How to open a Binance account: a complete beginner's guide

Every step, every setting that matters, and the mistakes that cost people money in their first week.

Before you start, three things worth knowing

An exchange is not a bank. There is no deposit insurance behind your balance, and the account can be frozen for reasons that have nothing to do with you. This is not an argument against using one — it is the reason the rest of this guide spends more time on security settings than on buttons.

Verification is mandatory and takes a document. Every major exchange now requires identity verification before you can deposit meaningfully. Have a passport or national ID and a phone camera ready before you begin, rather than discovering this halfway through.

Your first week is tuition. The cost of learning is real but small if your position sizes are small. Read our guide on how much money you actually need to start before you fund the account, not afterwards.

Step one: create the account

Go to the registration page and sign up with an email address you control and check regularly. Use an address that is not your everyday one if you prefer, but never one you might lose access to — account recovery without email access is slow and sometimes impossible.

Choose a password you do not use anywhere else. If a password you reuse leaks from an unrelated website, attackers will try it on every exchange within hours. A password manager solves this properly; if you will not use one, write it on paper and keep the paper somewhere safe.

You can register through our link, which applies a fee discount to your account: open a Binance account here. Binance pays us a share of the commission it already charges on your trades; it costs you nothing extra, and you can register without a referral if you prefer.

Confirm your email, then add and confirm a phone number. Keep this number current — losing access to it while it is attached to security settings is one of the more painful ways to lock yourself out.

Step two: verification, and how to pass it first time

Open the identity verification section and have your document ready. Most rejections come from the same four causes: glare from a light source, a finger covering a corner, a document expiring within the next few months, or a name that does not match the one on the account.

Photograph the document flat on a dark surface in daylight, without flash. Fill the frame. Do not crop the edges. If your document has a machine-readable strip at the bottom, make sure it is sharp, because that is often what the system actually reads.

The selfie step wants a plain background and no hat, glasses or mask. Follow the prompts exactly; the liveness check is comparing motion, not judging your appearance.

Verification usually completes within a few hours. Do not deposit until it is done.

Step three: the security settings that actually matter

This is the most important section in this guide, and the one most people skip. Ten minutes here prevents the great majority of account losses.

Two-factor authentication with an app, not SMS. Install an authenticator app and link it. SMS codes can be intercepted by a SIM swap, where somebody persuades your phone provider to move your number to their device. This is not rare, and it targets exactly the people who have just bought cryptocurrency. Save the backup codes offline.

The anti-phishing code. Set a short phrase that will appear in every genuine email from the exchange. Any email without it is fake, no matter how convincing it looks. This single setting defeats the most common attack on new accounts.

Withdrawal address whitelist. Turn this on. It means funds can only leave to addresses you have pre-approved, with a waiting period before a new address becomes usable. If somebody gets into your account, they find they cannot move anything anywhere.

Check the devices list. Review which devices and sessions are authorised, and remove anything you do not recognise. Do this occasionally, not only once.

Step four: your first deposit

You have two routes. Buying with a card is fastest and most expensive — the spread is often several percent, which is money gone before you have traded. A bank transfer is slower and much cheaper, and for anything beyond a small first amount it is worth the wait.

If you are depositing cryptocurrency from elsewhere, the network matters more than anything else on the page. Sending on a network the exchange does not credit for that asset is the most common way beginners lose funds permanently, and nobody can reverse it. Read our guide on sending crypto to the wrong network and use the Network guard panel to check the address before you send.

Always send a small test amount first when using a new address or network. The fee on a test transfer is trivial next to the alternative.

Some assets also require a memo or tag alongside the address. Omitting it can mean the deposit arrives nowhere recoverable. The deposit page states this clearly when it applies — read it.

Step five: understanding what you will be charged

Spot trading fees are typically around 0.1% per side, meaning roughly 0.2% for a round trip. That sounds small until you trade often: twenty round trips a month at that rate costs 4% of your capital annually before any profit or loss.

Maker orders cost less than taker orders. A maker order sits on the book waiting; a taker order crosses the spread immediately. Using limit orders instead of market orders reduces this cost on every single trade, and our guide to maker and taker fees explains when each makes sense.

Holding the exchange token gives a further discount, and a referral link adds one on top. These stack.

Run your actual numbers through the True cost panel, which prices both fee sides together with funding for the size and holding period you intend. Most people are surprised by the annualised figure.

Step six: your first trade, done properly

Use the spot market, not futures. Futures with leverage will be offered to you prominently; ignore them entirely for now. Our guide on spot against futures explains why the difference is not a matter of preference for a beginner.

Decide your exit before you enter. Where will you sell if you are wrong, and where if you are right? A trade without both answers is a hope, not a plan.

Calculate the size from the stop, never the other way round. Enter your account balance and stop distance into the Position size calculator and it returns the size. This one habit separates traders who last from traders who do not, and our guide on calculating position size covers the arithmetic in full.

Use a limit order for your first trade so you can see exactly how the book works, and how your order sits in it.

The mistakes that cost people money in the first week

Turning on leverage to feel productive. Leverage does not make a good trade better; it makes every trade shorter. At ten times, a nine percent move against you ends the position regardless of whether you were eventually right.

Leaving everything on the exchange. Keep what you are actively trading and move the rest to a wallet you control. Every exchange that has ever failed had customers who assumed it would not.

Trading the coins that moved most yesterday. The movers list is a record of what already happened. Our guide on why most traders lose covers this pattern and the others that follow it.

Skipping the journal. Log every trade with the reason you took it, written before you know the outcome. After twenty trades the Mirror panel will read that record and tell you which of your habits is costing you money — something no amount of chart study can reveal.

Increasing size after a loss. This is the most reliably destructive habit in the entire activity, and it feels completely rational in the moment. The Twin panel replays your own record with that habit removed and prices what it cost you.

What to do in your first month

Trade small enough that the outcomes do not matter, and treat the goal as learning the mechanics rather than making money. Twenty small trades teach more than two large ones, and cost less.

Complete a checklist before every entry. Six questions and twenty seconds. The Pre-trade check panel has them, and after a month of logging you will be able to see in your own numbers whether the twenty seconds paid.

Read three of our guides rather than thirty videos: position sizing, where to place a stop, and the psychology of losing. Those three cover most of what actually determines your outcome.

When you are ready, our free desk has ninety-seven panels, forty-five of which exist nowhere else, with no account and nothing stored on our servers.

Common questions