Binance was founded by Changpeng Zhao, a former developer who created high-frequency trading software. Binance was initially headquartered in China but later relocated outside of China due to China's increasingly stringent regulations on cryptocurrency.

CEO Changpeng Zhao previously founded Fusion Systems in 2005 in Shanghai; the company built high-frequency trading systems for brokerage firms. In 2013, he joined Blockchain.info as the third member of the cryptocurrency wallet team. He also worked at OKCoin as CTO for less than a year, a platform for spot trading between fiat assets and digital assets.
The company was founded in China but moved its servers and headquarters out of China and into Japan before the Chinese government's ban on cryptocurrency trading in September 2017. By March 2018, the company established an office in Taiwan.
In January 2018, it was the largest cryptocurrency exchange with a market capitalization of $1.3 billion; this title has been maintained by the company since April 2021, despite competition from Coinbase and other companies.