Overview

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. It was initially based in China, then moved to Japan, subsequently left Japan for Malta, and currently has no official company headquarters.

Binance has been the subject of lawsuits and challenges from regulatory authorities. As a result, Binance has been banned from operating or ordered to cease operations in some countries, and has been issued fines. On 21 November 2023, Binance pled guilty to violating U.S. anti–money laundering rules and paid a $4.3 billion fine. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority ordered Binance to stop all regulated activity in the United Kingdom in June 2021. 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. The company paid lobbyists $800,000 to lobby for a pardon from Trump for Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. In October 2025, President Trump pardoned Zhao.

Despite pledging zero tolerance for illicit activities on the exchange since 2023, investigative journalists have found that Binance continues to profit from money laundering for organized crime groups and sanctioned entities. Internal investigators at Binance found evidence that Russia and Iran, two sanctioned states, continued to use Binance accounts to move money; after reporting these suspicious transactions to Binance leadership, the internal investigators were fired or suspended.

In 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that Binance was under investigation by the United States Department of Justice for allegedly evading sanctions on Iran-backed designated foreign terrorist organizations such as the Houthis. U.S. federal prosecutors also alleged in an asset forfeiture lawsuit that Binance was used by Chinese companies to launder the proceeds of oil sales for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

2013–2017: company beginnings and move out of China

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. Zhao was hired at this position in 2014 by Yi He, with whom he co-founded Binance several years later.

Binance was founded in 2017. The company raised about $15 million through an initial coin offering (ICO) that year to fund the launch of the exchange. The company later moved its operations out of mainland China after Chinese regulators began cracking down on cryptocurrency trading in 2017.

2018–2019: launch of stablecoin and security breach

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.

2020–2023

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.

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 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.

2024–present

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.

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.