Binance Review (2023)

Binance is a popular cryptocurrency exchange that allows you to buy, sell, and store more than 350 cryptocurrencies.

You can also use Binance to earn interest by lending or staking cryptocurrency, get a loan using cryptocurrency as collateral, and spend cryptocurrency anywhere that Visa is accepted using the Binance Card.

Want to learn more?

Check out this Binance review for everything you need to know.

Advantages & Disadvantages

Advantages

Disadvantages

What Is Binance?

Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao (CEO) and Yi He (CMO). It quickly became one of the most popular and largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.

And it’s gone from strength to strength. In 2023, it has more than 120 million registered users around the world and a higher trading volume than any other cryptocurrency exchange (by a significant margin).

It now has more than 8000 employees across more than 100 locations – with dozens and dozens of open positions around the world. It’s clearly continuing to grow at a rapid pace – and is a strong competitor to established names like Coinbase.

Binance Products

Binance is more than just a place to buy, sell, and store cryptocurrencies.

Here are a few things they offer:

• Binance Spot Exchange: Trade 350+ cryptocurrencies without paying high fees (up to 0.1%).
• Binance P2P Trading: Like LocalCoinSwap and LocalBitcoins Alternatives, this allows you to buy and sell cryptocurrencies directly with other people.
• Binance OTC: Personalised way to buy and sell large chunks of cryptocurrencies.
• Binance Earn & Staking: This allows you to earn interest on your cryptocurrency holdings by lending them out.
• Binance Loans: Take out a loan using your cryptocurrency holdings as collateral.
• Binance Pool: Proof-of-work (PoW) mining pool that automatically adjusts what you’re mining to earn the highest profit.
• Binance Launchpad: Helps launch and promote projects with a “unique and innovative vision”.
• Binance Card: Crypto debit card that converts your cryptocurrency in real-time to cover purchases you make in-store or online. Powered by Swipe.

Binance Exchange

The Binance Exchange allows you to buy and sell lots of cryptocurrencies – including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Cardano (ADA).

You can access the exchange using the ‘Classic’ or ‘Advanced’ trading views.

The classic view is what Binance originally looked like when it launched in 2017. It includes everything you’d expect – including an order book, charting functionality, advanced order types, and more.

The advanced interface contains all the same things, it’s just been organised in a different way. I tend to prefer using this interface, as it feels less cluttered.

There’s also the ‘Convert’ interface. This allows you to easily exchange cryptocurrencies – without having to worry about using Binance’s normal trading interfaces.

However, there are two key downsides:

• You won’t be able to buy or sell all the cryptocurrencies available on Binance. For example, you can only use GBP to buy four cryptocurrencies – but there are three times as many GBP trading pairs available on the exchange.
• There are no explicit trading fees, but you’ll be quoted prices that are above the real exchange rate (i.e., fees are hidden in the priced you’re quoted). This spread varies depending on what you’re buying/selling.

While it’s easier and quicker, I stay away from it for these reasons.

Supported Countries

Binance is available in more than 180 countries around the world.

I couldn’t find a list of every country supported on Binance, but it seems like most places are. The only exceptions are going to be residents in sanctioned countries or where they’re been banned from providing services.

Supported Cryptocurrencies

The Binance Exchange currently supports more than 350 cryptocurrencies – which is more than other cryptocurrency exchange I’ve reviewed.

This includes larger cryptocurrencies, but also smaller and newer cryptocurrencies which are more difficult to find in other places.

Here are a few of the cryptocurrencies supported by Binance:

• Bitcoin (BTC)
• Ethereum (ETH)
• Litecoin (LTC)
• Ripple (XRP)
• Cardano (ADA)
• Polkadot (DOT)
• Uniswap (UNI)
• Chainlink (LINK)
• Stellar (XLM)
• Dogecoin (DOGE)

You can explore all the cryptocurrencies available on Binance here.

Payment Methods

Although you can currently deposit GBP with a UK bank transfer (via Faster Payments), this functionality is being lost from May 2023. This has happened a few times over the last few years.

You can also deposit GBP into Binance using a credit/debit card. You can also deposit EUR with a credit/debit card or Advcash. However, SEPA bank transfers and iDEAL are no longer supported.

Binance Trading Fees

Binance has extremely competitive trading fees.

You’ll pay a maximum of 0.1% in trading fees on the spot market.

You can easily unlock a 25% discount if you pay your trading fees using Binance Coin (BNB). If you trade more, you’ll unlock further discounts.

Binance Deposit Fees

You won’t be charged anything to deposit a supported cryptocurrency into your Binance account. This is the same in most other places.

The cost of depositing government-issued currencies (like GBP, EUR, and USD) depends on what payment method you select.

For instance:

• You’ll be charged a fee of 1.8% if you want to use a debit card or credit card to deposit GBP or EUR into your Binance account.
• You can deposit EUR with Advcash without paying any fees.

Binance Withdrawal Fees

You’ll be charged a fee whenever you withdraw cryptocurrency from your Binance account. What you’re charged depends on what cryptocurrency you’re looking to withdraw.

In some cases, this doesn’t cost much. For example, Monero (XMR) costs less than £0.02 to send and Cardano (ADA) costs less than £0.30 to withdraw.

But for other coins, it can be more. For example, Bitcoin (BTC) costs about £4.50 to withdraw and Ethereum (ETH) currently costs about £2.70.

You’ll also be charged a small fee to withdraw fiat currencies (like GBP, EUR, and USD) from your Binance account.

Check out the full fee schedule for more details. They can (and do) change without notice.

Binance Limits

If you haven’t completed identity verification, then you’ll have a withdrawal limit of 2 Bitcoin (BTC) every 24 hours (equivalent in any cryptocurrency). Unless you verify, you won’t be able to deposit or withdraw much government-issued currencies either.

Once you have verified your identity, you’ll be able to withdraw the equivalent of 100 Bitcoin (BTC) every 24 hours. You’ll also unlock much higher fiat deposit and withdrawal limits.

Binance Earn

Binance Earn is equivalent to what’s being provided by Crypto.com Earn. In short, it allows you to earn interest on your cryptocurrency holdings.

The amount of interest that you earn depends on what cryptocurrency you’re depositing – and they’re regularly updated. When I was updating this review, I found offers in excess of 10% APY.

With Crypto Earn, you have two options:

• Locked Savings: Lock-up your cryptocurrency for up to 90 days to unlock better interest rates.
• Flexible Savings: Allows you to earn interest on your cryptocurrency, but without having to lock it up for a fixed duration. You can withdraw it at any time.

Binance Staking

Staking cryptocurrencies helps to support the normal operations (and security) of blockchains that are using Proof of Stake (POS) to establish consensus.

You can usually stake cryptocurrencies using a cryptocurrency wallet. Binance Staking is just a simpler and easier way of going about it. Just transfer your coins over, lock them up for a defined period, and they’ll handle the rest.

You’ll receive rewards based on what cryptocurrency you’re staking and how long you’re locking it up for. Head over here to check the latest rates.

Binance Loans

Binance Loans allows you to use your cryptocurrency holdings as collateral for short-term loans (up to 180 days).

The loan-to-value (LTV) ratio depends on what cryptocurrency you’re using as collateral. Currently, the lowest LTV is 50% and the highest is 65%. Head over here to find the current LTV rates for different assets.

Binance Card

The Binance Visa Card allows you to spend your cryptocurrencies in-store and online. It’ll normally be accepted in places that process Visa card payments (i.e., millions of places).

This crypto debit card is linked to your Binance account, with a separate card wallet that can be topped up with a few cryptocurrencies.

When you use the Binance Visa Card in-store or online, it’ll automatically convert the cryptocurrencies you’re holding in your card wallet in real-time to cover the purchase amount. Pretty cool.

You can also get up to 8% cashback on your purchases, depending on how much Binance Coin (BNB) you’re holding in your Binance wallets.

Binance Coin (BNB) Amount	Binance Visa Card Cashback
0	1%
1	2%
10	3%
40	4%
100	5%
250	6%
600	8%

There aren’t any other benefits of the Binance Visa Card – which is a little underwhelming considering what some of the best crypto debit cards are offering.

Binance Coin (BNB)

Binance Coin (BNB) was launched in July 2017 as part of Binance’s initial coin offering (ICO). The supply was capped at 200 million, with 100 million Binance Coin (BNB) offered in the ICO. At the time, this helped them to raise $15 million.

It was originally an ERC-20 token (i.e., running on the Ethereum network), but was migrated over to the Binance Chain in April 2019.

One of the biggest benefits of Binance Coin (BNB) is that you unlock a discount when you use it to pay your trading fees on Binance. This discount is currently 25% on spot markets, but it’s slowly being reduced over time.

Every quarter, Binance has also committed to using 20% of their company’s profits to buy Binance Coin (BNB) and destroy (i.e., ‘burn’) it. They’ll keep doing this until they’ve destroyed half of the total supply (i.e., 100 million BNB).

In their 13^th quarterly Binance Coin (BNB) burn, Binance destroyed about 2.2 million Binance Coin (BNB). This had an approximate value of $68 million.

You can find out a little more on their website here or in its original whitepaper.

Security

Binance has a range of security features that can be turned on in your account.

This includes:

• U2F support (i.e., YubiKeys).
• 2FA support (e.g., Google Authenticator).
• SMS and email address verification.
• Address whitelisting (i.e., only allow withdrawals to designated addresses).
• Anti-phishing codes (small code that will be included in all Binance emails).

Once these features are turned on, you’ll have to verify each withdrawal you attempt to make from Binance.

According to the CryptoCompare Exchange Benchmark (February 2021), Binance has a security rating of 11.1 out of 20 (scored A). This is the 10^th highest security rating given to a cryptocurrency exchange in this report.

However, Binance did suffer a significant security compromise in May 2019. In this breach, hackers were able to withdraw 7000 Bitcoin (BTC) – which, at the time, was valued at about $41 million.

Binance used their Secure Asset Fund for Users (i.e., SAFU fund) to completely cover the loss of funds – so no one was left out of pocket. This SAFU fund is a separate cold wallet that contains 10% of all the trading fees generated on Binance. It was created in 2018 to cover cases like this.

In another incident, some Binance users had the information they’d submitted to verify their accounts leaked. The source of this leak appears to have been a third-party vendor that was used for a few months between 2017 and 2018, according to Binance.

Customer Support

Customer service is something that cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance seem to struggle with – especially during bull markets.

You can only contact customer support on Binance via live chat (accessible via a widget in the bottom right of the browser). Support requests will be closed if you don’t add a reply every 24 hours – which really sucks.

It has a 2-star rating on Trustpilot (4000+ reviews), but many of the ones I read through seemed like spam – so this is a distorted picture.

Nonetheless, people seem to be consistently reporting issues with their support.

In recent Clubhouse sessions, Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has said that improving customer support is “not an easy problem to solve” but that’s is something he’s personally prioritised.

Binance Alternatives

Alternatives to Binance include Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini – each of which has A rankings in CryptoCompare’s Exchange Benchmark Report (February 2021).

Of these four options, Binance has the largest number of cryptocurrencies available for trading.

Check how it compares to these alternatives (and more) in my roundup of the best cryptocurrency exchanges.

Alternatively, check out my list of Binance Alternatives.

Summary: Best Cryptocurrency Exchange?

There’s a lot to like about Binance.

Here’s what stood out to me:

• It supports more cryptocurrencies than any other cryptocurrency exchange (350+).
• You’ll be charged lower trading fees than popular alternatives like Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini (max 0.1%).
• It allows you to earn interest (via Binance Earn and Binance Staking), use your cryptocurrency to get loans (via Binance Loans), and more.

However, it doesn’t support as many popular payment methods as other places (like UK bank transfers and SEPA bank transfers).

I also don’t think it’s as simple or easy to use as alternative cryptocurrency exchanges – which is a consequence of no longer just being a place to trade cryptocurrencies.

Binance Website

Any Questions?

Thanks for reading this Binance review!

Have a question about Binance or the Binance Card that I haven’t touched on?

Just comment below and let me know!