Review Binance (4.3/5)
Business score: 4.6/5
Branding
Binance is one of earliest players in the crypto market and also the biggest and most popular one out there. From the exterior, it can be understood why Binance isn't aggressively marketing their brand on the market but instead they are working on the community, their needs and also haves an awesome program where they pledged $100 million dollars towards enthusiastic, smart and practical teams to build the future of decentralized finance.
Team
Founded by Changpeng Zhao, former member of Blockchain.com (formerly Blockchain.info) and CTO of OKCoin, proves early experience in the industry. Now the CEO of Binance, he has great plans for the future of decentralized finance. With their current 2,800 employees worldwide, they recently also opened around 600 new jobs around the world after a massive employee drop in 2018.
Road Map
Currently they are on track and the Road Map is not as clear as it was before. This is a normal thing as the company haves plenty of years already on the market and have kept their word so far. We know that the main goal is finance decentralisation and we can see that all their moves, services and products lead towards that way.
Technical score: 4/5
Product
They have to many products, services and project to name them here. Their 2 main crypto coins are the Binance Coin (BNB) used a currency and you can pay the fees on their exchange using this coin and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) which operates using "Proof of Staked Authority". They also have the Binance Smart Chain Wallet as a browser extension. In other words, they have all the products you need to ditch the old paper currency out there.
Crypto-Related
Everything that Binance does is related to crypto but their main goal is to decentralise the finance sector which will make it impossible for the government or another institution to print or affect the market. Binance is still the number one place that comes in mind when you want to deal with crypto.
Security
As security comes, there have been a few successful hacks on the Binance exchange in 2019 but I haven't seen any successful hacks since then.
We also take in consideration the legal status and governmental sanctions which are as followed:
March 2018 Japan - Warned by Financial Services Agency for not being registered to do business in Japan
2019 USA - Binance was banned by the United States of America on regulatory basis and Binance responded by oppning Binance.us which acts as a separate exchange and complies to the US laws and registered with United States Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
Binance is still banned in 7 states: Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, New York, Texas, and Vermont
Mai 2021 USA - It was reported by Bloomberg that Binance is under investigation again for money laundering and tax evasion.
June 2021 UK - It was ordered to stop all the regulated activity for not complying with to register with the FCA in order to comply with anti-money laundering rules.
June 2021 Japan - Warned by the FSA again for not being registered to do business in Japan.
July 2021 Thailand - Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission cited Binance for operating without a license and filed a criminal complaint related to the "Emergency Decree on Digital Asset Business B.E. 2561 (2018)"
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