On 25 June 2021 the Japanese financial regulator sent a warning letter to Binance Holdings Limited. At the top of a letter like that sits the address of the addressee. The Japanese filled in one word: 不明. Unknown.
The address: unknown
It is a small detail in a formal document, and it is the sharpest piece of evidence from eight years of Binance.
A regulator of one of the largest economies in the world wants to warn a company that is serving its citizens without a licence. He knows who the director is: Changpeng Zhao. He knows what the company does. He just does not know where it is — and after three years of looking, he simply writes that down.
Three years earlier, in March 2018, that same regulator had already sent a warning. Back then there was an address on it: Hong Kong. In the meantime Binance had moved. Several times.
This part is about that journey. And about why it ended, in the summer of 2026, at a closed door.
The tour
The route can be reconstructed from official documents, country by country.
2017 — China and Hong Kong. Binance starts up, registered in Hong Kong, team in Shanghai. In September China bans crypto trading. Binance leaves.
March 2018 — Japan warns, Malta beckons. Straight after the Japanese warning, Binance announces a move to Malta. The Maltese prime minister welcomes the company publicly. Zhao, two months later: “Malta’s government works on blockchain initiatives on Saturdays. Does yours?”
October 2019 — Malta quietly abandoned. Binance informs the Maltese authorities that it is no longer pursuing a licence. The head of European operations leaves without a successor.
21 February 2020 — Malta makes it public. The Maltese regulator publishes a statement: “Binance is not authorised by the MFSA to operate in the cryptocurrency sphere and is therefore not subject to regulatory oversight by the MFSA.”
Zhao responded that same day on X. His choice of words has been preserved.
There is a mix of truth, FUD & misconception. [Binance] is not headquartered or operated in Malta. This is old news & has always been the case.Changpeng Zhao, 21 February 2020, after Malta had declared that it did not supervise Binance.
“Where is the bitcoin office?”
In May 2020, three months after the Maltese statement, Zhao sat down for an interview at the Ethereal Summit. The interviewer asked where Binance was actually based now.
His answer became the most quoted sentence in the whole affair:
He built a principle around it. “That’s the beauty of the blockchain, right — you don’t need to… like, where’s the bitcoin office? Because bitcoin doesn’t have an office.” And on his own location: “I prefer not to say that. That’s my privacy.”
A year later, asked the same thing, he moved the discussion to the definition: “Everybody’s definition of a headquarters is slightly different. If you ask how you define a headquarters — is it an office where people sit?”
Meanwhile the statements kept coming in. On 1 July 2021 the regulator of the Cayman Islands — where Binance Holdings Limited is formally registered — published a statement that Binance was not registered, licensed or regulated there to operate an exchange. In September Singapore came with a warning; in December Binance withdrew its licence application there.
Wherever I sit, is going to be the Binance office. Wherever I need somebody, is going to be the Binance office.Changpeng Zhao, Ethereal Summit, 8 May 2020.
What ‘not targeting the Netherlands’ looked like in practice
In the Netherlands a registration requirement for crypto service providers applied from 21 May 2020. Binance did not register, but simply carried on serving Dutch customers.
How targeted that was is set out in the penalty decision of De Nederlandsche Bank. Indications listed: a Dutch-language website, offering iDEAL as a payment method, and a Dutch-language newsletter.
And then the detail you only have to read once to get it. The decision notes that the language option on the website was later changed — to “Flemish”.
Same language. Different flag.
DNB warned publicly in August 2021 and on 25 April 2022 imposed a fine of €3,325,000. Aggravating, according to the decision: Binance is the largest crypto service provider in the world, had very many Dutch customers, did not contribute to the costs of supervision and had been in breach “for a very long time”. Binance filed an objection and withdrew it two months later.
On 16 June 2023 the company announced its departure from the Netherlands. Its own statement is almost offhand: despite having explored “many alternative avenues”, this had “not resulted in a VASP registration in the Netherlands at this time”. From 17 July 2023 Dutch users could only withdraw.
“Not capable of being effectively supervised”
The United Kingdom was there earlier, and sharper.
On 25 June 2021 the British regulator FCA imposed a series of requirements on Binance Markets Limited. The company was barred from carrying out regulated activities, had to state on its own website within five days that it was not permitted to do anything regulated in the UK, and had to remove all advertising.
The reasoning is the hardest sentence any regulator has written down in this file: on the basis of its contacts up to that point, the FCA considered the company “not capable of being effectively supervised”. The reason: incomplete answers to information requests, and a refusal to explain how the company was organised and how its products reached British consumers.
The British registration application from 2020 never led to registration. In May 2023 the remaining permissions were cancelled at the company’s own request. In October 2023 Binance stopped accepting new British customers.
Today the British site of Binance carries a sentence that sums it up: neither the company nor the investments are regulated by the FCA, and customers are not covered by the British compensation scheme. The regulated entities the company does name are in Abu Dhabi.
The maze was the point
In March 2023 the American derivatives regulator CFTC put on record what had grown up over eight years. The formulations leave nothing to the imagination.
On Zhao’s statements: that the headquarters is wherever he happens to be, “reflecting a deliberate approach to attempt to avoid regulation”. On the structure: the use of a maze of corporate entities was “deliberate; it is designed to obscure the ownership, control, and location of the Binance platform”.
And then the sentence you could almost not invent. The CFTC wrote that Binance was so effective at concealing its own location and the identity of its own entities that it had thereby confused even its own Chief Strategy Officer.
Internally, according to the complaint, a goal had also been formulated: keeping countries “clean” of violations by “not landing .com anywhere” — letting the main platform land nowhere.
And then the company did want in
That is the context in which you have to read the summer of 2026.
With MiCA, Europe had done exactly what the industry had been asking for for years: one set of rules, in all twenty-seven member states, with a licence that is valid everywhere. Thirteen big names got it, from eToro to Backpack. Bitvavo, Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp, Bybit, Crypto.com — all in.
Binance filed an application with the Greek regulator on 23 January 2026. A Greek holding company appeared; Greece was to become the European headquarters. In its own statement the company called MiCA “a positive and important milestone for the industry”.
Five months later, on 24 June 2026, it withdrew the application. Six days before the deadline.
No rejection has ever been published. Not by the Greek regulator, not by ESMA, not by anyone. What there is, is two readings. Binance says the Greeks considered the application compliant and wanted to push it through. The Wall Street Journal reported on 5 July that ESMA had privately advised national regulators to block the application, over concerns about compliance with financial crime rules and the company’s past.
As of 1 July 2026 EU users can no longer buy, deposit or stake. Only withdraw.
What we are not going to write
Around that Greek application, stories are circulating about political pressure at the highest level. We checked them, and the result is worth writing down.
The version you hear most often — that Ursula von der Leyen personally put pressure on a Greek minister — has zero sources no source. Not one publication, no anonymous source, nothing. It looks like a garbled version of something else.
Because there is a story along those lines, and it is about someone else. One publication reported in June 2026, on anonymous sources only, that ECB president Christine Lagarde had let it be known at a meeting with the Greek prime minister that Binance was not welcome in Europe. The ECB, ESMA, the Greek and the French regulator none of them responded. No confirmation, no denial.
That is too thin to publish as fact. The WSJ reporting on ESMA is better founded, but it too rests on sources without a name. We call both what they are: journalistic claims, not established facts.
The nice thing is that for the conclusion it does not matter. Whether ESMA advised or not: the company had eight years to pick an address somewhere, and each time chose not to.
Old-fashioned
And the most remarkable bit is still to come.
In December 2025 Binance finally received licences from the financial regulator of Abu Dhabi, for three entities. The global platform has been regulated from there ever since. That is, after eight years, the closest thing to an acknowledged home base the company has ever given.
But even then Binance refused to use the word. A spokesperson, literally: “An HQ is a physical or symbolic concept that doesn’t fully capture how Binance operates. It feels a bit old-fashioned to us.”
A head office feels old-fashioned.
In December 2024 Richard Teng had still said that no decision had been taken on the location. As of August 2026 there is still no acknowledged global headquarters.
The bill for eight years
Line up the list. Japan: two warnings, address unknown. Malta: no supervision. Cayman Islands: not registered. Singapore: warning, application withdrawn. United Kingdom: not capable of being effectively supervised. Germany: application withdrawn. Netherlands: fine, departure. France: registration obtained, criminal investigation ongoing. United States: guilty plea, 4.3 billion. Canada, India: fines. Nigeria: a claim of 81.5 billion that is still running.
And then Europe, where the rules were finally the same everywhere and the deadline had been known for two years.
That is the point we keep coming back to in this series. It is not about one misstep. It is about a company that made one choice — not going where the questions get asked — and kept it up for eight years.
For you as a trader the translation is simple. A licence does not mean an exchange is good. A licence means someone has had to answer the questions: who is the owner, who sits on the board, where is the money held, who audits the books. And that a regulator found the answers good enough.
The largest exchange in the world managed to dodge those questions for eight years. In July 2026 that was, in Europe at least, no longer enough for the first time.
What is settled and what is not
Settled, from official documents: the Japanese warnings of 2018 and 2021 (including the address field), the Maltese statement of February 2020, the Cayman Islands statement of July 2021, the FCA notice of June 2021 with the wording about effective supervision, the DNB penalty decision with the Dutch-language site, iDEAL and the change to “Flemish”, the CFTC complaint, and the fact that Binance itself withdrew the Greek MiCA application on 24 June 2026.
Not settled unconfirmed: why the Greek application was not completed. No decision was ever published. The reporting about private advice from ESMA comes from one newspaper and anonymous sources. The story about political pressure from the ECB comes from one publication, also anonymous. And the Von der Leyen story has no source at all.
The quotes from Zhao come from recorded interviews and reporting on them; the quotes from the CFTC complaint are allegations in a civil case, which Binance settled with a consent order in December 2023.
Sources
Official documents: the Japanese FSA warnings of 23 March 2018 and 25 June 2021; the MFSA statement of 21 February 2020; the statement from the Cayman Islands; the FCA First Supervisory Notice of 25 June 2021 and the accompanying warning; the DNB penalty decision of 25 April 2022; the CFTC complaint of 27 March 2023; the ESMA statement of 23 June 2026; and the French PSAN registration. Plus reporting by CoinDesk, Decrypt, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and Cointelegraph, and Binance’s own statements. Current as of 1 August 2026.