A Binance sign-up walkthrough: from the referral code to the withdrawal network, step by step

Who this guide is for, and who it is not

In one line: if you just want to understand what opening an account, verifying your identity and sending a transfer actually involve, and to do it once for a few dollars, this guide is for you.

It suits people who have never touched an exchange, who have been put off by a wall of jargon, and who want a checklist that skips nothing. It also suits people already registered but stuck on identity verification, or facing a first withdrawal with no idea which network to pick; jump straight to the relevant section.

It is not for anyone hunting a way to get rich quickly or a sure thing. Those do not exist, and this page will not pretend otherwise. If your region bans or restricts these platforms, follow the local rules, and do not act against them because of an article. Crypto swings hard in price, so put in only money you can afford to lose, every single time. That is not a throwaway line; it is the one thing a beginner most needs to remember.

Where you cannot open a Binance account

Check one thing before anything else: whether an account can be opened where you live. This is the picture as of September 2026, and the list does change.

Do not route around this with a VPN or someone else’s identity. Binance’s terms forbid using a VPN to get past a location restriction, and access from a prohibited location can simply be blocked, with your money inside. Everywhere else, spend two minutes on your local rules before you start.

Step one: open an account, and where the referral code goes

Straight to the point: registering means entering an email or phone number, setting a strong password, turning on two-factor authentication, and typing the referral code into the Referral ID field on the sign-up page, which usually opens once you have filled in your account details.

An account works like a currency window between ordinary money and the on-chain world. When you pick a platform, only two things really matter: a large user base, and proper compliance and security in place. Do not chase a slightly lower fee on some obscure venue you have never heard of; that is the classic beginner trap. A large exchange with a long track record and transparent withdrawals is far less likely to go wrong.

Two settings are worth doing the moment the account exists. Turn on two-factor authentication with an authenticator app rather than relying on SMS alone, because a text message can be hijacked through a SIM swap, while a code that lives only on your phone stops someone who has guessed or bought your password. And give the account a password you use nowhere else, ideally generated and stored by a password manager. Most real account takeovers trace back to a reused password or to 2FA that was never switched on.

Which field the referral code goes in

This is where many people stall. The first screen of the sign-up page often only asks for an email or phone number, and the referral field sits lower down, or opens only after you tap "enter referral code". Its label is usually Referral ID or Referral Code. Type the code in, and this part is done.

If you arrived through an invite link carrying a ref parameter, that field is normally filled in for you, so just confirm it shows the code you want. The code used on this site is BN8812.

I forgot the code. Can I add it after signing up?

Short answer: usually not, apart from one narrow window. Binance’s referral rules let a Referral Pro code be bound after sign-up only if all of these hold: the account is under 30 days old, it has made no deposit and no trade, it has no referral relationship yet, it is a main account, and your ID has not been used on another account within 180 days. One deposit or one trade closes the window. So the safe move is to copy the code first and confirm it appears in the referral field before you submit. Entering a code costs you nothing and may bring a fee rebate; forgetting it is a pure loss.

If you are ready to start, open the account through this invite link and carry the code BN8812 into the sign-up form: every trade you place afterwards earns back part of its fee, up to about a fifth at the top of the range*. Opening the account takes a few minutes, and every later step in this guide happens inside that same account. This is a referral link; crypto trading carries risk and nothing here is investment advice. *That is the ceiling, not what everyone gets; the rebate is paid as USDC into your Binance Spot account.

How to pass KYC, and what to do when it fails

Here is the answer first: KYC means uploading an ID, taking a face scan for a liveness check, and matching the details you typed against the document. Almost every failure comes down to three things: a blurry photo, mismatched details, or a poor environment for the face scan.

Every legitimate platform requires verified identity; it is a hard rule and part of protecting your account. What you need is simple: one valid ID (a national ID card or passport), a phone that takes photos, and a spot with even light. Submitting takes a few minutes; Binance says documents are usually reviewed within 48 hours, and some cases take longer.

What Binance KYC asks for, step by step

Where to start (checked September 2026): on the website, log in and go to [Account] → [Identification]; in the app, tap [Verify Now] on the home screen or open [Account Center] and tap [Unverified]. You choose your country of residence, the country that issued your document and the document type (passport, national ID card or driver’s licence, depending on what your country offers), photograph the front and back, do the face scan, then confirm your personal details and submit. Take that last screen slowly: Binance says you cannot change the details yourself once they are confirmed.

Common reasons verification fails

These are the usual reasons verification fails, ordered roughly by how often each one happens:

• Blurry or glare-covered ID photo. A photo of a photo, a shot through a plastic sleeve, or a light shining straight onto the card all leave the system unable to read it. Fix: take out the original document, shoot in even light with all four corners in frame, and avoid glare.
• Details that do not match the ID. A space in the name, the order of day, month and year in a birth date, the case of a spelling; any mismatch with the document can bounce it. Check character by character and make it exactly match the ID.
• Expired or unsupported document. An expired ID is never accepted. If a local document keeps failing, a passport is often more reliable, because its layout is standard worldwide and machines read it with a higher success rate.
• Face scan (liveness check) failure. Dim light, glasses, a mask, backlight, or moving too fast all cause failures. Find a bright spot, face the camera squarely, keep your full face visible, and follow the prompts to turn your head or blink slowly.
• Repeated submissions in a short window. Several failures in a row can trigger a temporary limit. Waiting a while, fixing the points above, then trying once beats hammering the submit button.

If you have worked through all of these and still cannot pass, or the review has sat for more than 48 hours, contact Binance support: on Binance’s help centre page, click [Get Support], get past the automated replies and ask to be transferred to a customer service agent, who is available around the clock. Send a screenshot of the status or rejection reason shown on the verification page and say which of the fixes above you have already tried. A pointed warning: stay away from anyone offering to "pass verification for a fee" or asking to "borrow your identity". Handing your documents to a stranger can drag you into someone else's illegal activity, and it is never worth it.

Getting money in: three routes and where each one snags

Verification passed, and the account is still empty. More beginners stall here than at KYC, because there is more than one route in, and which routes work at all depends on your country and how you want to pay.

Route one: the fiat channel. Buy directly inside the platform with a bank card or a third-party payment method. Fewest steps, two traps. The cost is often folded into the exchange rate rather than shown as a separate fee line, so compare what you received against the market price at the time. And availability is regional: the same channel can be present in one country and simply absent in another.

Route two: C2C, peer to peer. You trade with another user while the platform escrows their coins; you pay off-platform, they release. In many regions this is the main road, and the pricing is often better. Three things matter. The name on the paying account has to match your verified name, or the transfer looks like third-party payment and gets rejected. Keep everything in the platform's own chat and order flow, because if it goes wrong outside that record there is nothing for support to work from. And leave crypto words out of the payment reference, since some payment providers block on exactly those words.

Route three: transfer coins in from elsewhere. If you already hold crypto, sending it on-chain is fastest. Both ends have to be on the same network, which the next section covers in detail. One detail catches people out: a few chains and deposit addresses require a memo or tag, and a deposit sent without it will not credit automatically. Recovering it means a support ticket and a slow wait.

All three share one thing worth knowing in advance. Platforms commonly apply a withdrawal hold after certain deposit methods, so money that just landed cannot immediately be sent on-chain. That is a risk rule, not a fault. How long it lasts and which methods trigger it is whatever the platform's current page says; knowing the rule exists is enough to save you an anxious evening.

Step two: swap a little into stablecoin

Once the money has landed, move a few dollars into a stablecoin, and you can feel value flowing on-chain without riding the swings of a volatile coin.

A stablecoin is a token pinned to a currency like the US dollar, so its price barely moves; common ones are USDT and USDC. It is the calmest way for a beginner to walk the flow, because your attention can sit on "how do I send and confirm this" rather than on a price ticking up and down.

There are usually two routes to get one: buy it directly on the spot market with funds you have deposited, or buy it C2C (peer to peer) from another user, with the platform escrowing the trade. Use whichever is easier. Before you swap, note two things: the minimum (each trading pair has a smallest order size, and too tiny an amount will not go through) and the fee (spot trades take a very small percentage). Keep the amount as small as you like; a few dollars is plenty.

Here money stops being a number locked inside a platform and becomes something that moves on a public network.

The order screen looks dense the first time, but it comes down to reading the pair. In a pair written BTC/USDT, the first side is what you are buying and the second is what you are paying with, so when USDT sits second it is the quote currency and USDT is what leaves your balance. Buying the stablecoin itself runs the other way: you are spending fiat or another asset to get USDT. Getting that direction backwards is the most common first mistake.

Three more places beginners trip. Buying a token with a near-identical name: USDT and USDC are different stablecoins from different issuers, and plenty of junk tokens are named one letter away from something real. The minimum order size: every pair has a floor, and an order below it simply will not submit, which is the rule working rather than you doing something wrong. And where the coins end up: spot purchases sit in the spot account, while earn and futures are separate balances, so when you cannot find what you just bought, check which account you are looking at.

Withdrawals and transfers: which network to actually pick

The most useful line first: to send USDT cheaply and fast, TRC20 is the common pick; use ERC20 only when you need to deal with the Ethereum ecosystem; use BEP20 for moving around inside Binance. The sending and receiving ends must use the same network, or the funds may be unrecoverable.

Withdrawals go wrong here more than anywhere else. The same USDT can run on different blockchains, the way one person can take different roads. The "network" you choose when withdrawing is which road it takes. Here are the three most common roads side by side:

The fees and speeds above are relative ranges and shift in real time with congestion. For the real numbers, rely on what the exchange's withdrawal page shows at the moment you act; it spells out the network fee and the amount that will actually arrive. This information was checked in July 2026 and is for directional guidance only.

Why insist that both ends match? Because the receiver, a wallet or another exchange, only recognises the asset on the chain it supports. Send from TRC20 while the other side expects ERC20, and the money lands somewhere that does not line up, and in most cases you cannot recover it yourself. So for every withdrawal: first confirm the network the receiving address supports, then return to the withdrawal page and pick the same one, then check everything before you submit.

A common beginner myth is that the pricier network must be the better one. The opposite is closer to the truth: fees mostly track how busy and how a chain prices its space, with no direct link to safety. For a small transfer, a low-fee network cuts the cost sharply, and there is no sense paying a steep network fee to move a few dollars.

Step three: make one on-chain transfer

Send that little bit of stablecoin from one address to another address or wallet you control, watch it confirm on-chain until it arrives, and you have walked the whole path.

The action itself is not complex: on the withdrawal page, paste the receiving address, pick the network, enter the amount, confirm. But two rules are non-negotiable.

First, check the address character by character. An on-chain transfer cannot be reversed, and one wrong character sends the money to someone else with no way back. The safe way is to copy and paste, then check the first and last few characters against the receiving end; never type it by hand. Some malware rewrites the address on your clipboard, and this check after pasting can save you.

Second, pick a low-fee network and confirm both ends match. The network choice from earlier comes to ground here. For a first transfer, strongly consider sending a tiny amount first, confirm the other side received it and that address and network are right, then send the rest. One extra network fee for peace of mind is well worth it.

The moment it lands, the words you read earlier, ledger, confirmation, tamper-proof, stop being concepts and become something you have actually done.

A few details only show up on a first transfer. Withdrawals have a minimum, and anything below it will not send. The network fee normally comes out of the amount you are sending, so the figure that arrives is slightly smaller than the figure you typed, which is expected rather than a second charge.

Confirming does not mean arriving. The transaction has to be included in a block, and then further blocks have to stack on top before it is settled; the number of confirmations differs by chain, from tens of seconds to a quarter of an hour. During that wait you get a transaction hash, the TXID. Paste it into that chain's block explorer and you can see exactly where the transfer is and how many confirmations remain. Learning that one lookup is worth more than memorising any rule: from then on, when somebody says the money never arrived, you can tell for yourself whether it was never broadcast, is still confirming, or went out on the wrong chain entirely.

How to buy your first bit of spot

Open the spot page, pick a trading pair, enter an amount, use a market order to fill immediately, and you have bought it.

If you want to go beyond stablecoins and buy an asset, the flow is just as simple. On the spot market, find the pair you want (say a coin against USDT); a "market order" fills at the current price straight away, while a "limit order" sets a price you name and waits for the market to reach it. As a beginner, use a market order with a tiny amount to feel how placing and filling an order works.

Once more: this step is only to understand what placing an order is. What to buy and how much, this article recommends nothing, so use only money you can afford to lose and brace for sharp price swings.

The order box normally shows three numbers, price, quantity and total, and they move together: fill in two and the third is calculated for you. A market order skips the price field and takes whatever the book offers right now, which guarantees a fill but means the price you get can drift from the quote you saw, especially on thin pairs. That drift is slippage. A limit order is the reverse: you name the price, and if the market never reaches it the order simply sits there unfilled, so check back rather than forgetting you have one open.

After it fills, open the order history or trade detail. It lists the price you actually got, the quantity, and the fee charged on that one trade. This is the first time the word fee becomes a specific number rather than an abstraction, and it is the best moment to check it: compare it against the platform's own fee page and you will know which tier your account is really on. If you want an estimate before you trade, run it through our fee calculator first, then compare with the real trade detail.

After the walkthrough: how not to get scammed

Memorise one line before anything else: a real platform will never message you privately and ask you to move funds into a “support wallet” or to “upgrade” your account. Anyone who does that is a thief.

Once the account exists, the biggest risk stops being a mistyped address and becomes other people. The five patterns below come up again and again, and recognising them is most of the defence.

• Fake support staff. Official support does not slide into your messages on Telegram, WhatsApp or X. Anyone asking for a password, a verification code or your seed phrase, or telling you to send funds somewhere to “verify” the account, is running a scam. Real support sits behind the help entry inside the app and never asks for any of that.
• Seed phrases and private keys. These are the master key to a wallet. Give them to anyone, or type them into any website, and the money is gone with no recourse. No legitimate platform or wallet will ever ask for them, not once, not for any reason.
• Guaranteed returns. “Risk-free”, “a few percent a day” and “let me help you win it back” are opening lines, not offers. The more certain a return is made to sound, and the harder you are pushed to send money now, the faster you should stop.
• Cloned sites and fake apps. Download only from the platform’s own channel and sign in only through the official app or site. Treat any link you were sent as suspect until you have checked it yourself. A cloned site looks identical to the real one; that is the entire point of building it.
• Clipboard hijacking. As covered earlier, check the first and last characters of a pasted address every single time. Malware exists that quietly swaps the address you copied for one belonging to somebody else.

Turn those into habits and you have avoided most of what catches beginners. One rule covers whatever is left: whenever somebody is hurrying you to send money, however reasonable the reason sounds, stop, close the conversation and check it yourself inside the app. Being slow is always cheaper than being robbed.

Frequently asked questions

How do I enter a Binance referral code, and where does it go?

On the sign-up page, type the code into the field labelled Referral ID or Referral Code, which usually appears after you fill in your email or phone number. If you arrived through an invite link with a ref parameter, that field is normally filled in for you, so just confirm it shows the code you want. The code used on this site is BN8812.

I forgot to enter the referral code. Can I add it after signing up?

Usually not. Binance only leaves a narrow window for Referral Pro codes: the account must be under 30 days old, with no deposit, no trade and no existing referral relationship. If fee rebates matter to you, the safe move is to copy the code first and confirm it appears in the referral field before you submit the sign-up form.

My Binance KYC verification failed. What should I do?

The most common causes are a blurry or glare-covered ID photo, a name or date of birth that does not match the document, an expired ID, or a face scan taken in poor light or with glasses and a mask on. Work through them: re-shoot the original document in even light, edit the name and date of birth to match the ID exactly, and redo the liveness check with your full face visible. A passport, having a standard global layout, often passes more reliably than some local IDs. After repeated failures, contact official support, and never trust anyone who offers to pass verification for you.

How long does Binance KYC take, and what if it is stuck?

Binance says documents are usually reviewed within 48 hours, with some cases taking longer. If there is still no result after that, or it was rejected with a reason you do not understand, go to Binance’s help centre, click [Get Support] and ask for a human agent, available 24/7, with a screenshot of the verification status. Anyone who messages you offering to speed up or pass verification is running a scam.

Which countries cannot register for Binance?

As of September 2026: the EU stopped taking new registrations from July 1, 2026; the UK has taken no new users since October 2023; US residents use the separate Binance.US; Binance left Canada and the Netherlands in 2023; and in mainland China a February 2026 notice bars offshore platforms from serving residents. Do not get around this with a VPN or someone else’s identity.

Which network should I choose to withdraw USDT? What is the difference between TRC20, ERC20 and BEP20?

These are the same USDT running on different chains. ERC20 lives on Ethereum and is the most widely compatible but usually has the highest fee. TRC20 lives on Tron, with a low fee and fast arrival, and is a common low-cost choice for sending USDT. BEP20 lives on BNB Smart Chain, also low-fee and handy inside the Binance ecosystem. The key rule: the sending and receiving ends must use the same network, or the funds may not arrive and may be unrecoverable. Check the actual fee on the exchange's withdrawal page at the time.

How long does an on-chain transfer take, and can I recover funds sent to the wrong address?

Arrival time depends on how busy the network is; a low-fee network usually confirms within a few minutes. Once a transfer is on-chain it cannot be reversed, and a wrong address or a mismatched network cannot be undone, so check the receiving address character by character and confirm both ends use the same network before you submit. For a first transfer, send a tiny test amount first.

How do I read the fees, and will a lot be taken?

You will meet two kinds of fee: a trading fee (a very small percentage of the trade value when you buy or sell on spot) and a withdrawal network fee (charged per the network you choose when moving coins off the exchange, largely independent of the amount). Before withdrawing, the page shows this network fee and the amount that will actually arrive, so read it before you confirm. Choosing a low-fee network noticeably cuts the cost of small transfers.

Updated: First published June 6, 2026. On September 29, 2026 we added where a Binance account cannot be opened, the KYC entry points and review time, what to do when verification is stuck, and the narrow window for adding a referral code after sign-up.

Fang Yu · Editor of FutureLens

Former technology reporter. This checklist only helps you walk the idea through once. Keep safety, and money you can afford to lose, first at every step.