Binance France Closes All Accounts on 31 December, Fees From 29 November

Binance has told its French customers that every account held with its French entity will be closed on 31 December. The emails began landing on 6 November. Deposits in euros and in crypto are already blocked, and withdrawals still work. From 29 November, an account still holding assets pays a monthly management fee of 0.025 per cent of the balance or 10 USDC, whichever is higher. Behind it is MiCA, the European Union's crypto rulebook: Binance holds no licence under it, and the transition period that let the exchange keep operating ran out on 30 June.

What happens to a balance left behind

The fee has a shape worth reading twice. Binance takes it from available USDC first, a stablecoin tracking the US dollar, and dips into whatever other crypto sits in the account if the USDC does not cover it. The first deduction comes within three days of 29 November, a second after 24 December. An account holding less than the fee has the whole balance taken. Empty the account before 29 November and nothing is charged. Cryptoast, the French outlet that printed the email first, calls that date the "Jour de Calcul", the calculation day.

The email everyone is quoting is in French, and the English going round the trade press is a translation of it. Binance tells the customer that because of the orderly cessation of activities the account closes as of 31 December 2026, and that an account not emptied by then may be treated as inactive under the terms of use, which can result in the conversion or transfer of the assets. CoinDesk notes it has not been confirmed beyond user screenshots.

"Affected accounts will be closed with effect from 31 December 2026," a Binance spokesperson told CoinDesk, describing the wind-down as "a carefully managed process."

Which countries got the same email

There are two accounts of that and they do not match. CoinDesk reported on 7 November that users in Spain, Italy and Poland said they had received similar notices, linking posts from each. Cointelegraph, filing a day later, asked Binance about reports of emails to users in Spain and Belgium, and the spokesperson made no mention of either. Belgium appears in Cointelegraph's account alone. Italy and Poland appear in CoinDesk's alone. Neither outlet mentions the other's countries, and no closure date has been published for any country but France.

Portugal is the counter-example. Binance ran no locally registered business there, so Portuguese users have not been singled out, though the broader EU restrictions still reach them. France, Spain, Italy and Poland are the four countries where Binance did hold local registrations, and the four it wrote to in June.

The registration lapsed in July

France's financial regulator, the Autorité des marchés financiers, lists Binance France's registration, held since May 2022, as having lapsed automatically on 2 July. That is when France's national registration regime ended and more than 50 providers without a MiCA licence were struck off, Gemini's European unit among them. Binance withdrew its application for a Greek licence in June, said it would apply in another member state, and has not named one. It still does not appear in the register of authorised crypto providers kept by ESMA, the bloc's markets authority. Germany's BaFin refused the operator of Bitcoin.de after fifteen months, so Binance is not the only incumbent licensing has gone against.

Three weeks to the first charge

Binance's published terms already allow a dormant account fee, taken monthly, to cover the cost of holding assets with an affiliate or a third party. The charge is not an invention of the wind-down. What nobody has published is how many people it reaches. Cointelegraph, citing Reuters, puts the global client base at a minimum of 300 million, and that number counts no French accounts. Service restrictions began across the bloc when the transition window shut, and this is the first hard date attached to them. The spokesperson's line is that assets "remain safe and accessible", that there is "no sudden freeze", and that the exchange is "actively progressing our authorization pathway". No member state has been named for that.