Last reviewed 2 September 2026 · Checked against FINTRAC and the CSA · By the CryptoNorth Team
Binance was never banned in Canada. It chose to leave. On 12 May 2023 it announced it was withdrawing from the Canadian market, blaming new rules on stablecoins and investor limits, and saying the market was no longer tenable for it.[1]
But you still should not use it. Binance is not registered with Canadian securities regulators, so it cannot lawfully serve Canadians — and if something goes wrong, no Canadian regulator can help you. That is a different problem from being banned, and it matters.
Most pages you will find on this say Binance was banned or kicked out of Canada. That is not what happened, and the distinction is checkable in about thirty seconds.
The Canadian Securities Administrators — the group of provincial regulators that oversee investing — publish a list of platforms that are banned from doing business with Canadians. Six platforms are on it. Binance is not one of them.[3]
Binance left of its own accord and said so at the time: “While we do not agree with the new guidance, we hope to continue to engage with Canadian regulators aimed at a thoughtful, comprehensive regulatory framework.” It added that it hoped to return “someday.”[1] That is the language of a company walking away, not one being removed.
A year after leaving, Binance was fined by FINTRAC — Canada’s financial-crime agency, which tracks money laundering rather than protecting investors. The penalty is often reported vaguely, so here it is precisely.
Two violations: failing to register with FINTRAC as a foreign money services business, and failing to report large virtual currency transactions of $10,000 or more made in a single transaction.[2]
Note what this is and is not. It is a money-laundering compliance penalty for the period Binance was operating here without registering. It is not a securities ban, and it is not why Binance left — the withdrawal came first, by a full year.
Binance stopped serving the Canadian market in 2023 and has not registered since. We are not going to walk you through ways around that, for a reason worth stating plainly rather than moralising about.
Every platform we review answers to the CSA and, in several cases, to CIRO. If your account is frozen, your withdrawal stalls, or the platform fails, there is somewhere to complain and rules it must follow. On an unregistered offshore platform there is not.
There is no Canadian company to pursue and no investor-protection fund. This is the same gap that made the QuadrigaCX collapse unrecoverable for most of its 17,000 creditors.
The CRA taxes your gains whether the platform is Canadian, offshore, registered or not. Using an unregistered exchange removes protections, not obligations.
Nine platforms are authorized by the CSA to serve Canadians and reviewed here.[4] If you came looking for Binance, these are the closest equivalents by what you were probably after.
A flat 0.20% at every trade size, CIRO-regulated with CIPF coverage on cash.
400+ coins, deep liquidity, authorized in all thirteen provinces and territories.
Registered here since 2024. Note it does not publish its buy fees, which we go into.
Flat 0.5%, free Interac both ways, registered longer than anyone else on the list.
For completeness, since this is the list Binance is so often wrongly placed on. These six platforms have been banned by a Canadian regulator, with the ban reciprocated nationally.[3]
This page is information, not financial or legal advice. Regulatory status changes — a platform can register, withdraw or be banned at any time. Always check the current CSA authorized and banned platform lists yourself before depositing anywhere. We hold no affiliate relationship with Binance or any platform named on the banned list, and we do not link to them.