Binance

Overview

Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume — and as of September 2026 it is in the middle of turning itself into something else. On September 29, 2026, the company began migrating user crypto balances out of its Funding Accounts into Spot Accounts; when the migration ends in January 2027, those Funding Accounts will be renamed Stocks Account and restricted to settling stock and stock-options trades in just six assets: USD, USDC, USDT, USD1, U and BNB (Binance). Weeks earlier, Binance had launched bStocks — fractional, zero-commission exposure to more than 7,000 U.S. stocks through a partnership with brokerage Alpaca (crypto.news). The same exchange is also the named venue in one of the year’s ugliest crypto lawsuits: in May 2026, World Liberty Financial countersued backer Justin Sun, alleging he improperly transferred WLFI governance tokens to Binance and short-sold the token as public trading began — a claim Sun dismissed as a “meritless PR stunt” (Reuters). Binance’s story since 2023 is not really the story of a crypto exchange anymore; it is the story of a company that paid the largest corporate penalty in U.S. crypto history, rebuilt itself around a regulator-turned-CEO, and then became entangled with the Trump family’s crypto empire.

The stock-market pivot

The Funding-to-Stocks migration is Binance’s most consequential product change in years, and it is happening account by account. Starting September 29, 2026, Funding Accounts stopped supporting on-chain deposits; a “One-Click Migration” button lets users move crypto to their Spot Accounts proactively, and anything left behind will be migrated automatically in batches from January 2027 (Binance). When the rename takes effect in January 2027, the Stocks Account will accept only six tokens — USD, USDC, USDT, USD1, U and BNB — for buying stocks, and all other crypto deposits and withdrawals will go through Spot Accounts. Binance says aggregate balances will not be affected (Binance). The change ripples across the product line: Binance Pay and Convert will settle into Spot Accounts, card and gift-card credits move to Spot, and P2P advertisers will get a dedicated P2P Account in December 2026 rather than routing through Funding (Binance).

The migration is the settlement plumbing for a push that began in July 2026 with bStocks: tokenized exposure to more than 7,000 U.S. stocks, tradeable in fractional $0.01 notional increments with no commission and no minimums, powered by Alpaca’s brokerage infrastructure (crypto.news). The timing matters because Binance is not alone — Crypto.com launched Stock Perps for 24/5 trading on U.S. equities and obtained CFTC-regulated 24 Exchange status around the same window, so the two largest crypto platforms are now directly racing to absorb each other’s markets (crypto.news). For an exchange that built its fortune on crypto spot trading, the message of the Stocks Account is blunt: the next chapter is equities.

Origins: a $15 million ICO to the world’s largest exchange

Binance was founded in 2017, when Changpeng “CZ” Zhao sold digital coins in an initial coin offering and raised $15 million (Economic Times). It swiftly became the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, turning Zhao into a billionaire (Malay Mail). In 2019, Zhao launched Binance.US, operated by an American company, BAM Trading, as the company’s U.S.-facing arm (Economic Times). By the time Zhao stepped down in November 2023, the exchange served 150 million users, in the words of his successor Richard Teng (Channel News Asia).

The company has long refused to say where it is based. In December 2023, Teng told the Financial Times there was no need to disclose the location of the global headquarters — “Why do you feel so entitled to those answers… Is there a need for us to share all of this information publicly? No” — while confirming regional headquarters in France for Europe and Dubai for the Middle East, with the global location to be revealed “as and when it’s appropriate” (Cryptopolitan). Zhao had historically maintained the exchange had no global headquarters at all, and Maltese regulators have denied authority over the holding company there (Cryptopolitan).

The $4.3 billion guilty plea and the regulator who took over

On November 21, 2023, Binance pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, operating an unregistered money-transmitting business, and violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, agreeing to a total criminal financial penalty of $4.316 billion — coordinated with the Treasury’s FinCEN and OFAC arms and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (crypto.news). Prosecutors said Binance knowingly failed to install controls that would stop U.S. customers from trading with users in sanctioned jurisdictions, causing more than $898 million in trades between U.S. users and users ordinarily resident in Iran from January 2018 through May 2022 (crypto.news). The settlement required Binance to retain an independent compliance monitor for three years and rebuild its anti-money-laundering and sanctions systems (crypto.news).

Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program, paid a $50 million fine, and served a four-month federal prison sentence in 2024 — yet he remains Binance’s majority shareholder (Malay Mail). His replacement was a deliberate inversion of the founder: Richard Teng, a Singaporean who had been director of corporate finance at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, chief regulatory officer of the Singapore Exchange, and CEO of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority at Abu Dhabi Global Market before joining Binance in August 2021 as CEO of Binance Singapore (Channel News Asia). On taking over, Teng said his focus was reassuring users about the company’s financial strength, security and safety, and collaborating with regulators to “uphold high standards globally that foster innovation while providing important consumer protections” (Channel News Asia). A separate civil front closed on May 29, 2025, when the SEC voluntarily dismissed its June 2023 lawsuit — which had accused Binance of artificially inflating trading volumes, diverting customer funds, failing to restrict U.S. customers and misleading investors about market surveillance — through a joint stipulation filed in the Washington, D.C. federal court (Reuters).

The Trump-crypto nexus

No thread explains Binance’s 2025 rehabilitation better than its proximity to the Trump family’s crypto empire. In March 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that Teng and chief legal officer Eleanor Hughes had met Treasury Department officials to discuss removing the compliance monitorship imposed in the 2023 settlement — while Binance was simultaneously exploring a business deal with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family venture, including listing a WLFI dollar-pegged token (Economic Times). Zhao had separately been pushing the Trump administration for a pardon (Economic Times).

The ties then became operational. Binance was the first exchange to list the WLFI token when public trading began on September 1, 2025 (crypto.news). On October 23, 2025, President Donald Trump granted Zhao a full pardon; the Journal noted Binance had spent nearly a year pursuing it and described the exchange as a “key supporter” of World Liberty Financial (Malay Mail). White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt framed the pardon as correcting the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency”; Senator Elizabeth Warren called it corruption, writing that Zhao had “financed President Trump’s stablecoin and lobbied for a pardon” (Malay Mail).

The relationship curdled publicly in 2026. On May 4, Reuters reported that World Liberty Financial had countersued Justin Sun — the billionaire who put $75 million into the project and served as an adviser — alleging he improperly transferred WLFI governance tokens to Binance and short-sold the token as public trading began (Reuters). Sun called the suit a “meritless PR stunt”; his own April 2026 lawsuit alleged his tokens had been illegally frozen; and the WLFI token was down about 72% since September 1 (Reuters). Zhao, for his part, denied in November 2025 that he held any formal advisory role with World Liberty Financial — though Reuters noted the two had met (Reuters). The Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. profiles document the family’s wider crypto footprint.

A new federal probe tests the monitorship

On September 22, 2026 — a week before the Stocks Account migration began — Bloomberg reported that federal prosecutors had opened a new criminal investigation into Binance over whether the exchange knowingly allowed trading that violated U.S. sanctions on Iran, nearly three years after the $4.3 billion settlement (crypto.news). The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office is leading the inquiry with the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in Washington; prosecutors are examining Binance’s compliance controls and what the exchange knew about the transactions under review (crypto.news). The report did not identify the transactions or say when the examination began, and Reuters said it had not independently verified Bloomberg’s account (crypto.news).

The probe follows a separate, already public court action. On September 14, 2026, the Southern District of New York filed a civil forfeiture complaint — case 1:26-cv-08010 — seeking about $61 million in USDT allegedly representing proceeds from black-market Iranian crude oil and petroleum sales intended to finance Iranian government and military bodies including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (crypto.news). The complaint alleges two Chinese companies, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, used Binance trading accounts while handling those proceeds; it does not accuse Binance itself of wrongdoing, and a civil forfeiture complaint contains allegations that remain unproven until a court enters judgment (crypto.news). Binance has given its own timeline: law enforcement contacted it in April 2025 about the accounts, it removed Hexa Whale from Binance.com on August 13, 2025, and offboarded Blessed Trust in January 2026 after a source-of-funds review (crypto.news). The exchange says more than 1,500 people — roughly a quarter of its global workforce — work in compliance-related functions, that it processed more than 71,000 law-enforcement requests in 2025, and that its exposure to four major Iranian crypto exchanges fell 97.3%, from $4.19 million to $110,000, over two years (crypto.news). Scrutiny had been building since March, when Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Ruben Gallego pushed for congressional oversight of Iran-linked transactions on the platform; Binance called parts of the underlying reporting “demonstrably false, unsupported by credible evidence, and defamatory in several material respects” (crypto.news).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state Binance’s current user count — Teng cited 150 million users in November 2023, but no verified later figure was confirmed in the research for this profile. It does not name a global headquarters, because Binance has never disclosed one and Teng declined to do so. It does not assert how the September 2026 Iran-sanctions probe will resolve; no charges have been filed and the forfeiture allegations remain unproven. It does not claim the WLFI token-transfer allegations against Justin Sun are true — they are WLFI’s allegations in a countersuit, which Sun disputes. It does not specify whether the SEC’s May 2025 dismissal was with or without prejudice; the sources confirmed here do not establish that. And it treats Binance’s own compliance figures — the 1,500 staff, the 71,000 law-enforcement requests, the 97.3% exposure drop — as the company’s account, not independent findings.