Interesting. Binance has been putting a lot of focus on building a platform, with their Labs and Binance Coin. Hopefully those haven't become distractions away from their core offering as an exchange.

It seems like I just heard about this company a week or two ago. Did it seem to appear out of nowhere to people more tuned in to the e-currency world?

No, Binance has been the leading BTC exchange in China for quite a while! Maybe you heard of them because of their Binance Coin announcement. It went pretty far, pretty fast in terms of volume.

They were in HK and now in Malta.

They've been around for 3 years+. Welcome to the world of Crypto.