Binance was once a place where Americans could easily access a huge pool of altcoins with decent exchange features. It let people hunt for diamond-in-the-rough altcoins with big upside — and, just as often, took large amounts of money out of their hands. That dynamic ultimately led Binance to block U.S. users and require proof of residency. In September 2019, a Binance representative announced that a U.S.-friendly exchange, Binance.US, would launch in the coming weeks.
Binance.US looks like a second Coinbase
People get excited when a coin is listed on Coinbase because of its wide reach and deliberately limited selection. At the time, only 16 projects had met the Coinbase Digital Asset Framework requirements, compared with Binance's 100-plus global listings.
To win favor with U.S. regulators, Binance started to look a lot like Coinbase. The team announced 30 crypto assets it was "exploring" for Binance.US in August 2019. Coming from the hundreds of coins Binance embraced globally, that narrow selection was a shock to longtime fans.
Of the 30 assets being explored, 17 were not listed on Coinbase. That mattered because Binance's biggest differentiator had always been access to as many coins as possible — a big reason it became one of the fastest-growing exchanges. Now the very thing that made it stand out was being taken away from U.S. users. Coinbase, meanwhile, had spent years building trust around a small, carefully chosen list. Among the top 10 coins by market cap, the only one on Binance that was not on Coinbase was Binance's own BNB.
How the exchange differed from Coinbase
Binance had always been friendlier to users without much money, giving them access to cheap coins during a period when many unknown projects spiked 1,000% or more. This appealed to users who could not buy a whole Bitcoin but believed other coins had similar upside.
On fees, Binance was consistently cheaper. Maker/taker fees on Coinbase Pro sat at 0.15%, while Binance defaulted to 0.1%. That gap looks small, but it cuts into the margins of anyone scalping price — and holding BNB reduced Binance fees by a further 25%.
Otherwise, Coinbase Pro and Binance both offered limit orders, stop-loss orders, and an order book. Binance benefited from additional indicators, drawing tools, and TradingView-linked charts, though many traders chart directly on TradingView anyway. Binance also had full-featured desktop and mobile apps, whereas the standard Coinbase app did not include Coinbase Pro's features.
Will Binance win over U.S. traders?
Binance.US was clearly a defensive launch. However confident CZ sounded, U.S. traders had been a major demographic, and these users now had less access to the exchange's once-appealing features while also having to comply with KYC.
Success largely depended on whether the extra coins and slightly lower fees were worth leaving Coinbase Pro for. If another altcoin season arrived, traders would move over to chase it — but those windows are historically short-lived.
At the time, Coinbase and BitMEX were the big winners in the exchange space: Coinbase trusted and compliant, BitMEX offering high leverage with low fees and no KYC. In the U.S., the best Binance could offer was a small fee discount and a capable mobile app. For a deeper look at the leverage side of that trade-off, see our comparison of DEX margin trading versus BitMEX.