Is Binance safe? How verifiable are its settlement, reserves and supervision?

Is currency security safe? Verifiable facts about its settlement agreement, reserves and regulation

Binance currently operates under the terms of a $4.3 billion settlement agreement with U.S. regulators. The agreement comes with an oversight mechanism whose current status is controversial, and a reserve reporting system that is self-verified rather than independently audited by the platform. Whether this means "safe" depends on how readers understand the word-this page will sort out what has been documented, what is controversial, and what is currently unable to be confirmed by anyone outside Binance and its regulators.

Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by transaction volume; the U.S. Treasury Department pointed out in a press release announcing the settlement agreement on November 21, 2023 that Binance accounts for 60% of centralized spot transactions. This scale is part of the reason why its compliance records and asset custody statements are subject to greater scrutiny than small platforms.

Specific data on the 2023 settlement agreement

On November 21, 2023, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that Binance had reached a $3.4 billion settlement with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and a $968 million settlement with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), as part of a global settlement totaling $4.3 billion with the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). According to one document, the distribution of the $4.3 billion solution among the four regulatory agencies is as follows: the Justice Department collected approximately $1.81 billion in criminal fines and $2.51 billion in outstanding collections;FinCEN's share was $3.4 billion;OFAC was $968 million; and CFTC was $2.85 billion. Since Binance has paid a regulatory agency that can be deducted from its arrears to other agencies, the actual total cash paid is close to US$4.3 billion, rather than a simple addition of the above four figures. The Treasury press release also disclosed a $15 million suspended fine that FinCEN could recover if Binance failed to meet the compliance provisions of the settlement agreement.

According to a press release from the Treasury Department, FinCEN's settlement implements a five-year oversight mechanism that gives the U.S. government access to Binance books, records and systems. In the same press release, then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Binance "turned a blind eye to its legal obligations" in pursuing profits. Founder Zhao Changpeng pleaded guilty to violating a Bank Secrecy Act and resigned as CEO in November 2023. He was released in September 2024 after serving four months in federal prison. According to the same source, he remains a shareholder but does not hold any operating positions.

Is the supervision mechanism still in operation?

The next direction of the supervision mechanism is not yet clear. Reports say the Justice Department is discussing the requirement to eliminate external oversight mechanisms as part of the Trump administration's broader reduction of corporate oversight mechanisms; the report notes that the Justice Department has ended oversight of three other companies, citing Glencore's own annual report showing that the company spent $142 million in oversight costs between 2023 and 2024 before its oversight ended. A memorandum from the Justice Department's Criminal Division argued that the oversight mechanism "may incur huge expenses and interfere with legitimate business operations."

Seven months later, the situation has not yet been resolved at the public level. According to reports, Senator Richard Blumenthal has written to the Justice Department and FinCEN to inquire about the status of two Binance supervisors-Francis McLeod of the Justice Department and Sharon Cohen Levin of FinCEN-after reports that Binance fired internal investigators who had reported Iranian-related financial flows. Blumenthal said in the letter that he was concerned about the exchange's "growing allegations of extremely lax anti-money laundering prevention measures." According to the same article, neither supervisor responded to media requests for comment, and spokespersons for the Ministry of Justice, FinCEN and Binance did not immediately respond. This page cannot tell you whether the supervisor of the Ministry of Justice has been removed, suspended, or is still performing his duties because the two related reports were released several months apart and neither of them confirmed the final results.

Operating mechanism and practical cases of reserve certificates

According to the information, Binance uses the Merkel tree structure to publish quarterly proof of reserves reports, allowing any individual user to verify whether their balance is included in a specific snapshot by hashing their account ID and tracing it to the published root hash value. A report on the August 1, 2026 snapshot shows how it works: the snapshot is anchored to the Bitcoin block height of 962079 at 00:00:00 UTC on August 1, 2026. According to the report, Binance users have a net Bitcoin balance of 656,644.187 BTC, while their on-chain wallets hold 658,293.119 BTC-to-reserve ratio of 100.25%. The net balance of Ethereum is approximately 3.98 million pieces, which also reaches a ratio of 100.25%. The buffer reserve of stablecoins is higher: USDT has a net position of approximately US$32.9 billion, with a reserve ratio of 103.62%;USDC is 107.64%; and USD1 is 112.80%. Solana's reserve ratio is exactly 100.00%-just covered, but without any buffer margin, which has been reported to be noteworthy. According to the same report, Binance's reported bitcoin holdings have increased from approximately 591,000 BTC at the beginning of 2025 to 656,644 BTC in August 2026.

Binance combines this Merkel proof with zero-knowledge concise non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs). Reported that this zero-knowledge cryptography method can prove that the aggregated arithmetic operations are correct without exposing personal account data. The data itself explains that its key limitations lie in what is not covered by the snapshot: liabilities outside the snapshot, such as loans, off-balance sheet debt or derivative margin gaps, and it cannot be proved that the on-chain wallets shown are not temporarily borrowed to beautify the snapshot data. The information also pointed out that unlike Binance, Coinbase, as a listed company, will also release additional audited financial statements-and Binance's reserve certificate is not signed and confirmed by an equivalent third party.

Compliance data between SAFU Fund and Binance itself

According to the information, Binance has an independent insurance reserve fund called SAFU, established in 2018, established by reserving a 10% transaction fee, and has a publicly visible wallet address. According to the same source, as of the first quarter of 2026, the balance reported on Binance's SAFU page (covering BNB, BTC, USDT and TUSD) has exceeded US$1 billion-this figure is reported by Binance itself and has not been independently verified. According to information, SAFU funds have been publicly used twice: once after 7,000 BTC was lost due to hacking attacks in 2019, and the other time after the BNB chain bridging incident in 2022 to compensate users.

Binance's own compliance metrics come from its February 2026 corporate update announcement: As of mid-2025, sanctions-related transactions fell to 0.009% of transaction volume, a decrease of 96.8% from January 2024, thanks to what the company claims to be a compliance team of 1,500 people (25% of its total employees). Binance also revealed to the announcement that it processed more than 71,000 enforcement requests in 2025, resulting in freezing more than $131 million in illegal funds. In the materials reviewed on this page, none of these data has been independently verified-they are just a company's description of its own projects.

Can U.S. and EU customers use Binance?

According to information, Binance.com cannot be used by Americans; the global exchange geo-blocks U.S. IP addresses and requires users to prove non-U.S. resident status when registering. The only legal access point in the United States is Binance.US, operated by BAM Trading Services and registered as a money services company with FinCEN, but it offers a limited range of products-spot trading only and no derivatives or margin trading-and as of the first quarter of 2026, it did not operate in New York, Texas, Hawaii or Vermont. According to information, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Binance and Binance.US in 2023, which was suspended in February 2025, and the charges against Binance.US were voluntarily dropped in May 2025.

In the European Union, according to a report on June 29, 2026, Binance stopped providing services in multiple member states starting from July 1, 2026 after failing to obtain authorization from the Cryptographic Asset Markets Act (MiCA)., and previously withdrew its license application in Greece. In addition, the data points out that Binance has held a French PSAN registration since 2022, and has passed a phased process in 2025 to remove stablecoins that do not comply with MiCA regulations for users in the European Economic Area. The USDT was removed in March 2025. Spot trading pairs in the European Economic Area.

Outstanding issues

Among the reports reviewed on this page, two issues remain unresolved. First of all, different media have given different descriptions of the dollar size of Iranian-related capital flows through Binance. There are reports that the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating suspected Iran-related USDT flows of more than $1 billion. Another article set the amount of Iranian-related crypto financial flows at US$1.7 billion. Neither media has checked their data with the other party, and this page cannot determine which number-or whether both refer to the same set of transactions-is accurate. Second, a report stated that Noah Perlman-who took over as chief compliance officer in 2023 after Binance pleaded guilty to sanctions and money laundering charges-has begun discussions to leave his post sometime in 2026. Binance refuted the report, but according to the same summary, Binance has not appointed a successor or set a departure date.

This page cannot tell you what

This page cannot tell you whether Binance's reserves prove that the wallet is truly free of debt at any time other than the published snapshot time point, because as stated in the data, this method cannot rule out the possibility of borrowing wallets specifically for snapshots, nor can it capture liabilities outside the snapshot, such as loan or derivative margin gaps. This page cannot tell you whether the Justice Department's external supervisors are currently active, suspended or terminated because the two sources describing their status are seven months apart and have not reached a common conclusion-one media reported discussions on withdrawing supervision in September 2025, and another media reported in April 2026 that a senator was still pressing for basic performance status information. This page cannot verify the compliance indicators reported by Binance itself-a sanctions transaction rate of 0.009%, a compliance staff size of 1,500, and $131 million in frozen funds-because these data come from the company's own February 2026 update, not an external auditor. This page cannot reconcile the two figures of US$1 billion and US$1.7 billion given by different media on Iran-related financial flows. Moreover, this page is based on a partial summary rather than a complete original report regarding the departure of the Binance compliance officer.

Sources of Information

Each of the above facts is attributed to one of the above reports. When there are differences in these reports, this article has made it clear.