Binance operates today under the terms of a $4.3 billion settlement with US regulators, a monitorship whose current status is disputed, and a reserves-reporting system that is self-verified rather than independently audited. Whether that adds up to “safe” depends on what a reader means by the word — this page lays out what is documented, what is contested, and what nobody outside Binance and its regulators can currently confirm.
Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume; the US Treasury put its share of centralized spot trading at 60% in its 21 November 2023 press release announcing the settlement. That scale is part of why its compliance record and its custody claims get more scrutiny than a smaller platform’s would.
The 2023 settlement, in numbers
On 21 November 2023, the Treasury Department announced that Binance had settled with FinCEN for $3.4 billion and with OFAC for $968 million, part of a global resolution with the Department of Justice and the CFTC totalling $4.3 billion. According to a support article from Eco dated 11 June 2026, the $4.3 billion resolution broke down across four regulators: DOJ collected roughly $1.81 billion in criminal fines and $2.51 billion in forfeitures; FinCEN’s share was $3.4 billion; OFAC’s was $968 million; and the CFTC’s was $2.85 billion. Because Binance received credit for amounts already paid to one regulator against what it owed another, the total cash actually paid out came to near $4.3 billion rather than the sum of those four figures. The Treasury release also disclosed a $150 million suspended penalty that FinCEN could collect if Binance fails to meet the settlement’s compliance terms.
The FinCEN settlement imposed a five-year monitorship giving the US government access to Binance’s books, records and systems, according to the Treasury release. Then-Secretary Janet Yellen said in the same release that Binance had “turned a blind eye to its legal obligations” in pursuing profit. Founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to a single Bank Secrecy Act violation, stepped down as CEO in November 2023, served four months in a federal facility and was released in September 2024, according to eco.com’s citation of the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator. He remains a shareholder with no operational role, per the same source.
Is the monitor still watching?
What happens next to that monitorship is unresolved. Bloomberg reported, via CryptoSlate on 16 September 2025, that the DOJ was discussing dropping the outside monitor requirement as part of a broader shift away from corporate monitorships under the Trump administration; CryptoSlate noted the DOJ had already ended monitorships for three other companies, and cited Glencore’s own annual reports showing it spent $142 million on monitoring costs between 2023 and 2024 before its oversight ended. A DOJ Criminal Division memo cited in that reporting argued monitors “can also impose substantial expense and interfere with lawful business operations.”
Seven months later, the picture had not been resolved in public. Fortune reported on 17 April 2026 that Senator Richard Blumenthal had sent letters to the DOJ and FinCEN asking for the status of Binance’s two monitors — Frances McLeod for DOJ, Sharon Cohen Levin for FinCEN — after reports that Binance had fired internal investigators who had flagged Iran-linked flows. Blumenthal wrote that he was concerned about “mounting allegations of dangerously lax anti-money-laundering prevention” at the exchange, per Fortune. Neither monitor responded to Fortune’s requests for comment, and spokespeople for the DOJ, FinCEN and Binance did not immediately respond either, according to the same article. This page cannot tell you whether the DOJ monitor has actually been removed, paused, or is still active, because the two reports describing it are dated months apart and neither confirms a final outcome.
How Proof of Reserves works, worked through
Binance publishes a quarterly Proof-of-Reserves report using a Merkle tree construction, according to eco.com, letting any individual user check that their balance was included in a given snapshot by hashing their account ID and tracing it to the published root. Crypto Briefing’s coverage of the 1 August 2026 snapshot, dated 6 August 2026, shows how the mechanics play out: the snapshot was pegged to Bitcoin block height 962079 at 00:00:00 UTC. Binance’s net user Bitcoin balances stood at 656,644.187 BTC while its on-chain wallets held 658,293.119 BTC — a reserve ratio of 100.25%, per Crypto Briefing’s citation of the report. Ethereum matched that same 100.25% ratio on net balances of roughly 3.98 million ETH. Stablecoins carried larger buffers: USDT was backed at 103.62% on a net position of roughly $32.9 billion, USDC at 107.64%, and USD1 at 112.80%. Solana sat at exactly 100.00% — covered, but with no cushion above the threshold, a point Crypto Briefing flagged as worth watching. Binance’s reported Bitcoin holdings had grown from around 591,000 BTC in early 2025 to 656,644 BTC by August 2026, per the same report.
Binance layers this Merkle proof with zk-SNARKs, a zero-knowledge cryptographic method that Crypto Briefing describes as proving the aggregate arithmetic is correct without exposing individual account data. The key limitation, stated by eco.com’s own explainer, is what the snapshot does not cover: liabilities outside the snapshot such as loans, off-balance-sheet obligations or derivatives margin shortfalls, and it does not prove the on-chain wallets shown were not borrowed specifically to pad the snapshot. Eco.com also points out that Coinbase, unlike Binance, additionally publishes audited financial statements as a public company — Binance’s Proof-of-Reserves has no equivalent third-party sign-off.
The SAFU fund and Binance’s own compliance numbers
Binance maintains a separate insurance reserve called SAFU, created in 2018 by setting aside 10% of trading fees, with a publicly visible wallet address, according to eco.com. As of Q1 2026, the balance reported on Binance’s own SAFU page exceeded $1 billion across BNB, BTC, USDT and TUSD, per the same source — a figure that is self-reported by Binance rather than independently verified. SAFU has been drawn on publicly twice: after a 2019 hack that lost 7,000 BTC, and to compensate users after a 2022 BNB Chain bridge incident, according to eco.com.
Binance’s own compliance metrics come from a February 2026 company update cited by Blockchain.News: sanctions-related transactions fell to 0.009% of trading volume by mid-2025, a 96.8% reduction from January 2024, attributed to a compliance team the company says numbers 1,500 people, or 25% of its workforce. Binance also told Blockchain.News it processed over 71,000 law enforcement requests in 2025, leading to more than $131 million in seized illicit funds. None of these figures carry independent verification in the sources reviewed for this page — they are the company describing its own program.
Can US and EU customers use Binance
US persons cannot use Binance.com; the global exchange geo-blocks US IP addresses and requires non-US residency at onboarding, according to eco.com. The only legal US entry point is Binance.US, operated as BAM Trading Services and registered with FinCEN as a money services business, but it offers a reduced product set — spot trading only, no derivatives or margin — and does not operate in New York, Texas, Hawaii or Vermont as of Q1 2026, per eco.com. The SEC’s 2023 suit against Binance and Binance.US was paused in February 2025 and voluntarily dismissed against Binance.US in May 2025, according to eco.com’s citation of SEC litigation releases.
In the EU, Binance halted services in several member states effective 1 July 2026 after failing to secure Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) authorization, having earlier withdrawn its Greek license application, according to Blockchain.News, dated 29 June 2026. Separately, eco.com notes Binance held a French PSAN registration since 2022 and had delisted non-MiCA-compliant stablecoins for EEA users in phased steps through 2025, with USDT removed from EEA spot trading pairs in March 2025.
Open threads
Two items remain unresolved in the reporting reviewed here. First, the dollar scale of Iran-linked flows through Binance is described differently by different outlets. Blockchain.News reported that the Department of Justice is investigating alleged Iran-linked USDT flows exceeding $1 billion. Fortune, in an article dated 17 April 2026, put the figure at $1.7 billion in Iran-linked crypto flows. Neither outlet reconciles its number against the other, and this page cannot say which figure — or whether both refer to the same set of transactions — is accurate. Second, a Bloomberg article dated 6 April 2026 reported that Noah Perlman, who took over as Binance’s chief compliance officer in 2023 after the exchange’s guilty pleas on sanctions and money-laundering charges, had opened talks about leaving the role sometime in 2026. Binance pushed back on the report, though it has not named a replacement or set an exit date, according to that same summary.
What this page does not tell you
This page cannot tell you whether Binance’s Proof-of-Reserves wallets are genuinely unencumbered at any moment other than the published snapshot time, because the methodology, as eco.com states, does not rule out wallets borrowed specifically for the snapshot and does not capture liabilities outside it, such as loans or derivatives margin shortfalls. It cannot tell you whether the DOJ’s outside monitor is currently active, paused or terminated, because the two sources describing its status are seven months apart and reach no shared conclusion — CryptoSlate reported talks toward removal in September 2025, and Fortune reported a senator still pressing for basic status information in April 2026. It cannot verify Binance’s self-reported compliance metrics — the 0.009% sanctions-transaction rate, the 1,500-person compliance headcount, the $131 million in seized funds — because these come from the company’s own February 2026 update rather than an external auditor. It cannot reconcile the $1 billion and $1.7 billion figures given for Iran-linked flows by different outlets. And it relies on a partial summary, not the full underlying reporting, for the claims about Binance’s compliance-officer departure.
Sources
Every fact above is attributed to one of these reports. Where they disagree, the article says so.
