Search our curated database of major exchanges. We surface what regulators say, what's actually happened to users, and whether the exchange has been independently audited. We don't rate — we report.
What this tool actually checks
Most “is this exchange legit” articles are SEO content farms that copy a paragraph each from the exchange’s own marketing page and call it a review. This tool does something different and narrower: for every exchange in the database, it surfaces four objective facts and lets you decide.
1. Verified regulatory licenses. Licenses we cite are ones we have personally cross-referenced against the regulator’s public registry — FinCEN’s MSB list for the United States, the FCA register for the UK, ESMA’s MiCA register for the EU, MAS for Singapore, AUSTRAC for Australia, the SEC TH register for Thailand, and the JFSA register for Japan. If a license is on file but we couldn’t find the entry on the regulator’s site, we say so. We don’t repeat marketing claims about being “regulated in 50 countries” — we list specific jurisdictions with verifiable registry numbers.
2. Proof-of-reserves attestation status. Several major exchanges (Kraken, Bybit, Binance, OKX, Bitget, Coinbase though only via SOC reports) publish periodic Merkle-tree proofs that user balances are backed by on-chain holdings. We surface whether the exchange publishes one, when the last attestation was, and link to the source. Note that PoR is necessary for trustless reserve verification but it is not sufficient — it doesn’t audit liabilities.
3. Documented incidents. Every major hack, regulatory action, bankruptcy filing, freeze of withdrawals, and confirmed fraud event we could verify, with dates and links to the primary source (DOJ press release, exchange’s own announcement, court filing). For exchanges with no incidents on file we state that explicitly rather than implying clean record.
4. Status classification.
- Active — operating normally as of our last review
- Restricted — operating but banned/blocked in major jurisdictions; verify availability for your country
- Degraded — operational issues / partial withdrawals / mass complaints
- Collapsed — bankrupt, users locked out, do not deposit
- Scam — confirmed fraud, regulator-issued warnings
What we deliberately don’t do
We don’t rate exchanges with stars or a “trust score” because:
- A score implies the exchange’s risk is a single number, but the actual risk for a Bitcoin self-custodian (you withdraw immediately after purchase) is fundamentally different from the risk for someone holding indefinitely in custody.
- Score-based rankings are gamed by exchanges’ SEO teams; objective facts plus jurisdiction-specific notes are not.
- “Best exchange” depends on your jurisdiction, what tax regime applies, what fiat rails work, and whether you’re going to self-custody — none of which a single score can capture.
We also don’t take advertising or affiliate fees from any exchange in this database. Every entry is curated independently. This is one of the few crypto websites you can use that doesn’t have a financial reason to recommend Crypto.com.
How to use it
Type the exchange name into the search box. Aliases (binance.com, binanceth, kucoin) and common typos are matched. If we have an entry, you get the full record. If we don’t, the tool surfaces direct links to the relevant regulator databases so you can verify manually — which is the same process we used to populate the database in the first place.
The tracked-exchanges browse view (under the search box) lets you scan every entry sorted by status, so you can see at a glance which historically-significant exchanges have collapsed (FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager, Genesis, Mt. Gox, QuadrigaCX, Zipmex) — useful when a friend asks you whether some recovery service can really get their FTX claim paid out.
The “withdraw immediately” rule
Even for legitimate, well-regulated exchanges with verified licenses and proof-of-reserves, the foundational rule of Bitcoin self-custody applies: don’t leave coins on an exchange any longer than necessary. Every exchange in the active list has user funds available for withdrawal today, and may not in five years. Buy on the exchange, withdraw to a hardware wallet, hold from there. The exchange is plumbing, not a bank.
This isn’t paranoia — it’s the lesson Mt. Gox, FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager, Genesis, and Zipmex collectively taught the Bitcoin community at a cumulative cost of tens of billions of dollars in user assets.
How we maintain the database
The data structure is committed to the site repo at src/data/exchanges.ts. Every entry has a lastReviewed ISO date. We re-check the major exchanges quarterly against their primary regulators’ databases; we update individual entries immediately when major news drops (a hack, a regulatory action, a bankruptcy filing). If you spot stale data, the source code is open and the contact form on this site goes to a human (well, a pseudonymous one — but human).
We do not cover the long tail of small / regional exchanges by default — there are hundreds globally and the maintenance cost of keeping accurate data on all of them exceeds the value to most readers. The database focuses on exchanges Bitcoiners actually search for.
Verifying manually — the regulator databases we use
If your exchange isn’t in our database, here are the same primary sources we’d check:
- United States — FinCEN MSB: fincen.gov/msb-state-selector
- New York — NYDFS BitLicense: dfs.ny.gov/virtual_currency_businesses
- United Kingdom — FCA register: register.fca.org.uk
- EU — ESMA MiCA: esma.europa.eu/digital-finance-and-innovation/mica
- Singapore — MAS: eservices.mas.gov.sg/fid
- Australia — AUSTRAC: austrac.gov.au/business/who-must-register
- Thailand — SEC: market.sec.or.th/public/idisc/en/DigitalAsset
- Japan — JFSA: fsa.go.jp/en/regulated/exchange.html
If an exchange is not on the relevant regulator’s register, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s a scam — it could be a legitimate offshore exchange operating outside that jurisdiction. But it does mean you have no regulatory recourse if things go wrong. That’s a known trade-off, not a hidden surprise.