Global Exchanges

Kraken's advantage is not its fee table, which is mid-pack. It is that when something goes wrong at 3am there is a person, and when you want to check the fee table you do not need an account to see it.

Binance still has the deepest books and the lowest headline fee of any large venue. What you are really buying is a trade-off: best-in-class execution against a counterparty whose legal structure is deliberately hard to pin down.

Coinbase is the exchange you can actually read a balance sheet for. It is also the exchange that will charge you 1.5% for a purchase that costs 0.6% one screen away — and it does not go out of its way to tell you.

OKX matches Binance on the things that show up in a fee calculator and beats it on the things that show up in daily use. The counterparty questions are identical, and the 2025 settlement is a reminder of what that means.

Bitstamp's selling point is a negative: nothing catastrophic has happened to it since 2011. In an industry with this failure rate, that is close to the strongest claim available.

Most exchanges bolt a lending product onto a spot book. Bitfinex runs an order book for credit itself, where you set the rate and the duration — and that market is the main reason to have an account here.

Gemini did more compliance work than almost any US exchange and still handed 340,000 customers to a bankrupt lender. It is a case study in why 'regulated' and 'safe' are not synonyms.

Copy trading is the feature Bitget is actually selling, and it is the best-executed version of it anywhere. That is a compliment to the engineering and not an endorsement of the idea.

For years KuCoin's pitch was listings without paperwork. The paperwork arrived in January 2025, cost $297 million and the US market. What remains is a decent mid-tier exchange with a fast listing desk.

Crypto.com spent more on sports sponsorship than most exchanges spend on everything. Underneath is a decent consumer app with an invisible spread and a separate exchange that is cheaper than the thing you were funnelled into.

MEXC's pitch is that whatever you are looking for, it is already listed. The corollary — that almost nothing was filtered out — is the part you have to price yourself.

HTX is what happens when a venue survives long enough to still have volume but not long enough to rebuild trust. The books are real. The reasons to leave assets there are not.