Which exchanges
you can trust.

1. Licences · 25 points. Where the exchange is legal: licences and registrations from regulators' registers, minus bans and fines.
2. Reserves · 20 points. Proof of reserves: is there one, who checked it, how fresh it is and whether coins cover every client balance.
3. Security · 15 points. Past hacks and whether clients were made whole, the insurance fund.
4. Liquidity · 15 points. Real BTC order-book depth within ±2% and futures open interest.
5. What people say · 10 points. App Store ratings across countries, weighted by the number of reviews.
6. Opinion leaders · 10 points. What the opinion leaders from our Sentiment page write about it: the share of complaints among mentions over 90 days.
7. API reliability · 5 points. Our own check: does the exchange API answer, over 30 days.

Licences: a full licence in the EU (MiCA), UK, US, UAE, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada, Korea, Australia or Switzerland gives 5 points, a full licence elsewhere 3, a registration (such as FinCEN or AUSTRAC) 1.5, an application or in-principle approval 0.5. Each country counts its best entry, and only if confirmed in the regulator's register. Every regulator ban, fine or warning in the last 3 years costs 2 points, at most 8 in total.

Reserves: a published proof of reserves gives 4 points; zk proof 6, audited Merkle tree or audited filings of a listed company 4, unaudited tree 2; a snapshot under 45 days old 4, under 90 days 2; the lowest coverage among BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC at 100%+ gives 6, at 95%+ gives 3.

Security: 10 points minus 2 for each hack where clients were made whole and minus 6 where they were not; hacks older than 5 years count half. Plus 5 if the insurance fund can be checked via API or on-chain, 3 if the exchange only publishes the amount.

When a block has no data yet it is left out and the total is rescaled to 100 over the blocks we have. Our readers' ratings are shown separately and do not enter the score, so they cannot be gamed.