Binance

Binance is the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume. It was founded in 2017. Binance is a company that holds your coins for you. Solana is a blockchain, so the two are not rivals of the same kind.

On Solana, Binance matters for three reasons. It is one of the main places people buy and sell SOL. It issues BNSOL (Binance Staked SOL), a token that earns Solana staking rewards and can still be traded. And since September 2026, the Binance Wallet app has let users lend on Solana through Kamino Finance KMNO$0.039+5.8%.

What is BNSOL and how does Binance SOL staking work

BNSOL is Binance's liquid staking token for Solana. You give Binance SOL, Binance stakes it, and you get BNSOL back as a receipt. The receipt is a normal Solana token. You can trade it, move it to your own wallet or use it as collateral, and the SOL behind it keeps earning.

Rewards show up as a rising exchange rate. Each BNSOL is slowly worth more SOL. Binance updates the BNSOL to SOL rate every Solana epoch, which is about every two to three days, according to Binance's SOL staking page.

A worked example helps. On 22 September 2024, soon after launch, one BNSOL was worth about 1.01 SOL. If you staked 10 SOL that day, you got about 9.9 BNSOL.

Two years on, the same token buys more SOL. In October 2026, Solana Compass's stake pool data showed one BNSOL worth about 1.135 SOL. You can see the latest rate on our BNSOL stake pool page.

Under the surface, BNSOL runs on Solana's standard stake pool program, the same open-source code many other liquid staking tokens use. Binance's staking page links an audit report for that program. Rewards have accrued since 26 August 2024, and the product opened to users in September 2024, after Binance shared the details with The Block earlier that month.

How to stake SOL on Binance and redeem BNSOL back to SOL

Staking SOL on Binance takes three steps. You stake SOL and get BNSOL. You hold BNSOL to earn. You swap BNSOL back for SOL when you want out. You need a Binance account with SOL in it. Binance runs the staking side for you.

There are two ways out, and they suit different needs.

• Redeem with Binance. You hand back BNSOL and get SOL at the full rate. Binance's SOL staking FAQ says the SOL should reach your Spot Wallet no more than four days after you ask.
• Sell on the market. BNSOL trades against SOL on Binance's spot market, so you can swap out at once. The market price can sit below the full rate, mostly when many people sell at the same time.

Two limits are worth knowing before you stake. Binance caps how much you can redeem, and it shows the cap on the redeem screen, not in its help pages. Binance also warns that a busy or failing Solana network can slow things down.

You can also send BNSOL to your own Solana wallet. Binance's BNSOL explainer says the token keeps earning there too.

BNSOL fees, commission and APR

Binance takes a commission on the rewards its validators earn, and pays you what is left. The yield you see is variable. Binance describes its APR as "dynamic" and "not guaranteed", moving with how much SOL is staked across the network and how well the validators perform.

Binance's public pages do not print the commission rate in plain text. The pool's on-chain settings do. In October 2026, Solana Compass's stake pool data showed the BNSOL pool charging a 10% fee on rewards and no fee on SOL deposits.

Here is what that means in practice. Say your 100 SOL earns 6 SOL in rewards over a year before fees. A 10% rewards fee takes 0.6 SOL of that, and you keep 5.4 SOL. The fee comes out of rewards only, never out of the SOL you put in.

The same on-chain settings include a 0.1% withdrawal fee at pool level. What you pay inside the Binance app is whatever the redemption screen shows, so check it there before you confirm.

Binance Wallet and Solana DeFi: Kamino vaults and BNSOL collateral

Binance Wallet opened Solana lending to Binance users in September 2026. From 3 September, people could put USDC or PYUSD into Kamino vaults from the DeFi tab of the Binance app. A vault here is a shared pool that lends your coins out to earn interest. We covered the launch and its reward pools at the time.

The launch came with $300,000 in extra rewards, split across the two pools. The offer ran for 30 days, to 2 October 2026, per Binance Wallet's post.

Money came in fast. On 12 September 2026, Kamino said more than $100 million had flowed into its vaults through Binance Wallet. Our report on that milestone has the detail.

These vaults carry Kamino's risks as well as Binance's. Your coins sit in on-chain code and are lent to borrowers. A bug or a wave of bad loans can cost you money, whatever app you used to get there.

BNSOL has uses inside the exchange too. Binance lets you pledge it to back a Binance Loan, or to back trades in a Portfolio Margin account. It also trades on the spot market against SOL.

Who Binance SOL staking suits, and who should look elsewhere

Binance SOL staking suits people who already keep SOL on Binance and want it to earn without learning wallets, validators or stake accounts. It also suits traders who want their staked SOL to count as collateral for loans or margin on the same exchange.

It is a weaker fit for three groups.

• US residents. Binance.com does not serve them, and Binance.US is a separate company with its own product list.
• People who want to hold their own keys. SOL staked on Binance sits with Binance until you withdraw the BNSOL to your own wallet.
• People who care which validators they support. Binance chooses them. Solana Compass's stake pool data showed the BNSOL pool delegating to five validators in October 2026.

If you plan to hold for years and never trade, the convenience matters less each year and the fee keeps running. That is the trade to weigh.

Is Binance safe? BNSOL risks, the 2025 depeg and custody

BNSOL has two kinds of risk: the token's and the company's. The token runs on staking code that many pools share, and Binance links an audit of it. Binance notes that Solana does not slash staked SOL on its own. In plain terms, the network does not burn your stake when a validator breaks the rules. Your rewards can still drop if the validators Binance uses go offline or run badly.

The company risk is the bigger one. While your BNSOL sits on the exchange, Binance holds it. You are trusting Binance to stay in business, stay online and keep serving your country.

The price of BNSOL can also break away from the SOL behind it. On 10 October 2025, in a market-wide crash, BNSOL, wBETH and USDe traded well below their fair value on Binance for about 40 minutes. People who had pledged them to back loans and trades had those positions closed by force.

Binance paid about $283 million to the users hit, The Block reported. It also said it would count each token's redeem price when it values them in future. Binance said its systems stayed up and blamed some of the worst prices on a display error, Decrypt wrote.

Binance has been hacked once at scale. On 7 May 2019, thieves took 7,000 bitcoin from one of its online wallets. Binance covered the loss in full from SAFU, its rainy-day fund for users.

SAFU is still the backstop. In February 2026, Binance finished moving the fund into 15,000 bitcoin, worth about $1 billion at the time. It promised to top the fund up if its value fell below $800 million, per The Block.

Binance also posts proof of reserves. This is a maths-based check that lets you confirm your balance was counted. It shows that Binance held enough coins to match what it owed users on a given day. It does not show the firm's other debts or its wider books.

One more thing sits with Binance: control of the stake pool. The pool has a manager key that can change its fees and its validators. We could not confirm from public sources whether that key needs one signer or several.

BNSOL vs staking SOL yourself, and other liquid staking tokens

BNSOL is the easy choice if your SOL is already on Binance. The main alternatives trade that ease for control.

Native staking means staking SOL from your own wallet with a validator you pick. You hold the keys the whole time, and you choose who earns the commission. You get no token to trade or borrow against.

Protocol-run liquid staking tokens, such as those from Jito and Marinade, work like BNSOL but are issued on-chain without an exchange account. They are the closer match if you want a liquid token and your own keys. You can compare every Solana stake pool by fee and yield on our stake pools page.

A disclosure: Solana Compass runs its own validator and stake pool, so we compete with Binance for stake. If you want to see how that option works, start with our staking page.

Binance history, regulation and US availability

Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ. It grew into the largest crypto exchange in the world. Its record with the law is part of weighing it.

In November 2023, Binance pleaded guilty in the US to breaking money-laundering and sanctions rules. It agreed to pay $4.3 billion. Zhao stepped down, and Richard Teng took over. The deal also put an outside monitor in place for three years to check that Binance follows the rules, as this September 2025 report sets out.

Zhao served four months in prison. President Trump pardoned him in October 2025, Fortune reported.

The same Fortune story, from February 2026, made a new claim. It said Binance had fired staff who flagged more than $1 billion in flows tied to Iran. Binance denied that anyone was fired for raising concerns. It said its own review found no breach of sanctions law.

Binance now runs its global site under one main regulator. In December 2025, the financial regulator in Abu Dhabi approved three Binance firms to run its exchange, clearing and broker business. They began work on 5 January 2026, Gulf News reported. Binance said then that it had more than 300 million users signed up.

Binance.com is not open to people who live in the US. Binance.US calls itself "separate and independent" from Binance.com. It is run by a firm named BAM Trading Services.