On 21 November 2023, Binance Holdings Limited stood up in a federal courtroom in Seattle and pleaded guilty. The company agreed to forfeit $2,510,650,588 and pay a criminal fine of $1,805,475,575. Three other US agencies settled with it the same day. If you are trying to decide whether to keep money on Binance, that sequence matters more than any fee table, and it is the part most exchange reviews bury in a paragraph about "regulatory risk".
This page is not a review in the usual sense. It does not rank the exchange against Coinbase or Kraken, and it does not tell you which token to buy. It sets out what the US government alleged, what Binance admitted, what the settlements require, and how you can confirm every figure yourself. Everything below was checked against primary documents on 2026-09-15. Where I could not confirm something to that standard, the page says so instead of guessing.
The resolutions were coordinated, and the money overlaps. DOJ credited roughly $1.8 billion of the criminal penalty against what Binance owed the other agencies, so the four headline figures do not simply add up to what was paid. Each authority published its own terms:
| Authority | Instrument | Money | Other terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| DOJ (W.D. Washington) | Criminal guilty plea | $2,510,650,588 forfeiture plus $1,805,475,575 fine | Independent compliance monitor for 3 years |
| FinCEN | Civil settlement | $3.4 billion civil penalty | 5-year monitorship, complete exit from the United States, $150 million suspended penalty |
| OFAC | Civil settlement | $968,618,825 | 1,667,153 apparent violations, August 2017 to October 2022 |
| CFTC (N.D. Illinois) | Consent order | $1.35 billion disgorgement plus $1.35 billion penalty | First charged violation of Regulation 1.6, governance reforms |
Treasury said it would keep access to Binance books, records and systems for five years through the monitor. The suspended $150 million is the part worth remembering: it is the amount FinCEN could collect if the compliance undertakings were not met.
Binance pleaded guilty in the Western District of Washington to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, to operating an unregistered money transmitting business, and to violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The court documents describe a company that chose growth over compliance in dated, specific steps. Binance launched in 2017 and chased high-volume customers, including Americans. When it announced in 2019 that it would block US users and open a separate Binance.US venue, it worked to keep commercially valuable VIP customers, including a plan to help them register at an offshore entity and move holdings across. Between August 2017 and October 2022, US users generated over $1.6 billion in profit for the exchange.
KYC arrived late. Identity checks for new users began in August 2021, and users who never completed them could keep trading until May 2022. Before that, an email address was enough. Binance filed no suspicious activity report with FinCEN during the relevant period.
The sanctions admission is narrower and more serious. Between January 2018 and May 2022, Binance wilfully caused over $898 million in trades between US users and users ordinarily resident in Iran. The matching engine made this inevitable once both populations were on the platform, and the company did not build the control that would have kept them apart.
One qualification, and it comes from Binance rather than from me. In its own announcement the company pointed out that the US resolutions did not allege that it misappropriated user funds or engaged in market manipulation. That is a self-serving statement from the party concerned, and it is also an accurate description of what was charged. Read it as a limit on the charges, not as a clean bill of health.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Binance, Zhao and then chief compliance officer Samuel Lim in March 2023 in the Northern District of Illinois. The consent order, entered by Judge Manish Shah, resolved it that November. Binance entities were ordered to disgorge $1.35 billion of ill-gotten fees and pay a $1.35 billion civil monetary penalty. Zhao was ordered to pay $150 million. Lim was ordered to pay $1.5 million for aiding and abetting and for conduct outside the US intended to evade US law.
The order included the first ever charged violation of CFTC Regulation 1.6, the anti-evasion rule. That citation is the clearest single line in any of the four documents: the regulator treated the compliance programme itself as part of the violation.
The non-money terms matter as much as the money. Binance must implement a board with independent members, a compliance committee and an audit committee, and must certify that sub-accounts opened by prime brokers can no longer bypass onboarding controls. Certifications are signed statements. They create a document trail a reader can look for.
Zhao pleaded guilty to one count: failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering programme, in violation of the Bank Secrecy Act. He resigned as chief executive that day and was replaced by Richard Teng, previously the company's head of regional markets. He was sentenced in April 2024 and released from federal custody that September.
Separately from the criminal resolution, the SEC sued Binance Holdings Limited, BAM Trading Services, BAM Management US Holdings and Zhao on 5 June 2023 with 13 charges. They covered operating as an unregistered exchange, broker and clearing agency, the unregistered offer and sale of BNB and BUSD, and statements about market surveillance on the Binance.US platform.
On 29 May 2025 the Commission filed a joint stipulation with the defendants dismissing the action with prejudice, and its own press release pages carry that update. With prejudice means the charges cannot be brought again. The Commission said it acted in the exercise of its discretion and as a policy matter, and that the decision does not reflect its position on any other proceeding. A dismissal is not a finding that the allegations were wrong, and it does not undo the guilty plea, which came from a different agency and a different court.
DOJ's plea agreement required an independent compliance monitor for three years plus remediation of the AML and sanctions programmes. FinCEN's settlement required five years, with the monitor reporting to FinCEN, OFAC and the CFTC. Two appointments, two instruments, two clocks.
I could not confirm from any primary document whether either monitorship was still operating on the date this page was checked. Reporting since 2025 has described talks about ending the DOJ appointment early and has described the FinCEN appointment as contested. None of that is a court order or an agency statement, so I will not assert an outcome. If the status matters to you, read the monitor attachment to the plea agreement and any later DOJ or Treasury statement, and treat anything short of those as unverified.
Binance's own announcement says prospective users of the main platform, none of whom may be a US person, must complete identity checks including a selfie matched against government identification. Binance.US is a different platform run by different entities. The brand is shared. The counterparty is not.
That distinction is the practical one. Your protections, your complaint route and any compensation scheme follow the legal entity you contract with, not the logo on the app. Before funding an account, get the full registered name from the account agreement, then look that name up on the register of the regulator that licensed it.
I am deliberately not publishing a country list. Those lists go stale in weeks, and a stale list on a YMYL page is worse than no list at all.
Most Binance pages quote a spot fee of 0.10% for both makers and takers. I won't. Pricing on the exchange is tiered by 30-day volume, by whether fees are paid in BNB, by whether you trade spot or derivatives, and by which entity holds your account. A single headline rate is either wrong for you or wrong by the time you read it.
The same applies to coin counts and registered user counts. Open the exchange's own fee schedule and market list, note the date you looked, and treat that as the only figure worth acting on.
An exchange balance is a claim against the exchange. OFAC's enforcement release describes the mechanics plainly: user funds sit in omnibus wallets visible on chain, entitlements are tracked on an internal ledger, and trades between users never touch the blockchain.
The Secure Asset Fund for Users is a reserve Binance set aside from trading fees and holds in its own wallets. It is not insurance. No third-party insurer underwrites it, no regulator guarantees a payout, and the decision to use it rests with the company. Calling it an insurance fund, which a great many pages do, overstates what it is.
The mitigations available to you are ordinary: hardware-key two-factor authentication, withdrawal address allowlisting, and moving long-term holdings to a wallet you control.
Each of those is checkable by you, and the routes are listed above.
Fines are a cost of doing business for a firm with Binance's revenue. A monitor is not. Under the plea agreement the company had to accept an independent compliance monitor for three years, and under the FinCEN consent order that period ran to five, alongside a requirement to exit the United States entirely.
Treasury also kept the right to walk through Binance's books, records and systems for five years. That is the clause with teeth in it, because it converts promises about remediation into something an outsider can inspect.
None of this tells you whether the remediation worked. It tells you what the company agreed to, and who was supposed to be watching.
Binance is the largest crypto exchange by volume, and it is also a company that pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges and paid over $4.3 billion to resolve them. Both statements are true at once, and neither cancels the other.
What settles it for you is not an opinion about whether the company has reformed. It is three narrower questions: is the entity you would contract with regulated where you live, are client balances segregated from corporate funds, and do you have a route to complain if something goes wrong. If you cannot answer all three from primary sources, that is itself the answer.