How we score crypto exchanges

Exchange evidence comes mostly from regulators and from the exchange itself. Registers tell us who is licensed or registered, where and for what. The exchange's fee schedule, terms of service and help centre tell us what it charges and offers. Court filings, regulator notices and the company's own incident reports tell us what went wrong and how it was handled.

Some documents need context before they can be used. The US audit regulator's staff has warned that proof-of-reserves reports "are not audits", cover one point in time and may not address liabilities. Since the October 2026 checks, a review says what a report covers and does not treat it as a guarantee; the May 2026 exchange reviews have not yet been re-checked on this point.

Why do review sites never count as evidence?

Because they are often out of date and sometimes wrong, and we cannot see their sources. A claim that only appears on another review site does not appear in ours. Marketing numbers, such as user counts, are attributed to the exchange that published them.

Since October 2026, through four checks, in this order. A page that fails any of them does not ship. The exchange reviews predate this process; the paragraph after the example says how they were checked.

1. Claim ledger. Every factual statement (fees, dates, licences, incidents, user numbers) goes into a table with its current value, the source URL, the publisher, the source's own date and the date we opened it. We cut any claim that has no fetched source.
2. Adversarial challenge. A separate second pass re-opens the sources for every high-stakes item (money, licences, incidents, lawsuits) plus a random 30% of the rest. Where the two passes disagree, the challenge wins.
3. Sentence-level QA. On the finished draft, every sentence that states a fact must map to a ledger row or a fetched source. We fix or delete any sentence that does not map.
4. 100-point audit. The audit scores the finished page out of 100 on content quality, search optimisation, sourcing and expertise signals, technical structure and how easily search and AI tools can cite it. Below 75, the page does not ship. The target is 85.

What does a catch look like?

While researching our US exchanges guide in October 2026, the challenge pass found that two review sites said OKX's US platform does not serve Texas. OKX's own US licences page, dated 15 September 2026, lists a Texas money transmission licence, number 3574. We used the exchange's page, and the review sites' claim never reached ours.

The exchange country guides went through this full process in October 2026. The fourteen exchange reviews are dated between May 21 and 22, 2026. They were checked under the May 2026 version of the process, which verified each page's highest-stakes claims (usually 10 to 20) rather than every sentence. On the Binance, BTCC, Bybit and Kraken reviews that check covered the scores and data fields, not the long-form text carried over from the old site. The other exchange reviews were rewritten in May 2026. Nine exchange reviews described tests we have no record of, such as order timings and support response times; those passages were removed on October 17, 2026, and the reviews keep their May dates because nothing else in them was re-checked. The methodology overview explains how the two versions differ.

No. Skrumble does not open exchange accounts, deposit money, place trades or file support tickets. Every exchange review is desk research; the May 2026 reviews do not yet list their sources with dates, which the October 2026 process adds.

So a score cannot tell you how long verification took for one person, or how a support agent answered on a given day. What it can tell you is whether the exchange's published fees, licences, listings and track record hold up against primary sources, and how that compares with the other exchanges we cover. Fees in a review are the published rates; the cost you pay can differ with your payment method, account tier and the spread at the moment you trade.

One thing desk research does well is reading the fine print. The UK regulator, for instance, tells consumers that crypto is "largely unregulated in the UK" and that FSCS protection is "highly unlikely" to apply, and a UK review should say so plainly.

Our target is at least every six months. Each exchange review shows the date it was last updated, and the table above repeats it. These events trigger an earlier check:

• a change to the fee schedule, including the simple-buy spread
• a licence or registration granted, refused or withdrawn, including decisions under the EU's MiCA regime
• a hack, a withdrawal freeze or an insolvency filing
• the exchange leaving or entering a country
• an enforcement action or a court ruling

If a review is more than six months old, check its updated date and the sources it links to before relying on a fee or a licence.

Tell us through the contact page, with the claim and the source that contradicts it. We re-open the primary source. If the review is wrong, we correct it, re-check any pillar score the fact feeds, move the review's updated date and record the change and its source in the research file.

A corrected fact does not always move a score, because each pillar is set relative to the other exchanges we cover. When a score does change, this page's table changes too, since both read the same data.

No. The overall score is calculated from the five pillar scores and nothing else, so commission terms have no way into it. Today none of the fourteen exchange reviews links out with a referral code. The Visit buttons open the exchanges' own websites.

Many exchanges run affiliate programmes, and Skrumble keeps a record of their terms. If a review ever links out through a partner link, Skrumble can earn a commission when you sign up, and the Visit buttons on reviews are marked as sponsored links. Country guides list only exchanges with a published review, and their order is an editorial call explained in each entry, not a ranking by commission. No exchange approves a review before it is published. The full disclosure is on how we make money.