How we rate exchanges
Every number on this site traces back to a public source you can open yourself. Where we are unsure, we say so instead of guessing.
Is it legal where you live?
Most countries require a crypto exchange to register before it serves local residents. Japan, for example, requires registration with the Financial Services Agency and publishes the list. We check exchanges against these public registers and show the result as it stands.
Registered names rarely match brand names. Kraken is registered as Payward and Crypto.com as Foris DAX. Each exchange page shows the exact legal entity that appears on the register.
What we measure
Most exchange rankings weight liquidity heaviest. We do the opposite, because reported volume is the easiest number for an exchange to inflate and the least useful to someone deciding where to keep their money.
Regulation and licensing
35%Licences held in the jurisdictions an exchange actually serves, taken from official registers.
Solvency and asset transparency
25%Proof of reserves, published wallet addresses and third party audits, verified on chain where possible.
Not live yet
Security
20%Penetration test reports, bug bounty programmes and cold storage practice.
Not live yet
Incident history
10%Hacks, withdrawal halts and regulatory actions. Every entry carries a public source link.
Liquidity
10%Order book depth rather than reported volume, because depth is far harder to fake.
Not live yet
We do not publish a composite score yet. Only 45% of the methodology has live data behind it. A total now would imply a completeness we do not have, so the grade below is a band, not a number.
How we grade regulatory coverage
We publish a band rather than a number. We read 10 registers, and an exchange licensed only in Korea or Turkey would score zero on a scale with no Korean or Turkish register behind it.
- Flagged
- Named on a regulator's list of non-compliant entities. A flag overrides everything else, including licences held elsewhere.
- Broad
- Licensed in three or more of the jurisdictions we check.
- Partial
- Licensed in one or two of them.
- None found
- No record in any register we read. Several exchanges in this band hold licences in markets we do not cover yet. Read it as missing evidence, not as a verdict.
The table is ordered by reported spot volume by default, not by our own grade, so our judgement never hides in the default sort. Sort by the regulation column to see it our way.
Regulator warnings
Some regulators publish the names of operators they have warned for serving local residents without registering. Japan's Financial Services Agency is one. We show each warning with the month it was issued, next to any licences the same brand holds elsewhere.
A warning is not a finding of fraud. It means the operator served residents of that country without registering there, so it does not change the grade on its own. Binance is a good example: Japan's regulator warned the global operator in 2018 and 2021, while its Japanese subsidiary, Binance Japan, is registered today. Both facts appear on the page, each with its entity name and date.
Where the data comes from
Regulatory status comes from official registers. Market data comes directly from each exchange's public API, not from another ranking site.
- ESMA MiCA register (European Union)Authorised crypto asset service providers, plus a separate list of entities named as non-compliant.
- Financial Services Agency register (Japan)Registered crypto asset exchange operators and the assets each one may handle.
- VARA public register (Dubai)Licensed virtual asset service providers and the activities each is approved for.
- SFC list of licensed platforms (Hong Kong)Licensed virtual asset trading platform operators.
- MAS Financial Institutions Directory (Singapore)Major Payment Institutions licensed for digital payment token services.
The UK, US, Canadian and Australian registers are not included yet. An exchange missing from our table has not been judged unlicensed.
How we link licences to brands
Registers list legal entities, not brands. Kraken appears as Payward Europe Solutions and Crypto.com as Foris DAX MT. We link each record in one of two ways and label which one we used.
- Verified
- The website registered with the regulator is the exchange's own domain, or the regulator named the brand itself, word for word. Only this kind of evidence can attach a warning to an exchange.
- Unverified
- Only the company name matches, for example Bybit EU GmbH. Shown with a dashed outline and never used to flag an exchange.
The EU non-compliance list includes an entity called HTXcoin-az. A naive text match would attach it to HTX, a large exchange with no connection to it. Wrongly branding a company does far more damage than missing a record, so a name match alone never produces a warning.
What we exclude from volume
Some exchanges now list tokenised shares next to crypto. Those pairs track companies like Nvidia or Nike, not crypto assets, so we remove them from the spot figure and publish the amount removed on each exchange page.
Across the exchanges we track, that currently removes $386.93B of reported 24 hour volume, almost all of it on a single exchange.
The volume that remains is still self reported and may include wash trading. Treat it as a claim, not a measurement.
How we make money
Exchanges can buy clearly labelled advertising, and they can pay us to verify documents such as audit reports and proof of reserves.
Ranking positions and grades are not for sale, at any price. A paid verification buys the review, not the outcome. If the documents do not hold up, we publish that and keep the fee.