Crypto Exchange KYC: Documents, Tiers, and Limits

What you need before you start verification

Verification on any centralized exchange follows a similar pattern, whether it's Binance or a smaller regional platform. Before you begin, get these ready:

• A government-issued photo ID: passport, national ID card, or driver's licence, depending on what your country supports.
• A working phone camera or webcam for a live selfie or short video check. Static photos of yourself usually get rejected.
• Proof of address if the exchange requests a second tier: a recent utility bill, bank statement, or government letter with your name and address visible.
• A stable connection and a bit of patience. Manual review queues exist, and rushing the upload with a blurry photo just adds another cycle.
• Confirmation that your country is actually supported. Binance, for example, does not onboard residents of American Samoa, Canada, Cuba, Cyprus, Guam, Indonesia, India, Iran, Japan, North Korea, Northern Mariana Islands, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, Ukraine (Crimea Region incl. Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson as well as the Crimea Peninsula), United States Minor Outlying Islands, USA, Vietnam, Virgin Islands (U.S.), Malaysia, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom., and no document fixes that.

Table: document types and what they're checked against

One-line takeaway: have your ID, a live selfie, and proof of address ready before you click start, or the review queue becomes a second attempt.

The verification steps, in order

1. Register with an email or phone number. This gets you a basic account that can browse but not trade meaningfully.
2. Enter personal details. Legal name, date of birth, residential address, and sometimes occupation.
3. Upload the government ID. Front and back for cards, or the photo page for passports. The exchange's system checks the document type against what's accepted in your country.
4. Complete the liveness check. A short selfie video or a series of photos taken in real time, used to match against the ID.
5. Submit and wait for review. Automated checks often clear within minutes; manual review can take longer if the document quality is poor or details don't match.
6. Provide proof of address if asked. Not every account gets prompted for this immediately; it usually appears when you try to raise limits or trigger certain activity.
7. Watch for a status change. Once approved, trading and withdrawal permissions unlock in stages rather than all at once.

One-line takeaway: verification is staged, not binary, and each stage can ask for a different document.

Fees and limits after you're verified

Verification tier and trading fees are two different systems that people often conflate. Your KYC tier decides what you're allowed to do; the fee schedule decides what it costs once you're allowed to do it.

Table: Binance fees that apply once you're verified

A few things worth separating out:

• Trading fees don't scale with verification tier. The base-tier maker and taker fees, 0.100% and 0.100%, apply once you can trade at all; they don't drop because you uploaded more documents.
• Card purchases carry a premium regardless of tier. The instant buy fee of up to around 2% is a payment-processing cost, not a KYC cost.
• Deposit minimums are currency-specific, not tier-specific. Binance states that minimum deposit amounts vary by currency and method Minimum deposit amounts vary by currency and method, which means the number you see depends on what you're depositing, not on how verified you are.
• Country restrictions override everything else. No verification tier gets around the fact that Binance does not operate for residents of American Samoa, Canada, Cuba, Cyprus, Guam, Indonesia, India, Iran, Japan, North Korea, Northern Mariana Islands, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, Ukraine (Crimea Region incl. Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson as well as the Crimea Peninsula), United States Minor Outlying Islands, USA, Vietnam, Virgin Islands (U.S.), Malaysia, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom.. If you're in one of those places, the account gets flagged eventually, tier or no tier.

Withdrawal limits, in general on these platforms, rise as you move from basic to fully verified status, but the exact figures are set by the exchange internally and change without much notice, so I won't quote a number I can't source to a fact. What I can say is that the pattern is consistent across exchanges: unverified or partially verified accounts get the lowest ceiling, and full verification (ID plus address plus sometimes a video call) removes most of it.

One-line takeaway: fees are fixed by trading type, limits are fixed by tier, and country eligibility overrides both.

Common verification problems and how to fix them

• Document rejected for glare or blur. Retake the photo in even light, flat surface, no phone case covering the corners.
• Selfie doesn't match ID photo. Remove glasses or hats, use current lighting, and make sure the liveness prompt (blink, turn head) is followed exactly.
• Proof of address too old. Most exchanges want a document dated within a recent window; a six-month-old utility bill is a common rejection reason.
• Name mismatch between ID and address document. Married names, shortened names, or transliteration differences trip up automated matching. A manual appeal with both documents side by side usually resolves it.
• Country shows as restricted. If you're physically located in or hold citizenship tied to a country on the restricted list, such as those covered under American Samoa, Canada, Cuba, Cyprus, Guam, Indonesia, India, Iran, Japan, North Korea, Northern Mariana Islands, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, Ukraine (Crimea Region incl. Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson as well as the Crimea Peninsula), United States Minor Outlying Islands, USA, Vietnam, Virgin Islands (U.S.), Malaysia, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom., no document fix works. The account will eventually be limited or closed regardless of how clean your paperwork is.
• Considering a 'buy verified Binance account' listing. These are pre-KYC'd accounts sold on secondary markets. They violate the exchange's terms, and the identity behind them can be re-verified or frozen at any point, taking your funds with it. There's no fix for this one except not doing it.
• Coinbase withdrawal stuck in review. This isn't a Binance-specific problem, but the same principle applies across exchanges: a withdrawal request that doesn't match the verified name on the account, or that exceeds an unverified limit, gets held for manual review rather than an automatic decline.

One-line takeaway: most rejections are photo-quality or document-age issues you can fix in one retry; country and account-provenance problems you generally cannot.