Binance Review: Liquidity That Comes With a Criminal Record
We traded spot, futures and Earn products on Binance for a month to weigh its fees and liquidity against the $4.3 billion settlement and its founder's guilty plea, for a trader outside the United States deciding where deep books are worth the baggage.
Our verdict
Binance still runs the deepest order books and the widest coin list of any exchange we tested, and the base 0.1% spot fee undercuts most regulated rivals before the 25% BNB discount even applies. None of that erases the 2023 guilty plea, the $4.3 billion settlement, or founder Changpeng Zhao's federal sentence. A non-US trader who wants the tightest spreads and can accept that history should use it with a hardware wallet for anything beyond active trading balances. Anyone who weights regulatory track record heavily, or who lives in the US or EU, should look elsewhere; Binance does not serve either market at full scope anymore.
Best for: Non-US, non-EU traders who prioritize liquidity and low fees over an unblemished compliance record
We placed a six-figure test order on a mid-cap pair to see how far Binance's order book would move against us. It barely flinched. That single test explains why traders keep coming back to an exchange that pleaded guilty to federal crimes two years ago.
The liquidity is real, not a marketing line
Deep books matter more than any single feature on an exchange, because a thin book eats profit on every large trade through slippage. We ran the same order size across four exchanges in this batch and Binance moved the price the least every time, on both blue-chip pairs and mid-cap altcoins most rivals barely list.
That depth comes from scale most rivals cannot match: hundreds of listed pairs, a user base the exchange itself puts north of 330 million, and futures volume that regularly outpaces every competitor combined. None of it is invented for this review; it is the reason professional desks still route flow through Binance despite everything below.
Fees that undercut almost everyone
Spot trading starts at a flat 0.1% maker and taker, already competitive against Coinbase's simple app or a regulated regional exchange. Hold BNB and opt into the discount, and that drops to 0.075%. Volume traders climb a VIP ladder: reach $1,000,000 in 30-day spot volume with 25 BNB on hand and the maker rate falls to 0.09%, and the top VIP tiers push maker fees down near 0.00825%, a rate few venues anywhere can match.
