No source in this evidence set shows Binance and Coinbase holding equivalent, currently-verified registrations in the same countries. The clearest documented facts are that Binance pleaded gu
No source in this evidence set shows Binance and Coinbase holding equivalent, currently-verified registrations in the same countries. The clearest documented facts are that Binance pleaded guilty to US charges and paid a $4.3 billion penalty in November 2023, and that Coinbase is a Nasdaq-listed public company. Beyond that, the license claims that circulate in exchange comparison tables — a Luxembourg MiCA license for Coinbase, a French MiCA license for Binance, an outright ban on Binance in four named countries — trace in this evidence to a single support-page article, not to a regulator’s own filing or register.
Binance pleaded guilty to US criminal charges over failures to put in place anti-money-laundering protections, according to DL News, reporting on 27 November 2023. Under the settlement, Binance agreed to pay $4.3 billion in penalties and submit to what DL News described as an intensive three-year monitoring programme, and founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao resigned. A different outlet in this evidence, eco.com, describes the same November 2023 settlement but says Binance is now under a five-year compliance monitorship — the two accounts disagree on the length of the monitoring period, and neither is a primary document such as the settlement agreement itself.
DL News also reported, on 27 November 2023, that Binance had no board of directors or headquarters listed in any nation, and that at its peak the exchange held 60% of the world’s crypto trading volume, a share DL News said had fallen to about 43% by the time of its report. Coinbase, by contrast, took what DL News called a compliant path from its 2012 founding onward — registering for state licences, limiting the tokens it listed, and going public in 2021. Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong wrote on X, as quoted by DL News, that going public meant Coinbase “couldn’t always move as quickly as others.” Armstrong also said, per DL News’s report, that “it’s more difficult and expensive to take a compliant approach. You can’t launch every product that customers want when it’s illegal.” DL News does not specify where or in what context that second remark was made. XReg Consulting managing director Aaron Unterman told DL News that Binance’s settlement created what he called “a good scenario” for compliant competitors, though he said it had for a long time been a competitive disadvantage.
Datawallet, in an article last updated 27 March 2026 that it describes as reflecting a full editorial audit, states that Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam and went public on Nasdaq under ticker COIN in April 2021, and that Binance launched in 2017, founded by Zhao and Yi He.
The European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, MiCA, requires a crypto firm to secure authorization from a regulator in one member state before it can “passport” services across all 27 countries in the bloc, according to IBTimes, reporting on 16 June 2026. The transitional period under MiCA ended on 1 July 2026, according to Bitcoin Foundation, reporting on 3 July 2026, after which unlicensed platforms were required to close to EU customers.
IBTimes reported on 16 June 2026, citing Reuters, that Binance’s bid for a license from Greece’s Hellenic Capital Market Commission was headed for rejection, according to two unnamed people Reuters said were familiar with the matter. Binance had set up a local entity, Binary Greece, and picked the country as its EU regulatory base earlier in the year, per the Reuters reporting relayed by IBTimes. The Greek regulator’s representative declined to comment, citing confidentiality rules, and Binance said — according to the report cited by IBTimes — that it had not received a formal rejection and remained engaged with regulators during the licensing process. IBTimes also reported, citing public data from CoinMarketCap, that Greece had not issued any MiCA licenses to any crypto firm when Binance submitted its application, while Germany and the Netherlands had issued significantly more authorizations.
Bitcoin Foundation, reporting on 3 July 2026, said Binance’s Greek license application was withdrawn once it became clear it would not be approved in time, and that Binance subsequently suspended new registration, spot trading in affected countries, some deposits, and Earn and staking products for EU users, while withdrawals remained available. Bitcoin Foundation said Binance’s most developed regulatory hub is now in the United Arab Emirates, and that the exchange’s global user base — more than 300 million as of August 2023, per Binance’s own disclosure cited by Bitcoin Foundation — means the loss of EU access was not expected to be a major financial blow. Bitcoin Foundation also said Binance does not publicly disclose a country-by-country breakdown of its EU user base or the share of its trading volume that came from Europe, so the actual size of what was lost cannot be quantified from this evidence.
This is the point at which the evidence splits into two tiers. Newsroom reporting — DL News, IBTimes, Bitcoin Foundation — describes a contested, unresolved licensing process in one specific country, Greece, as the deadline approached. Separately, eco.com, in a support-page comparison article, states flatly that Coinbase “received MiCA authorization in Luxembourg in 2025” and that Binance “did obtain a MiCA license through its French subsidiary in 2025.” Eco.com’s own comparison table also states that Binance is “banned or operating without license” in the UK, the Netherlands, Canada (Ontario), and Nigeria.
Eco.com’s article carries no verifiable publication date in the evidence gathered for this piece. The page itself says only that it was “Updated over 2 weeks ago,” with no absolute date given anywhere on it, and no publication date could be established independently. That makes it impossible to say how recent — or how stale — its licensing claims were relative to the mid-2026 Reuters reporting on Binance’s Greek application, or whether the two accounts are even describing the same period.
None of eco.com’s specific claims — the Luxembourg license, the French subsidiary license, or the four-country ban list — appears in any other source in this evidence. No regulator statement, filing, or register entry backs them here. The claim that Binance holds a French MiCA license sits awkwardly against IBTimes’s and Bitcoin Foundation’s contemporaneous reporting that Binance’s EU-wide passporting strategy in mid-2026 ran through a Greek application that was expected to fail and was then withdrawn — if a French license already existed and covered EU-wide passporting, the Greek bid would be redundant, and none of the sources gathered here explains that apparent contradiction.
A separate comparison site, BitDegree, last updated 2 June 2026, states in its own table that Coinbase is “fully authorized in the EU under MiCA” without naming a member state, a licensing date, or a source, and that Binance.US — a legally distinct entity from Binance’s global exchange, according to both BitDegree and eco.com — is registered with FinCEN and holds money transmitter licenses in most US states, but is unavailable in New York, Texas and Washington, among others, according to BitDegree.
The unreliability isn’t limited to licensing claims. Datawallet’s own article, in body text, puts Coinbase’s user base at roughly 140 million verified users as of 2026, but its side-by-side comparison table in the same article lists Coinbase’s user base as 120,000,000. The same article’s body text says Binance surpassed 310 million registered users by early 2026, while its table lists 300,000,000. BitDegree, in a table last updated 2 June 2026, gives a different pair of figures again: 670K active users for Binance.US and 100M+ for Coinbase — figures that aren’t measuring the same thing as Datawallet’s, since one is Binance.US specifically and the other is Binance’s global platform. None of these figures are dated to a disclosure by the exchanges themselves; all are secondhand estimates from comparison sites.
This page cannot state, with confidence, which countries currently license either exchange to operate. That would require checking primary sources — national regulators’ own license registers, and the exchanges’ own regulatory filings — none of which was in the evidence gathered for this piece. Every licensing claim above traces to a news article or a comparison site’s own table, not to a regulator’s register itself.
The evidence does not resolve whether Binance holds a French MiCA license, as eco.com states, or whether that claim is simply wrong or outdated given the contemporaneous Greek-application reporting from Reuters and IBTimes. It does not say which EU countries, if any, restored Binance access after the July 2026 suspension, since Bitcoin Foundation reported that country-level detail was not disclosed. It does not give a verified figure for how much of Binance’s trading volume or user base came from the EU, since Bitcoin Foundation and Datawallet both note that breakdown isn’t published. And it should not be read as confirming eco.com’s claim that Binance is banned in the UK, Netherlands, Canada or Nigeria — that claim appears in one source only, carries no confirmed publication date, and has no corroboration here.
Finally, the user-count and asset-count figures cited by BitDegree, Datawallet and eco.com are self-reported or estimated by those sites, are undated beyond a loose reference to “2026” or, in eco.com’s case, no absolute date at all, and in at least two cases contradict themselves within the same article. They are included here as attributed claims, not as verified facts.
Every fact above is attributed to one of these reports. Where they disagree, the article says so.
The post Binance vs Coinbase: why ‘what each is registered to do, by country’ has no verified answer appeared first on TheCoinrise.com.
