Signing Up for Binance: The Steps That Fail, and How to Get Past Them

Fourth attempt at the passport photo. It is half past eleven, the overhead light is throwing a white bar across the document number, and the app has just said "image unclear" again without saying which part.

Registration on Binance takes about ten minutes. Identity verification is where the evening goes, and it usually fails for reasons that have nothing to do with you looking suspicious — a reflection, a cropped corner, a first name and middle name entered in the order your bank uses rather than the order printed on the document.

Where our money comes from: this site earns referral commission from Binance. That is our income, and you should factor it into how much weight you give our recommendation. Our code is BN68L and the sign-up page is here. Using it costs you nothing extra. Whether you get a fee rebate depends on whether the referrer has enabled commission sharing — check what the sign-up page shows you at the time.

Check that Binance will serve you at all

The international site does not accept US users. US residents need Binance.US, a separate entity with a separate order book and a smaller product range, and it is not available in every state. We get no commission from Binance.US, which is exactly why we can tell you plainly that everything below applies to binance.com and not to that platform.

Binance has withdrawn from Canada and the Netherlands completely. UK and EU customers can use the exchange with restrictions on products, and retail crypto derivatives have been off the table in the UK since the FCA ban took effect in January 2021.

Worth ten minutes on the eligibility questions before you commit to a platform, including what happens to accounts opened through a VPN from a blocked country. Short version: the account works until you try to withdraw.

Type the domain yourself

This is the one step where a mistake costs you money rather than time, which is why it comes before the sign-up form.

The domain is binance.com. Fake versions rank in search results and buy ad slots above the real listing — an extra letter, a different ending, a Unicode character that looks like a normal one at small sizes. The page is a pixel-accurate copy. You enter your email, password and two-factor code, and someone else uses all three within seconds.

Type the address into the bar yourself, then bookmark it and use the bookmark from then on. Do not click sponsored search results. Do not open exchange links people send you, including ours — if you would rather not trust a referral link, type binance.com manually and find the sign-up page yourself. The account works the same way.

Register, then spend five more minutes on security

The form wants an email address or phone number, a verification code and a password. Use an email you will still control in three years; recovery and withdrawal confirmations run through it, and a disposable address becomes a disaster on the day you need to get back in.

Then, before you deposit anything, do these three things in one sitting.

Turn on two-factor authentication with an authenticator app rather than SMS. SMS codes can be intercepted through SIM-swap and port-out fraud, where someone talks your mobile carrier into moving your number to their device. Most US, UK and Australian carriers will set a port-out PIN on request; that call is worth making. An authenticator app generates codes on the device itself and ignores your phone number entirely.

When you set it up, the app shows a recovery key. Write it on paper and store it somewhere separate from your phone. Lose the phone without that key and you are in a long identity-recovery process instead of a two-minute reset.

Set the anti-phishing code. It is buried in security settings and frequently skipped, and it kills an entire category of attack: once enabled, every genuine email from Binance carries the string you chose. Mail without it is fake, and you know that at a glance instead of after five minutes of squinting at the sender address.

Get through verification on the first try

Verification means photographing an identity document and completing a short face scan. Most rejections are photography problems.

Lay the document flat on a dark, plain surface rather than holding it. Turn the flash off and use side light or a desk lamp, so there is no glare band across the printed fields. Keep all four corners inside the frame — cropping an edge to make the text bigger is a guaranteed rejection. Type names exactly as printed, in the printed order, and check the document number character by character.

If the photos keep bouncing, change the room rather than the technique; morning window light solves more of these than any camera setting. A passport often clears when a national ID card will not.

If the face scan is the part failing, take off glasses, hat and anything covering the face, stand against a plain wall, and put the light on your face rather than behind you. Backlighting is the single most common cause. Wipe the front camera; a smear of oil is enough to fail an edge-detection check.

If the review has been sitting for longer than the official page says it should, open a ticket through the support entry inside the app, with your submission time and account email. Support will never message you first. Anyone who direct-messages you offering to speed up your review is running one of the oldest scripts in this market.

Verification comes in levels, and higher levels raise deposit and withdrawal limits. The thresholds change with regulatory requirements, so the numbers that count are the ones on your own account page, not the ones in any article — this one included.

Fund it, then make one small round trip

Bank transfer is the cheap route in most English-speaking markets: ACH, Faster Payments, SEPA. It takes longer to clear the first time and usually costs little or nothing from the exchange side. Card deposits land instantly and carry a processing fee that dwarfs the trading fee. The confirmation screen quotes that number before you commit; read it.

Then run a complete loop with an amount you would not mind losing: deposit, buy, sell, withdraw to your bank. Half an hour and a few dollars, and it answers the question people panic about later, which is whether money comes back out.

Buy spot, not futures. Spot means you hold what you bought and nothing gets liquidated. A market order fills right away at whatever the book gives you; a limit order waits at your price. For a large, liquid coin a market order is fine.

Binance's base spot fee is 0.100% for both maker and taker orders, and holding BNB with the fee discount switched on takes 25% off, which works out to 0.075%. That switch is off by default and people trade for months without noticing. Those were the published rates in September 2026, and the fee schedule changes, so read the current fee page. The visible fee is also not the whole bill.

The first hour after the account is live

Not buying. Three settings, then stop.

Turn on the withdrawal address whitelist, so funds can only leave to addresses you added in advance. Even with your password and codes, an attacker cannot send coins anywhere else. It is the highest-value setting on the page.

Confirm the two-factor recovery key is written down somewhere physical. Confirm the anti-phishing code is set and that you remember what you chose.

And start a record of every transaction from the first one — date, amount, price, fee. Your local tax authority may treat sales and swaps as reportable, and the rules vary by country; look up what yours publishes rather than trusting a forum. Reconstructing a year of trades afterwards is unpleasant.

An open, verified, funded account is not a signal to start trading. It is permission to practise with small amounts until none of the steps require thought. What to buy and when is not something we answer.

• The OKX sign-up flow, for comparison —— phone plus email, and app-only verification