee v. Binance. Twenty-seven members of the House condemned the pardon. Nothing about it changed what Binance owes its supervisors.

We score its custody 5 out of 10: the fund is real and has paid, the plea and the corrected reserve ratio are real too, and the two roughly cancel. The practical position is that Binance is the deepest and cheapest venue in the world, run by a company with the worst compliance record of any exchange still operating at scale.

A $10,000 bitcoin buy cost 0.10% on 14 July 2026, and so did a $100,000 one. That second number is the impressive one: we measured no slippage at ten times the size, which almost nothing else in the rating manages.

Depth is why. We found 142.0 BTC within 0.1% of best ask and 260.1 BTC within 0.5%. Kraken holds a deeper book at the very top — 189.8 BTC within 0.1% — and charges 2.6 times as much to trade against it. On cost per executed order at any retail size, Binance wins and it is not close.

What you give up is infrastructure quality and recourse. We measured 460 ms of API response latency, roughly two and a half times Coinbase’s 183 ms and double Kraken’s 224 ms. And the venue charging you the least is the one whose compliance record is described in the section above; the cheap trade and the $4.3bn plea are attributes of the same company.

The honest framing is that Binance is priced where it is because it is enormous, not because it is generous, and that the saving is real. Sixteen basis points against Kraken on every trade compounds for anyone trading often. Whether that is the right trade depends on how much of your balance sits there between trades, which is the question this whole page is really about.