The world’s largest crypto exchange will suspend services for European Union users from July 1 after failing to secure a license under Europe’s new crypto rules. The headlines say Binance is leaving Europe. The reality is more precise, and more revealing: it was locked out, and the reason was not its paperwork but its past.
Summary
- From July 1, 2026, Binance will suspend most services for European Union residents, halting new orders, deposits, sign-ups, and staking products, after failing to obtain a license under the EU’s MiCA regulation by the June 30 deadline.
- This is a suspension, not a permanent exit: user funds remain safe and withdrawable, and Binance says it intends to secure an EU license and return in the coming months.
- Binance bet on Greece as its entry point, but on June 24, it withdrew its application one week after reports that the Greek regulator was preparing to reject it.
- The rejection reportedly turned on Binance’s past, not its paperwork, in particular its history of penalties and whether co-founder Changpeng Zhao could pass MiCA’s “fit and proper” test for owners and managers.
- The episode shows MiCA has teeth: of more than 3,000 crypto firms in Europe, only around 210 secured authorization, with rivals like Coinbase, Kraken, and OKX passing, while the largest exchange in the world was shut out.
On June 24, an email from Binance landed in the inboxes of millions of European users, and within hours, it had set off a wave of alarm across the continent’s crypto community. The message was blunt: starting July 1, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange would suspend much of its service for anyone residing in the European Union. The headlines that followed were predictably dramatic, declaring that Binance was shutting down in Europe, abandoning the region, or being expelled from the bloc.
The reality is both narrower and more revealing than any of those framings. Binance is not collapsing, it is not seizing anyone’s money, and it is not, in its own telling, permanently leaving Europe. What actually happened is that Binance failed to obtain the license it needed under the European Union’s new crypto regulation before a hard deadline, and as a result, it is being locked out of the EU market until it can secure that license somewhere else.
The distinction matters because the panic-inducing version of the story obscures both what users should actually do and the far more interesting question of why the largest exchange on earth could not get a license that its smaller rivals managed to obtain.
This piece lays out what actually happened, what changes and what does not, and what the episode reveals about the new rules now governing crypto in Europe.
The story is worth understanding precisely because it is a milestone, the moment when Europe’s comprehensive crypto framework showed that it would apply to everyone, including the biggest player in the industry, with no exceptions for size or market share. It is also a story with a specific and somewhat surprising cause, one that has less to do with Binance’s compliance systems or its application paperwork and more to do with the legal history of the company and its founder.
To make sense of it, this piece works through the precise facts of the suspension, the practical reality for users whose first instinct was to panic, the MiCA regulation and the deadline that forced the situation, the Greek gateway that collapsed, the deeper reason the application failed, Binance’s own account of events, the rivals who succeeded where it did not, the path Binance is now pursuing, and what the whole affair means for the future of crypto in Europe. The aim throughout is accuracy over drama, because the drama, while real, has obscured what is genuinely going on.
What actually happened
Strip away the alarmist framing, and the sequence of events is clear. Binance needed a license to operate legally in the European Union under a regulation called MiCA, the bloc’s new crypto framework, and the deadline to have that license was the end of June. Binance had pursued the license through Greece, filing its application there in January, but the process stalled, and in mid-June, reports emerged that the Greek regulator was preparing to reject the application.
Facing a likely formal rejection, Binance made a strategic choice on June 24: rather than wait to be formally refused, it withdrew its Greek application altogether, framing the move as a prudent decision to pursue authorization in another EU member state instead. Because withdrawing the application meant Binance would not hold a MiCA license by the June 30 deadline, it was obligated to stop offering regulated services to EU residents from July 1, and so it emailed its European users to tell them exactly that.
The crucial point that the dramatic headlines missed is what this suspension is and is not. It is a halt to Binance’s ability to offer new regulated services to EU residents, triggered by the absence of a license. It is not a shutdown of the company, a seizure of user assets, or, in Binance’s framing, a permanent departure from Europe.
Binance has stated clearly that it intends to remain in the European market, that it will seek a license through another member state, and that it expects to secure authorization in the coming months.
So the accurate description of what happened is this: Binance, unable to get the license it needed in time and facing a probable rejection in Greece, withdrew its application and is now suspending EU services until it can obtain a license elsewhere, while assuring users their funds are safe.
That is a serious setback and a significant moment for the industry, but it is a regulatory lockout with a stated path back, not the collapse or expulsion the headlines suggested.
What changes on July 1, and what does not
For the millions of European users who received that email, the most urgent question is intensely practical: what happens to their accounts and their money? Here, the gap between the panic and the reality is widest, and it is worth being precise, because the distinction between what stops and what continues determines what users should actually do.
What stops on July 1 is the set of active, regulated services that require a license. Binance will halt new spot trading orders for EU residents, stop accepting new deposits, end new sign-ups and onboarding, and suspend its yield-generating products such as staking and the various Earn offerings.
In effect, the ability to put new money in and to actively trade or earn on the platform as an EU resident comes to an end, because those are precisely the regulated activities MiCA requires a license to provide.
What does not change is just as important. User funds remain safe and accessible, and withdrawals stay active, which means no one’s assets are being seized, frozen, or automatically lost.
The orderly wind-down that EU rules require an exiting platform to provide is designed to guarantee exactly this: that users retain access to their assets and can move them elsewhere. Binance has said it is not instructing customers to remove their funds by a specific date and that user assets remain secure. To allow an orderly exit, it keeps certain features available in a limited form, such as a conversion function that can be used to sell positions so users can wind down in an orderly way.
The practical guidance that follows from this is the opposite of panic: EU users have time, their money is accessible, and the sensible course is to withdraw funds to another licensed platform or a self-custody wallet in an unhurried way, while being especially alert to scammers who exploit exactly this kind of confusion.
Binance has also said it will contact affected users directly with steps specific to their account and country, and that it will never call them by phone or ask for passwords or security codes, a warning worth heeding because moments of regulatory upheaval are prime opportunities for fraud.
The headline made it sound like an emergency. The reality is a wind-down with the safety nets that the regulation requires.
MiCA, and the deadline that forced this
To understand why any of this happened, you have to understand the regulation at the center of it, because the Binance situation is a direct consequence of a deliberate European policy choice.
MiCA, which stands for Markets in Crypto-Assets, is the European Union’s comprehensive framework for regulating crypto, designed to replace the patchwork of differing national rules that previously governed the industry across the bloc’s member states.
Before MiCA, a crypto company could operate in Europe by registering under the individual rules of various countries, and global operators often moved through the gaps and gray areas between those national regimes. MiCA ends that fragmented era by creating a single, unified system: to offer crypto services anywhere in the EU, a company must obtain authorization as a Crypto-Asset Service Provider, known as a CASP, from the regulator of one member state, after which a passport mechanism lets it operate across the entire bloc on the strength of that single license.
The deadline that forced the Binance situation is the end of a transition period built into the regulation. MiCA came into full effect at the end of 2024, but it included a grandfathering window that let firms operating under the old national registrations continue while they pursued a CASP license. That transition period closes on July 1, 2026, which is the hard enforcement date.
From that day forward, any firm offering crypto services in the EU without a CASP license is in breach of European law, and the prior national registrations that companies once relied on, in countries such as Spain, France, Italy, and Poland, carry no legal weight under the new framework. This is why the deadline was absolute for Binance: its old national registrations became void, and without a CASP license by June 30, it had no legal basis to serve EU customers.
The regulation makes no distinction between large exchanges and small ones; it distinguishes only between the licensed and the unlicensed. Binance, for all its size, fell on the wrong side of that line, and MiCA’s design left no room for a grace period or a special arrangement. The deadline was the deadline, and Binance did not meet it.
The Greek gateway that collapsed
Binance’s path to a license ran through Greece, and the choice was strategic rather than accidental. Because a single CASP license passport across the entire EU, a company can pick which member state to apply through, and the calculation involves speed, the competitiveness of the local process, and the regulator’s posture.
Binance filed its application with the Greek markets regulator in January, setting up a local holding entity to anchor its European operations there. The logic, by several accounts, was that Greece had granted few or no MiCA licenses at that point, which in principle might offer a faster and less crowded path than applying in a country like Germany or the Netherlands, which had already processed dozens of applications and built up queues.
Binance also cited the country’s local talent and other practical considerations, and it pursued the Greek approval for what it described as a lengthy engagement with regulators.
The plan collapsed. Although Binance filed in Greece, the application did not get reviewed in isolation, because under MiCA’s structure, the assessment was tracked alongside regulators in other member states, with authorities in Ireland and Latvia reportedly involved in the review, and oversight at the level of the EU’s central markets authority.
According to multiple press reconstructions, that joint review raised concerns about Binance’s legal history and its complex corporate structure, and in mid-June, reports indicated that the Greek regulator was poised to reject the application.
People familiar with the process described Binance making significant offers to win approval, including commitments to hire staff, open an office in Greece, and bring substantial investment into the country, the kind of inducements that signal how badly the company wanted the license and how much trouble it sensed.
None of it was enough. Faced with a likely formal rejection, Binance withdrew the application on June 24, pulling its bid before it could be officially refused. The Greek gateway, chosen for its supposed speed and openness, had become the place where Binance’s European ambitions stalled, and the reasons for the stall point to something deeper than any single country’s process.
The real reason: the fit and proper problem
Here is the heart of the matter, the part that the headlines about Europe and deadlines miss entirely: the rejection reportedly turned on Binance’s past, not its paperwork. MiCA, like most serious financial regulations, applies a standard known as the fit and proper test to the people who own and run a regulated firm, assessing whether an applicant’s management and significant shareholders are suitable to operate a licensed financial business.
This is where Binance ran into trouble, because the test put the spotlight on its co-founder and roughly 90% owner, Changpeng Zhao, and on the company’s documented history of legal problems.
According to people familiar with the review, the concerns that sank the Greek application centered on Binance’s anti-money-laundering controls and on whether Zhao could satisfy the fit and proper standard, given his record.
That record is substantial and a matter of public fact. In 2023, Binance pleaded guilty in the United States to anti-money-laundering and sanctions violations and paid penalties exceeding $4 billion, among the largest corporate penalties in American history.
Zhao himself stepped down as chief executive, pleaded guilty to a criminal charge, served a prison sentence of several months, and was later pardoned by the United States president in late 2025, though he retains his roughly 90% stake in the exchange.
Beyond the American case, Binance faces elevated pressure elsewhere in Europe: French authorities opened a judicial investigation into whether the company assisted money laundering, including possible links to drug trafficking and tax fraud, allegations Binance denies, and the exchange has been banned in the United Kingdom since 2021.
Stacked together, this history is exactly the kind of baggage that a fit and proper assessment is designed to scrutinize, and it gave regulators concrete grounds for concern about authorizing the firm and its dominant owner.
The significance of this cannot be overstated: Binance was not locked out because it filed a sloppy application or lacked the technical capacity to comply. By the available accounts, it was locked out because regulators looked at its past and the standing of the man who controls it and concluded they could not, in good conscience, hand it a license to operate across the EU. The obstacle was history, not paperwork.
Binance’s side of the story
Fairness requires giving Binance’s account, because the company disputes important parts of this narrative, and its perspective deserves a clear hearing.
Binance’s central contention is that its application was sound and that it never received a formal rejection. The company has stated that its understanding was that the Greek regulator completed its review and considered the application compliant with MiCA requirements, and that the application was also reviewed at the level of the EU’s central markets authority.
In Binance’s framing, it did not fail a clear test so much as run out of time within an ambiguous process: it received no formal decision before the deadline, and so it made what it called the prudent choice to withdraw the Greek application and pursue authorization in another member state rather than wait passively to be refused.
The company emphasizes that it engaged constructively with regulators for roughly eighteen months and believes it meets MiCA’s requirements, casting the outcome as a procedural and timing failure instead of a substantive rejection on the merits.
Binance has also worked hard to reassure users and to project continuity. It has stressed repeatedly that user funds remain safe and secure, that it is not instructing customers to rush their withdrawals, and that its ambition to operate in Europe under a clear and harmonized framework is unchanged. It has framed the entire episode as a setback on the path to a license instead of a defeat, expressing confidence that it will secure authorization in another EU member state in the coming months.
At the same time, the company’s handling of the situation has drawn criticism even from sympathetic observers, who argue that the weeks of ambiguity before the announcement, followed by an email that triggered panic, reflected poorly on a firm seeking to present itself as a mature, compliant financial institution.
Several commentators noted that a straightforward early acknowledgment of the Greek difficulty and a clear timeline could have spared users much of the confusion, and that in regulated finance, where transparency maps directly to trust, the murkiness of the process was itself a reputational cost.
Binance’s version, then, is of a compliant applicant caught in a slow and unclear process, choosing prudence over a formal refusal, while its critics see a company whose past caught up with it and whose communication compounded the damage.
The winners: who passed MiCA
Nothing illustrates the significance of Binance’s failure more sharply than the list of companies that succeeded, because the contrast turns the story from one exchange’s misfortune into a statement about the new shape of European crypto.
While Binance was being locked out, a number of its largest rivals secured the MiCA authorization it could not obtain. Major exchanges, including Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, and Crypto.com, all cleared the process and now hold licenses to operate across the bloc, giving them a significant competitive advantage heading into the second half of the year.
These are not minor players; they are among the most prominent exchanges in the world, and their success shows that the MiCA hurdle, while high, was clearable by serious firms willing and able to meet its standards. The fact that the largest exchange of all could not join them is what makes the moment so striking.
The broader numbers underline how selective the new regime is, and how much of an achievement a license represents. Of more than 3000 crypto firms operating across Europe, only around 210 secured full CASP authorization across roughly two dozen member states, a clearance rate in the single digits. Measured against the smaller universe of firms that had held national registrations before MiCA, the conversion rate was still well under a fifth.
In other words, the overwhelming majority of crypto firms that operated in Europe under the old patchwork did not make it through MiCA’s gate and were left to exit the market or scale back. This is the regime working as intended, filtering out firms unable or unwilling to meet a unified standard, and the licensed survivors now enjoy a meaningful moat.
Unsurprisingly, regulated rivals have moved quickly to capture the business Binance is vacating, with competitors publicly promoting their authorized status and their readiness to serve the users now looking for a licensed home. The competitive map of European crypto is being redrawn, and the redrawing favors those who got their license, with Binance, for now, on the outside looking in.
What comes next: the France gambit
Binance’s lockout is, by the company’s account, temporary, and the path it is pursuing back into the market is worth understanding, because it raises questions of its own.
Having withdrawn from Greece, Binance has signaled that it will seek a MiCA license through another member state, and according to reports citing people familiar with its plans, the chosen venue is France. This is a notable choice given that French authorities have an open judicial investigation into the company, which would seem to complicate an application there, and it suggests Binance believes it can satisfy the French regulator despite the scrutiny it faces in the country.
The more immediate problem is timing. Even if Binance applies promptly in France, any approval is likely to come after the July 1 deadline, which means there will be a gap, potentially of months, during which Binance remains locked out of the EU and unable to serve its European users with regulated services. The company’s confidence that it will secure a license in the coming months may prove justified, but the interim is real, and during it, the business migrates elsewhere.
The France gambit also surfaces a deeper tension within MiCA that the Binance affair has exposed. If Greece, working alongside regulators in Ireland and Latvia, found Binance unsuitable for a license, and France subsequently grants one, the episode would reveal inconsistencies in how different member states interpret and apply the same supposedly unified requirements.
That kind of divergence is precisely the regulatory arbitrage that MiCA was designed to eliminate, the practice of shopping for the most permissive regulator, and a high-profile instance of it involving the largest exchange in the world would raise uncomfortable questions about whether the framework is as harmonized as advertised.
Conversely, if France also declines, Binance’s path back into Europe narrows considerably, and the lockout could extend well beyond the coming months, the company has promised.
So the next chapter hinges on France: a relatively quick approval would vindicate Binance’s confidence while testing MiCA’s consistency, a slow process would prolong the lockout, and a refusal would turn a temporary suspension into something that looks more like a lasting exclusion. The one certainty is that the gap between July 1 and whatever comes next is a period in which Binance is genuinely shut out, and the European crypto market continues without it.
What it means: the end of crypto’s gray zone
Step back from the specifics, and the Binance affair marks a genuine turning point, the moment when Europe showed that its crypto regulation has real teeth and applies without exception.
For years, the crypto industry operated in a gray zone in Europe, with global exchanges moving through the gaps between national rules and the largest players seemingly too big and too important to be meaningfully constrained. MiCA was built to end that gray zone, to replace ambiguity with a single clear standard, and to subject every operator to the same requirements.
The fact that the framework’s first major casualty is the largest exchange in the world is the clearest possible proof that the regime means what it says. No firm, however dominant, is exempt from the fit and proper standard, the anti-money-laundering requirements, or the licensing process, and a company that cannot meet them is locked out regardless of its size.
That message will reverberate through the industry far beyond Binance, because if the biggest player can be shut out, everyone else is on notice that compliance is now the price of access to the European market.
The implications are double-edged, and an honest accounting acknowledges both sides. On one hand, the regime delivers what it promised: consumer protection, a level playing field of uniform rules, and the removal of operators unwilling or unable to meet serious standards, which many would call a healthier and safer market.
On the other hand, locking out the largest exchange carries real costs and risks. Liquidity and trading volume migrate, some of it to the licensed rivals who will consolidate the market, but some of it potentially to workarounds, as users turn to virtual private networks and offshore accounts to keep accessing Binance, which is exactly the kind of regulatory shadow activity that MiCA was meant to prevent.
The bloc may lose some of the investment, jobs, and tax revenue that a major exchange brings, a concern Binance itself has raised. And the France question hangs over everything, with the prospect that inconsistent application across member states could undercut the very harmonization MiCA was built to achieve.
What is not in doubt is that the era of crypto’s European gray zone is over. From July 1, the rule is simple and absolute: hold a license or do not operate, and even Binance is not big enough to be an exception.
That is what actually happened, and it matters far more than the headlines about an exchange leaving Europe, because the real story is that Europe decided who gets to stay, and for now, on its own terms, it said no to the biggest name in crypto.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Binance actually leaving Europe?
Not permanently, despite headlines suggesting otherwise. Binance is suspending most regulated services for EU residents from July 1 because it failed to obtain the required MiCA license by the June 30 deadline. The company has stated clearly that it intends to remain in the European market, that it will seek a license through another member state, and that it expects to secure authorization in the coming months. So the accurate description is a regulatory lockout with a stated path back, not a permanent departure. Binance is being shut out until it can get a license elsewhere, not abandoning Europe by choice.
What happens to my funds on Binance if I am in the EU?
Your funds remain safe and accessible, and withdrawals stay active. Nothing is being seized, frozen, or automatically lost. What stops on July 1 is new activity: new spot trading orders, new deposits, new sign-ups, and yield products like staking and Earn. The orderly wind-down that EU rules require is designed to guarantee continued access to your assets, and Binance has said it is not instructing users to remove funds by a specific date. The sensible approach is to withdraw to another licensed platform or a self-custody wallet without panic, and to be alert to scammers, since Binance says it will never call you by phone or ask for passwords.
Why did Binance fail to get a MiCA license?
By the available accounts, the rejection turned on Binance’s past, not its paperwork. MiCA applies a “fit and proper” test to a firm’s owners and managers, and the concerns reportedly centered on Binance’s anti-money-laundering controls and on whether co-founder and roughly 90% owner Changpeng Zhao could satisfy that standard. Binance’s history includes a 2023 guilty plea in the United States to anti-money-laundering and sanctions violations with penalties over $4 billion, Zhao’s own criminal plea and prison sentence, an open French investigation, and a UK ban since 2021. Regulators looked at that record and the standing of its controlling owner and had grounds for concern.
What is MiCA and why does it matter?
MiCA, the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, is the European Union’s comprehensive framework for crypto, replacing the old patchwork of differing national rules with a single unified system. To offer crypto services anywhere in the EU, a firm must obtain authorization as a Crypto-Asset Service Provider from one member state’s regulator, after which a passport lets it operate across the bloc. MiCA came into full effect at the end of 2024 with a transition period that closes July 1, 2026, the hard enforcement date. After that, operating without a license breaches EU law, and prior national registrations carry no weight. It matters because it sets a single, serious standard for the entire European market.
Which exchanges did get a MiCA license?
Several of Binance’s largest rivals secured authorization, including Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, and Crypto.com, all of which can now operate across the bloc and hold a meaningful competitive advantage. The broader picture shows how selective the regime is: of more than three thousand crypto firms operating in Europe, only around two hundred ten obtained full authorization across roughly two dozen member states, a clearance rate in the single digits. The overwhelming majority did not make it through and must exit or scale back. That the largest exchange of all was locked out while these rivals passed is what makes the moment so significant for the industry.
Can Binance come back to the EU?
Yes, that is its stated plan, though the timing and outcome are uncertain. Having withdrawn from Greece, Binance intends to seek a license through another member state, reportedly France, and expects to secure authorization in the coming months. But any approval is likely to come after July 1, leaving a gap during which Binance remains locked out. France route also raises questions, both because French authorities have an open investigation into the company and because, if France grants what Greece would have refused, it would expose inconsistencies in how member states apply MiCA. A quick approval would bring Binance back; a refusal would turn the suspension into something more lasting.
This article provides information about a fast-moving regulatory situation, not legal or financial advice. Details of Binance’s licensing, the positions of regulators, and the timeline reflect reporting available as of June 26, 2026, and can change quickly as the situation develops. EU users with questions about their accounts should rely on official communications from verified sources and be alert to scams. Verify current developments through primary sources
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