I never trusted Binance for the following reasons:
1. CZ is not a trust worthy person, in his early days he was involved in a lot of scam ventures and pump and dumps. Back then Binance used to promote literal shitcoins on their platform (Bytecoin for example) hoping to cause massive price action and cashed in by dumping on their own users.
2. The company is structured like a rogue/criminal venture, ownership is obscure, they change HQ locations constantly hoping to evade regulations and delay potential lawsuits. Even the Department of Justice is struggling to identify executives other than CZ in their investigations. Same playbook︀ as Tether/Bitfinex. I don't mind these set ups when you're a lone wolf trying to︁ protect your money, but when you have billions in customer deposits, this becomes a problem.︂
3. They can't pass a basic financial audit, Mazars had to drop audits for crypto︃ clients because Binance PRESSURED them to adopt "agreed upon procedures" for the audit, making it︄ not really an audit in the end. When an auditor cannot do their jobs independently︅ and has the company execs breathing down their necks to produce the desired results, it︆ means the numbers are s**t and the company is not doing good financially. CZ's excuse︇ is that crypto exchanges are supposedly too difficult to audit for Big 4 firms yet︈ Coinbase gets audited by Deloitte.
4. CZ had very close ties to Tether/Bitfinex for a︉ while and those 2 entities are the sketchiest in the space.
5. The feds are︊ onto them for various counts of money laundering, sanctions violations, false reporting, etc. Binance was︋ built with dirty money and their success relied on accepting money from every sources while︌ being extremely lax on KYC. While i couldn't care less about them being a laundromat︍ (Banks are too, you know ?), combining this with the fact that audits are near︎ impossible to do with them and you get the typical collapse scenario.
6. Their BNB️ ecosystem is mostly manipulated by Binance itself. A lot of their profits are funneled into "pumping" BNB and creating value out of thin air. Profits dwindle and watch BNB crash to the ground.