The story of Binance: from a $15M ICO to the world's biggest exchange

Today, Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange: more than 300 million registered users and $34 trillion in trading volume in 2025 alone. But eight years ago, it was a project launched on $15 million raised in an ICO, and the road since then has included not just explosive growth but a $40 million hack, a record fine from US authorities, and a prison sentence for its own founder.

Who Founded Binance

Changpeng Zhao, known throughout the industry by his initials CZ, is a Chinese-Canadian entrepreneur. Back in 2005, he founded Fusion Systems in Shanghai, a company that built high-frequency trading systems for brokers. In 2013, he joined crypto wallet Blockchain.info, and in 2014 he became CTO of exchange OKCoin — hired for the role by Yi He, with whom he'd go on to found Binance a few years later.

Yi He's own path into the industry was entirely different: born in 1986 in a village in Sichuan province to a family of schoolteachers, she worked as a television host on a travel show before crypto. She discovered bitcoin in 2013, then left OKCoin in 2015 for a marketing role at a live-streaming app company. In August 2017, she joined CZ to become co-founder and chief marketing officer of Binance, overseeing branding, PR and the exchange's venture capital arm.

Launch and Rapid Rise

Binance was founded in 2017. The project launched with an ICO in July of that year, raising $15 million to build the platform. The ICO issued 200 million BNB tokens, which gave holders a 25% discount on the exchange's trading fees. Within six months of launch, Binance became the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume — and by January 2018, it held the top spot with a $1.3 billion market cap, ahead of rivals like Coinbase.

The rapid growth coincided with tightening regulation in China: in 2017, Chinese authorities began cracking down on crypto trading, and the company moved operations outside mainland China, eventually settling into a model with no single permanent headquarters.

The $40 Million Hack

On May 7, 2019, Binance suffered a major hack: attackers stole more than 7,000 BTC, worth over $40 million at the time — about 2% of the exchange's total bitcoin holdings. The hackers combined phishing, malware and other techniques to obtain user data, including two-factor authentication codes, and drained the exchange's hot wallet in a single large transaction.

Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals for roughly a week while it investigated, affecting around 6 million users. The company said it would cover the losses in full from its own SAFU (Secure Asset Fund for Users) reserve, and no customer suffered a financial loss.

A Technological Leap: Launching BNB Chain

Alongside the exchange's own growth, Binance was also building out its own blockchain infrastructure. In April 2020, the community published a whitepaper for a smart-contract chain designed to run parallel to Binance Chain, and on September 1, 2020, Binance Smart Chain (BSC) officially launched — a chain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine that let developers port over apps from Ethereum with minimal changes, while paying dramatically lower fees. Just over a month after launch, BSC was already handling about 21% of Ethereum's transaction volume while burning through just 0.6% of Ethereum's total gas spend — roughly 35 times cheaper.

In May 2021, amid explosive growth in network usage, BNB hit a new all-time price high. In February 2022, Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain were merged under the unified BNB Chain brand, splitting roles between the governance-focused BNB Beacon Chain and the transaction-executing BNB Smart Chain. By 2026, the network has processed more than 7 billion transactions and supports thousands of decentralized applications across DeFi, gaming, NFTs and the metaverse.

Regulatory Battles Around the World

The 2019 hack wasn't the only crisis in the company's history: alongside its growth, Binance had to weather a whole series of regulatory blows across different markets, often nearly simultaneously.

• June 2021, United Kingdom — regulator FCA banned Binance Markets Limited from conducting any regulated activity in the country or marketing the brand there, citing failures to meet anti-money-laundering requirements. Following the ruling, major banks — Barclays, Nationwide, HSBC and Santander — began blocking transfers to Binance, forcing the exchange to sharply restrict withdrawals for UK users
• June 2021, Ontario, Canada — Binance designated Ontario a "restricted jurisdiction" and fully stopped serving local users amid tightening Canadian regulation of crypto platforms
• 2021, Netherlands, Germany and Italy — Binance announced it was winding down derivatives products in these countries, giving existing users 90 days to close open positions before halting new derivatives sales to local customers entirely

That string of local bans turned out to be a prologue to a far larger confrontation with regulators — this time not individual countries, but US federal authorities.

A Record Settlement With US Authorities

On November 21, 2023, Binance and CZ personally pleaded guilty to federal charges as part of a $4.3 billion settlement with the US Department of Justice — the largest case in the department's history in which a company's guilty plea was accompanied by that of its own sitting CEO. Binance admitted to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, failing to register as a money transmitting business, and violating sanctions law. CZ personally pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program, paid a $50 million personal fine, and stepped down as Binance's CEO.

In April 2024, a court sentenced CZ to four months in prison — significantly lighter than the 36 months prosecutors had requested.

An Unexpected Turn: A Pardon From Trump

On October 23, 2025, US President Donald Trump pardoned CZ — nearly two years after his guilty plea. Trump called the case a Biden administration "witch hunt." The decision followed a months-long lobbying campaign by Binance, and shortly before the pardon, an Emirati-backed investment firm agreed to use the World Liberty stablecoin (a project tied to the Trump family) for a $2 billion investment in Binance itself — raising questions about a conflict of interest.

“Deeply grateful for today's pardon and to President Trump for upholding America's commitment to fairness, innovation, and justice.”

— Changpeng Zhao, post on X, October 23, 2025

Quote source: NPR, October 24, 2025

The reaction was mixed: Senator Elizabeth Warren called the pardon an example of corruption, while the market responded with BNB rallying 15% within hours of the news.

What Makes Binance Stand Out Today

Despite its turbulent history, Binance remains the number-one exchange by key metrics — here's why:

• Liquidity and volume — $34 trillion in trading volume in 2025 and more than 300 million users make Binance the deepest order book in the market
• BNB and fee discounts — BNB holders get a discount on trading fees, and the token itself fuels the BNB Chain ecosystem
• Launchpad and Launchpool — early access to new projects vetted by the Binance team for credibility, plus the ability to farm new tokens by staking BNB or stablecoins
• Binance Earn — a lineup of passive-income products, from flexible savings to fixed-term deposits with higher yields
• A broad range of assets and tools — spot, futures, margin trading, staking, an NFT marketplace, and its own wallet, all within one ecosystem
• The SAFU fund — a reserve for force-majeure events like the 2019 hack, one that has already proven its worth in practice

For more on how the exchange marked its recent anniversary and what its internal culture looks like, see our piece on Binance turning 9.

The Founder's Philosophy: A Few Real Quotes From CZ

CZ rarely gives lengthy interviews about his personal motivations, but in December 2025, at the Bitcoin MENA conference, he opened up about what drives him:

“Fame and legacy, they're not so important to me. I didn't care too much about money.”

— Changpeng Zhao, remarks at Bitcoin MENA, December 9, 2025

Quote source: Benzinga

“When I'm really old and when I look back at my life, I want to be able to tell myself I did my best.”

— Changpeng Zhao, remarks at Bitcoin MENA, December 9, 2025

Quote source: Benzinga

Earlier still, discussing product philosophy, CZ framed business value not through revenue but through usefulness to users:

“I think as long as you keep helping serving more users, then you're giving them value. So I believe a product is valuable when people want to use it. So the more people who wants to use it, even if your revenue is zero, you have value.”

— Changpeng Zhao, All-In interview

Quote source: The Singju Post

Binance Today: Without CZ at the Helm

After CZ's departure, Richard Teng took over as CEO. Then, in December 2025, the leadership structure shifted again: co-founder Yi He, who had formally stayed in the background compared to CZ, officially became co-CEO of Binance alongside Teng. In 2026, under their joint leadership, Binance is doubling down on security, compliance and user education, while continuing to face regulatory pressure — notably, the DOJ warned of a possible cutback in cooperation with the exchange, and Binance itself is rebuilding its Binance.US unit, aiming to reclaim 20% of the US market. Teng has also publicly defended the platform's resilience during sharp market liquidations earlier this year, insisting Binance faced the same market-wide pressures as everyone else, not problems unique to the exchange.

Curtain Call for Europe: Exiting the EU in 2026

The most recent blow landed in the European market. In January 2026, Binance applied for a MiCA (CASP) license with Greece's HCMC regulator but was rejected. Having failed to secure authorization from any other EU country before the June 30, 2026 transition deadline, the exchange announced it would stop serving users with EU registrations starting July 1. Binance wasn't alone in this: of more than 3,000 crypto firms that had previously operated across Europe, only about 210 secured full MiCA authorization by the deadline — roughly 7% of the market — while Coinbase, Kraken, OKX and Crypto.com made the cut. For more on what happened and what EU-registered users should do, see our piece on Binance's EU exit.

What This Means in Practice

Binance's story is a story about how market dominance and legal or reputational risk aren't mutually exclusive: the exchange remains the unquestioned leader in liquidity and product breadth — while also carrying the weight of the largest corporate guilty plea in US history. For users, the practical takeaway is that scale and convenience aren't the same thing as the absence of regulatory risk — and choosing an exchange is worth doing with both sides of that history in mind, not just its current product advantages.

This material is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.