Researchers have revealed the safest global cryptocurrency exchanges where investors’ funds are considered the best protected.
The extensive study, carried out by comparison website BrokerChooser, employed a swathe of metrics to score the world’s crypto exchanges over regulation, consumer protection, market fairness and transparency to reveal the safest exchanges for investors.
Three exchanges registered a perfect score of five out of five when it came to regulation – FTX US Derivatives, Gemini, and Kraken Futures. Two exchanges – KuCoin and Bybit – scored the lowest with one out of five.
No exchange managed the full five points under consumer protection, but Gemini came close with 4.8. Worst performer in this category was OKX, and was the only exchange to score just one out of five.
Two exchanges got full marks when it came to market fairness, with FTX US Derivatives and Bittrex ahead of the pack. Again, OKX and Bybit – together with Gate.io – came out as the worst-performing exchanges.
Transparency is key to ensuring that consumers feel protected, and in this category Coinbase ranked top. A large number of platforms scored poorly over transparency with six different exchanges all scoring just one out of five – including Binance, OKX, KuCoin, Gate.io, Bybit and Phemex.
With an overall safety score of 4.1/5, Coinbase was found to be the safest. It was also ranked as a tier 1 exchange for the majority of sub-categories, largely because of its robust security features.
In second place was FTX US Derivatives with an overall safety score of 4.0/5. It fell into tier 1 for the majority of the factors in the BrokerChooser index.
Bitstamp took the bronze position with 3.8 points, largely due to keeping 98 per cent of assets offline in cold storage.
Commenting on the findings, BrokerChooser’s Head of Legal – Zoltan Kormanyos – said Coinbase’s recent warning that customers could be viewed as general unsecured creditors was a risk disclosure confirming risks associated with crypto.
“As a publicly listed company, Coinbase had to disclose and confirm this fact in an official regulatory document,” he explained.
“The problem here is simply stemming from the unregulated nature of crypto and cannot be simply associated with Coinbase only. “Now that these risks are known and confirmed, what retail investors can do is check what kind of safeguards might be available for them when things go wrong on an exchange.”
