Update June 16, 2021:

Binance is currently under intense scrutiny from multiple regulators around the world. Potential users are cautioned to consider the risk that the exchange may cease operations in your country.

According to CNBC, Binance was banned from operating in the UK, effective June 30, 2021.

On July 2, The Block reported that following the UK ban, the Cayman Islands was investigating Binance's activities in their country.

On July 13, Coindesk reported that Binance had halted sterling withdrawals, following Faster Payments ending their agreement with the exchange in response to the UK ban.

On July 15, Coindesk shared the news that Italian regulators were saying the exchange was not authorized to provide investment services in Italy.

Keep all of these recent developments in mind when reading the below review.

Binance is probably the world's most important crypto exchange today. Following its successful ICO in 2017 and subsequent launch, it seems to have made all the right moves to position itself as "the native crypto-trader's exchange", which is to say that most people choose Binance for their trading or investing activities over practically all other exchanges. It consistently reigns as the volume champion, boasting trade volume numbers all other exchanges can only dream of - and these volumes are believed to be mostly genuine, which means the exchange does not manipulate numbers for higher rankings like other shady exchanges do - it simply doesn't have to.

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We'll take a look at what makes Binance so attractive, and the reason it ranked as high as it did on our rating system. One important thing to note: no exchange is perfect.

Starting with the User Experience, Binance has managed to create a seamless experience from its launch, and is continuing down this path these days as it redesigns the entire website and incrementally allows more users to test out the new interface. We believe Binance's workflows are indeed among the best in the industry, and it easily gains a high score in this category.
The only downside to Binance's user experience is its customer support: When we contacted them, requesting information about their team, we received the reply: "CZ is the team". This is a bit concerning, and we will further expand on it when we reach the Team score.

Binance's performance is as good as it has to be: for an exchange that supports millions of users and a mind-boggling amount of transactions each second, Binance has built adequate infrastructure to support it all, and it is holding up surprisingly well when you take into account the immense loads put upon it. True, theses systems are not without their faults, and we have seen some cases of Binance going under unplanned maintenance, although it has always explained the reasons for that after-the-fact and are improving from incident to incident; as a leading corporation should.

On the features front, Binance's twin champions are its immense amount of assets available to trade and its trading incentives, the first is maintained using the exchange's constantly shifting regulatory status, which allows it close to full autonomy when choosing which assets to list, and the second is the winning combination of its token, BNB, and trading competitions and promotions, which make use of newly listed assets, the token BNB and other mechanisms to promote user trading on the platform. Binance also recently introduced margin trading, although it is currently far from being intuitive, with difficult to understand funding mechanisms, insufficient support documentation and no ability to lend funds, only borrow.
Other exchanges frequently copy Binance's moves since they proved themselves so effective in growing the exchange, and we don't see these stopping anytime soon.

Another notable feature of Binance is its recently launched Binance Chain, a blockchain-based platform with Smart Contracts capability, which welcomed the exchange's token BNB in open arms as its native currency. Binance have started to heavily promote the platform and offer fat bribes to projects as incentive for migrating their activities from other platforms over to Binance Chain, and Ethereum is among the platforms from which most projects are being solicited.
The rising of Binance Chain has also introduced the Binance DEX, a self-proclaimed Decentralized Exchange, although in practice it is not at all decentralized, but merely an exchange in which user self-custody their assets, using software and platforms provided by the company Binance.

The Binance team is, contrary to most criteria in this rating, hard to find. The company's CEO, Changpeng Zhao, or CZ in short, is among the most outspoken businesspeople in the crypto industry, and has built a very positive public image and a significant following on social media. However, as talented as CZ may be (and trust us, he is an excellent businessman), he is not running the exchange alone: we estimate the number of employees of Binance to exceed 200 people worldwide, and it is quickly growing.
This magnitude of a company requires more than a single qualified person to manage and lead, but so far we haven't had luck in understanding who are the key members of Binance's team - you could say aside from CZ, most of the team is deliberately staying in the shadows.
In our perception, an exchange of such magnitude also carries a responsibility to the public in terms of transparency standards, and we do not accept the current situation. We believe, at the very least, Binance should construct a Team page to display on their site, with prominent members' pictures and brief career descriptions.
We at Cointelligence have reached out to Binance multiple times to attempt to cooperate on the matter for the benefit of both our userbases, but have received no answers. It appears they are a bit too busy coming up with new ideas for trading competitions.

Finally, Binance's Trust score is a bit above average. While the exchange certainly does its best to safeguard user funds, sometimes its best is simply not enough: In early May 2019 it has hacked for 7000 BTC, around $40M at the time. All customers who lost funds were fully reimbursed by Binance's self-managed insurance fund maintained specifically for such an event.
Even though in the end the only one punished for the hack was Binance itself, it is a reminder the the biggest exchanges in the industry also carry a much bigger "bullseye" on their back than other, less-significant exchanges, and it is better to assume attackers are constantly looking for new ways to gain access to the incredible amounts of funds deposited in Binance. The exchange does keep much of the users' funds in cold storage and provides several means for users to protect their accounts.

However, Binance will forever be followed by a dark cloud, threatening its continued operations - or at least until it chooses to settle down. We are talking about the company's refusal to give up one distinctive feature: no KYC or identification for users, up to a daily withdrawal limit of 2 BTC. The fact that the exchange will simply not give up this feature has got it into regulatory trouble in multiple jurisdictions during its short lifespan, but the exchange dealt with it in the best way they saw fit: to leverage their ability and power to create what the industry now calls "regulatory arbitrage", meaning Binance's ability to position itself in several jurisdictions around the globe, at every point in time serving its current interest. Most notably, after receiving scrutiny by Japanese authorities while it was based in Singapore, the exchange has since settled in Malta, a country known for its desire to attract foreign businesses in order to generate tax revenue. It is safe to assume Binance will not easily give up this status quo they value so much (and apparently, the rest of the market does too), and will go to extreme lengths to preserve this situation.

To conclude, Binance is without a doubt one of the most important crypto exchanges in the world today, and we don't see this situation changing anytime soon. It always strives to provide its customers with the best service in the business, the most freedom within the walls of a centralized exchange, and a unique, seemingly regulatory-sterile environment to do whatever you please with your money (most choose to invest in wild altcoins). Binance does most of these things right, and had much luck and a head-start at doing so, and is now focused on maintaining its status as the world's leading altcoin exchange. Time will tell how and if Binance can preserve the current situation, but we are betting their strategy is to eventually convert the company from corporate to a true decentralized community, a DAO, if you will, and break free from current legal definitions. This, however, is a topic for another discussion, and right now Binance remains one of the best options for crypto traders today.

Session 7: Valuation Of Assets For Tokenization, Pricing and Secondary Market