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Binance runs the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, where people buy, sell, and trade digital coins and tokens.
Binance is the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange — a marketplace where people swap digital coins like Bitcoin and Ether, park their crypto, and trade all sorts of tokens against each other. If you want to buy crypto, it's one of the first places you'd look. It's not a bank and it doesn't issue coins; it's the venue, the matching engine, and increasingly the whole arcade around the coins.
How it makes money is straightforward. Every trade on its spot market carries a small fee — a tiny slice of a huge volume adds up fast. Then there's the stuff wrapped around the trading: a suite of trading products, a stablecoin it issues, a venture arm, and a payment card. Its founder Changpeng Zhao — everyone calls him CZ — built it around 2017, and it grew to become the largest exchange in the world by trading volume. Users choose it for deep liquidity (you can trade large amounts without moving the price much), a huge menu of tokens, and low fees. The messiness matters. Binance has spent years tangled in regulatory fights across the globe. In 2023 it pleaded guilty in the United States to money-laundering and sanctions violations and agreed to pay about $4.3 billion, one of the largest corporate penalties ever. Zhao stepped down and later served time in prison, and the company has since been rebuilding its compliance apparatus under new leadership. Its legal home base has also wandered — it has pointed to the UAE as its headquarters, a reflection of how crypto firms shop for friendlier jurisdictions.
What sets Binance apart is scale and reach: volume, token listings, and products the rest of the industry copies. What makes it vulnerable is the same thing that makes any exchange fragile — it lives on trust and regulatory goodwill, and the crypto market's wild swings can dry up trading activity overnight. Competitors like Coinbase have leaned into regulation as a selling point, while Binance has had to prove it can play by the rules it once skirted.
Saved answer · last researched 4 Nov 2026