Buy on Binance

If you are in the European Union, Binance is not currently an option for a first purchase. The sequence, briefly: MiCA’s transition window — the grandfathering period that let pre-existing crypto firms keep operating while they applied for a licence — closed across the European Economic Area on 1 July 2026. Binance had filed for its EU licence in Greece. On 24 June 2026, days before the deadline and reportedly ahead of an expected refusal from the Hellenic Capital Market Commission, it withdrew the application.

When the window shut a week later, Binance stopped onboarding new customers in the EU. Existing European accounts were restricted to closing positions and withdrawing funds, and users in France, Italy, Spain, Poland and elsewhere received notices to that effect. Press reporting has linked the collapse of the Greek application to intervention at European Central Bank level; Binance’s own account is that the approval process was repeatedly delayed without explanation and that withdrawing was better than a rushed transition.

Switzerland is not affected

Worth stating plainly, because it gets confused constantly: Switzerland is not in the European Union and not in the European Economic Area. It is an EFTA member, and EFTA membership alone does not bring MiCA with it — Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway are covered because they are in the EEA, Switzerland is not. MiCA’s 1 July 2026 deadline therefore never applied to Swiss residents, and Binance continues to accept customers in Switzerland, as it does across the rest of the non-EEA world. The United Kingdom sits outside the EEA too, under its own FCA regime.

Binance describes the suspension as temporary and says it expects to be licensed again within months, with several member states having invited a fresh application — France has been named in reports. Nothing is settled, and no date has been given.

Application withdrawn

24 June 2026, Greece

MiCA deadline

1 July 2026, EEA-wide

New EU accounts

Suspended

Existing EU accounts

Close positions, withdraw

Switzerland

Not affected

Rest of the world

Operating normally

Binance position

Temporary; reapplying

EU alternative

Coinbase, Bitpanda

Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao — universally “CZ” — and reached the top of the industry inside a year, on a combination of aggressive listings, an unusually generous affiliate programme and fees roughly a tenth of what American competitors charged. It has stayed there since. On a normal day it handles more spot volume than the next several exchanges together.

The scale of it

Hundreds of assets, over a thousand spot pairs, and order books deep enough that a six-figure trade barely moves the price on a major pair. Around the exchange sits an entire ecosystem: Earn for lending and staking products, Launchpool for new token distributions, a large P2P marketplace for fiat in regions where banking rails are awkward, Binance Pay for transfers between users, and a derivatives business that dwarfs the spot exchange.

A word on that last one. Binance Futures offers leverage that can liquidate a beginner’s entire position on a routine day’s volatility. It is not a way to buy cryptocurrency; it is a way to lose it faster. If you are reading a page titled “how to buy”, stay on spot.

BNB

BNB is Binance’s own token and the native asset of BNB Chain. Holding it cuts your trading fees by a quarter, and your balance feeds into the VIP tier calculation. It is a genuinely useful thing to own if you trade on Binance — and, like every exchange token, it welds part of your portfolio to the company that is also custodying the rest of it.

Binance’s base spot fee is 0.10% for both maker and taker at the entry level, which is already the low end of the industry. Pay your fees in BNB and you get a 25% discount, taking it to 0.075%. Above that sits a VIP ladder keyed to your 30-day volume and your BNB balance, where the numbers fall to hundredths of a percent.

The trap, same as everywhere

The one-click “Buy crypto” flow on the front page is not the spot market. It is a convenience wrapper with a much wider spread built in, and a card payment on top of it is more expensive again. The order book is two clicks further and costs a fraction as much — exactly the same lesson as Coinbase’s Simple screen and Bitpanda’s 1.49%. Every platform in this industry sells convenience at a markup, and every one of them lets you decline.

Deposits and withdrawals

Crypto deposits are free. Crypto withdrawals cost the network fee, and Binance supports an unusually wide range of chains — which is an advantage, and a hazard: sending an asset on the wrong network is the most common way people lose funds here. Check the network on both sides, then send a test amount. Fiat deposit and withdrawal costs vary widely by country and method.

More than anywhere else, straightforwardly. Beyond the majors, Binance lists a long tail of smaller tokens years before a conservative platform such as Coinbase will touch them — which is the reason many people keep an account, and also the reason to be careful. A listing is not a recommendation, and illiquid small-cap tokens on any exchange are where most retail money goes to die.

Binance also tends to lead on network events. When EOS rebranded to Vaulta in 2025 and swapped its token one-for-one, Binance was among the exchanges that converted customer balances automatically, while Coinbase left it to holders. That story is on our EOS page.

Our own coverage of the assets we follow: HoloFuel, EOS / Vaulta and Stellar Lumens.

You cannot sensibly assess Binance without the history, so here it is without varnish.

For its first years Binance operated with no fixed headquarters and a famously flexible relationship with national regulators, which is a large part of how it grew so fast. In November 2023 that ended: Binance reached a settlement with the United States Department of Justice, FinCEN, the CFTC and OFAC worth roughly $4.3 billion — among the largest corporate penalties in American history. Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to a Bank Secrecy Act violation, stepped down as chief executive, and later served a four-month prison sentence.

Richard Teng, a former head of the Abu Dhabi Global Market financial regulator and previously of the Singapore Exchange, took over as CEO and has since been joined by co-founder Yi He in a dual-CEO structure. The strategy since has been explicitly compliance-first: licences and registrations in Dubai, Bahrain, France and elsewhere, a monitorship in the United States, and a great deal of public signalling about regulatory alignment.

Whether you find that convincing is a judgement call. What is not a judgement call is the EU outcome described at the top of this page: the compliance-first era has not yet produced a MiCA licence, and European users are the ones carrying the consequence.

Binance.US is a different company

American customers do not use Binance. They use Binance.US, a separate legal entity with its own management, a far shorter asset list and its own regulatory difficulties. Do not assume anything on this page applies to it.

The general advice — keep serious holdings in a wallet you control — applies with extra force to an exchange whose availability in your jurisdiction can change on a week’s notice. European users spent the summer of 2026 discovering exactly that.

Practically: enable the withdrawal allowlist so funds can only leave to addresses you have pre-approved. Match the network on both ends before you send, because Binance supports many chains and the same address string can mean different things on each. Send a small test amount, confirm it lands, then send the rest. And keep the seed phrase of the destination wallet on paper or metal, never in a photo, a password manager note or a cloud document.

For readers outside the EEA — Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. If you are inside the European Union, see the notice above instead.

1. Check availability in your country first — Binance’s footprint changes, and there is no sense verifying into a platform you cannot fund.
2. Create the account with a dedicated email and a password from your password manager.
3. Enable two-factor authentication with an authenticator app or a hardware key, never SMS, before depositing anything.
4. Complete identity verification. Passport or ID card plus a liveness check; higher tiers unlock higher limits.
5. Fund by bank transfer where it is available, or through the P2P marketplace where it is not. Card is instant and expensive.
6. Buy on the spot market, not the one-click Buy crypto button. Hold a small BNB balance to take the 25% fee discount.
7. Turn on the withdrawal allowlist, send a test transaction to your own wallet, then record the trade and export a CSV.

The honest ledger, as of September 2026.

Reach Binance through a bookmark, never a search advert — phishing clones of this domain are among the most persistent in the industry.

binance.comFee scheduleSupportAPI managementbinance.us — separate US entity