Binance Sign-up and Invite Code: From Account to KYC Approval

This is how most people get stuck: they finish signing up, then remember someone said an invite code saves on fees, go digging through the settings, and find nothing. You aren't looking in the wrong place. That field only ever appears once, during sign-up.

What follows is the flow we put together after walking Binance's sign-up the way a new user would. What you see will differ by region and by when you look, but the order and the places people get stuck have barely changed in years. Anywhere a specific fee, cap or review time comes up, we write it as a range with the date we checked. When you're actually doing it, go by what the page shows you at the time.

Three things to check before you start

Signing up isn't hard. What's hard is hitting a restriction and not knowing which one you hit. Two minutes on the three things below will save you most of the rework later.

One: whether your region can use the global site

Binance offers different products in different countries, some through a locally regulated entity, and in some places it will send you to a different site entirely. What decides this is mainly where your connection comes from and which country issued your ID document. When those two disagree, the document wins, because identity verification is looking at the document.

Here's what the Binance sign-up page looks like when it opens normally. If your region isn't served by the global site, you'll get a regional notice first, pointing you to the locally regulated site. If you see that, work out which site you're supposed to be on before you start filling anything in.

If you do get a regional notice, don't try to route around it. Routing around it only pushes the problem to identity verification, where a mismatched issuing country stops you anyway, and switching networks back and forth is a good way to trip risk controls. The thing to actually do is work out which site you belong on.

Two: email or phone number

Either works, and you can link the other afterwards. Our suggestion is to lead with email: an email address survives changing phones, carriers and countries, whereas a dead phone number makes account recovery a lot harder. And use an address you've had for a long time and that itself has two-factor protection — far safer than spinning up a fresh mailbox. The floor on your account security is usually the security of whatever inbox receives the codes.

Don't use a work address, and don't use a shared team mailbox. You lose access to those the day you leave.

Three: have your ID ready

Verification needs photographs of the original document. Before you start, check it's in date, that all four corners are intact, and that the lamination isn't scuffed. If your passport page is catching the light, move the lamp. Take the document out of any plastic holder before you photograph it; shooting through a sleeve gets rejected most of the time.

Where exactly the invite code goes

Straight answer: inside the sign-up flow there is an optional field, collapsed by default, usually labelled "Referral ID (Optional)" or "Invite code". Expand it, type the code in, and only then finish the sign-up.

It is collapsed by default.

That is why most people miss it; the form looks complete, the button is lit, and pressing it is the natural thing to do.

Three ways people get it wrong

1. Finishing sign-up and then looking for it. It isn't there. The referral relationship is fixed at the moment the account is created; there is no setting afterwards that changes it.
2. Typing it into the wrong box. People put the code into the verification-code field and then wonder why it keeps failing. Those two sit close together. Read the label before you type.
3. Using a referral link, then switching browser or device. The parameter a link carries rides on that browsing session, and changing environment part-way can drop it. The reliable approach: whether or not you used a link, type the code into the field yourself and confirm you can see it sitting in the box before you continue.

How to confirm it attached

Nothing pops up to say "linked", which is why people are left unsure. The way to check is to log in and look at the referral or rebate page inside your account: if it attached, your referrer information or the corresponding rebate relationship shows up there. If there's nothing at all, the field was almost certainly empty at the time.

Two caveats. The location and name of that page shifts between versions and isn't identical on web and in the app. If you can't find it, search "referral" in the help centre. And whether the relationship attached is a separate question from whether you've traded: a brand-new account that has generated no fees will of course show zero rebate, but the relationship itself should already be there. Don't read "rebate is 0" as "it didn't attach".

If you confirm it genuinely didn't attach, there's honestly no fix. The pragmatic way to think about it: this relationship buys you a small discount on fees, not something you must have. Closing the account and starting over, or opening a second account on a relative's ID, carries far more risk than the discount is worth. Getting your account security and your own habits right matters much more than saving that slice of fees.

Step by step: web and mobile

The fields are identical either way. The only difference is that mobile collapses things harder, so the optional item is easier to scroll straight past. For a first account we'd suggest the desktop web: bigger screen, easier to read, and simpler to get document photos across from a camera.

1. Open the sign-up page and choose email or phone

   There's normally a toggle at the top. Pick one and enter it; for a phone number, get the country code right.

2. Set a password

   Usually at least eight characters with an uppercase letter and a number. Don't reuse a password from another site — an exchange password should be a string you have never used anywhere else.

3. Expand the collapsed optional field and enter the invite code

   This is the field from the section above. While it's collapsed it may be nothing more than a line of small print, and the input box only appears once you open it, which is where most people lose the code. Before you continue, look back at the box and check the code is complete and hasn't picked up a stray space from the clipboard. One more thing: refreshing the page at this step closes the field again and clears whatever you had typed into it, so fill it in once more on the second attempt.

4. Accept the terms and submit

   The terms and privacy checkbox has to be ticked; often it's already ticked for you. If it tells you your region isn't supported at this point, go back to the first thing in the previous section.

5. Enter the verification code

   An emailed code may land in spam. Codes expire; if yours does, just send another. You don't have to redo the whole form.

6. Account created — now stop for a moment

   You can log in now, but you're two steps away from actually being able to use it: identity verification and security settings. Don't rush to deposit. Keep going.

Identity verification and why it gets rejected

Identity verification is what people mean by KYC.

Until it's done, fiat deposits, P2P and withdrawal limits are all restricted; the account is essentially look-but-don't-touch. So it's best to push straight through it after signing up.

What to have ready

• The original document: national ID, passport or driving licence, with the accepted types depending on your country or region;
• A device with a camera: the face check almost always has to be done live;
• Somewhere evenly lit: an overhead light leaves glare on the document, and daylight near a window usually works best.

The usual reasons it gets rejected

All of these are technical problems. Fix and resubmit; one rejection doesn't count against later attempts.

Review time depends on when you submit and how long the queue is; sometimes it's quick, at peak times it can take a while. Our experience: submit and go do something else. Don't log in and out repeatedly, and definitely don't submit several times in a row; duplicate submissions just move you to the back of the queue. Which documents are accepted where, and how review times are counted, is in the Binance help centre, where the guidance tracks local rules.

Three security settings to add immediately

Don't skip this section. Crypto transfers can't be reversed. Once someone else controls your account and the coins are gone, they're gone; no support desk can claw them back. All three together take under ten minutes.

Two-factor authentication

Use an authenticator app for the rotating codes first, and SMS only as a fallback: that's also the order CISA recommends for multi-factor authentication. SMS codes can be bypassed by SIM-swap attacks, which have happened in plenty of countries. Once it's set up, write the recovery key down on paper and store it — don't just screenshot it into your phone's photo library. When a phone is lost, the photo library and the authenticator usually go together.

Anti-phishing code

This is a string you choose yourself, and every genuine Binance email to you afterwards carries it. An email from "Binance" without that string can be treated as phishing on sight. It costs almost nothing to set and it blocks the single most common category of scam.

Withdrawal address whitelist

The third one is the most fiddly and the most worthwhile.

With it on, coins can only be withdrawn to addresses you added in advance. Even if the account really is compromised, the attacker can't send coins straight to their own address. The cost is a wait when you add a new address yourself, a very good trade.

There's a sequencing point worth thinking about early: a newly added address normally sits through a cooling-off period before it can be used, so don't leave adding it until the day you actually need to transfer. If you already know which wallet address you use and which platform you withdraw to, add them all in one go right after you enable the whitelist, and no future withdrawal has to wait.

One small thing more: as you add each address, give it a label you'll understand later: "my cold wallet", "deposit at exchange X". An address is a long string, and picking the wrong one by glancing at the first and last few characters is easy. The loss from choosing the wrong address is not reversible.

While we're on devices and sign-in

With those three done, the foundation is in place. The other half is habit: if a device you don't recognise shows up in the login history, kick it out and change the password; don't log in on a public computer or someone else's phone; only install the app from an official app store or the official site. The top search result isn't always the real one.

One thing many people miss: when you change phones, the keys inside your authenticator app don't automatically come with you. Before you switch, make sure you have the recovery key, or move two-factor to the new device while the old phone still works.

Don't leave that step until after the old phone has been factory-reset.

Run the whole path once with a tiny amount

Once verification passes, most people's instinct is to deposit the whole amount they'd set aside. We'd suggest the opposite: take a sum small enough that you genuinely don't care about it, and walk the entire path — deposit, buy, move into Earn, redeem, withdraw.

The point isn't saving money, it's surfacing the unknowns early: whether your payment method works, how long it takes to land, whether redemption really is instant, what verification a withdrawal needs. Finding those out on a small amount costs you a few minutes. Finding them out on a large amount can cost you several days of stress.

Doing it once will teach you more about the flow than ten tutorials. And deciding whether to scale up afterwards feels a lot more solid.

Concretely, the path is: deposit a small amount, swap it to USDT on spot, move it into Flexible Earn for a day, redeem it the next day, then withdraw it back where it came from. Note the time and the actual amount at each step. Five steps in, you'll have several answers only you can have: roughly how long your deposit route takes, whether redemption really is instant, how many verification steps a withdrawal needs, and how much the fees ate in total. No tutorial can tell you those, because they depend on your region, your payment method and your account tier.

Don't count the sign-up bonus as a return

The sign-up page and the app home often carry a new-user rewards entry, and the headline figure doesn't look small. These campaigns are real, but read the terms with three things in mind: whether the reward is cash, a voucher or trial funds; whether you have to complete a deposit or trading task before you can claim it; and whether it expires and is forfeited automatically. Miss any of those and you get the gap between "I thought I had it" and "I don't".

Trial funds are especially easy to misread; they can usually only be used to generate a return, with the principal taken back at the end, so what you actually keep is the return alone. That isn't a trap; it's written plainly in the terms. The problem is that nobody reads them.

More importantly, don't let that copy drive your decisions. The bonus is one-off; the fees and product rules stay with you. If you make trades you didn't want to make just to hit a task threshold, the extra fees and the volatility you take on can easily exceed the bonus. We don't restate any campaign amounts here: these change faster than anything else on the site, and a figure written today can be wrong tomorrow. Read whichever version of the terms is on the page when you claim.

How fees are charged, and where the discount comes from

Keep two things apart. Your fee rate is set by your tier and whether you pay fees in BNB. The referral discount comes from the referral relationship formed at sign-up. They don't affect each other. So entering a code never makes you pay more and never raises your base rate.

Here's what Binance's public fee page looks like, with the regular user's spot maker and taker rates and the BNB-discounted versions in the same table:

Should you turn on the BNB discount

That discounted column comes from the "pay fees with BNB" option. With it on, each fee is charged at the discounted rate but taken out of your BNB balance. It isn't free money: you have to hold BNB first, and BNB's own price moves.

Put another way, you save a certain small amount of fees and take on an uncertain amount of price exposure. For people who trade often and whose fee spend is visible, the maths usually works. For someone who places a handful of orders a year, buying BNB to sit there for the discount means the price swings can easily swamp the fees saved. The toggle can be turned off at any time. Just work out which of those two you are first.

And don't assume the two discounts simply stack. The referral discount and the BNB discount are separate mechanisms; which applies first and what each is calculated on is spelled out in a dedicated section of the fee page. Read that section rather than working it out yourself.

On the size of the discount: the page says "up to". What actually lands on your account depends on the current campaign and which referral relationship you came through. So treat anyone quoting you a fixed, guaranteed figure with suspicion, including us. What this site says is: register with invite code BN6971 for up to 20% off trading fees, with the actual rate being whatever Binance shows at the time, subject to change with their policy.

Sign-up failures at a glance

The traps scattered above, collected in one place so you can check against them.

Common questions

Can I add the invite code after signing up?

Once the account exists, that field doesn't appear again. Binance binds the referral relationship at the moment the account is created, and there's no setting afterwards where you can add it. The only way to have that relationship is to open a new account on a different email or phone number, and repeatedly opening accounts as the same person carries its own risk. We wouldn't open a second account for this.

If I enter an invite code, do I pay higher fees?

No. Your fee rate is calculated from your VIP tier and whether you pay fees in BNB, and has nothing to do with whether you entered a code at sign-up. What the code does is put you into a referral relationship carrying a fee discount; the relationship on this site is worth up to 20%, and what lands on your account depends on the current campaign.

Is identity verification mandatory? Can I use the account without it?

Barely. Without verification, fiat deposits, P2P trading and withdrawal limits are all restricted and many functions simply aren't available. Rather than signing up and leaving it, get verification done in one go, so you aren't stuck half-way when you actually need the account.

If verification gets rejected, does that hurt future attempts?

The common rejection reasons are technical — blurry photo, cropped corners, glare over the document number, a selfie that doesn't match the document photo. Fix and resubmit; it normally has no bearing on later attempts. What's genuinely awkward is a problem with the documents themselves, like an expired ID or a nationality that doesn't match the issuing country. Sort the document out first.

What should I do first after signing up?

Set up two-factor authentication, an anti-phishing code and the withdrawal address whitelist before you think about depositing. Together they take under ten minutes, and they block account takeover and phishing, the two most common and least reversible ways to lose money.

Once the account is open, verified and secured, the next question is usually "so where do I put this USDT". The rules differ more than you'd expect between tiers. Use the interest estimator to put a number on it before deciding whether to commit, and for how long.