How our exchange ranking works, and what sits outside it

Our exchanges section lists 16 venues and orders them by 24-hour trading volume. A scheduled job rewrites those volumes once a day, and the page carries the timestamp of the last change, so you can see how stale the number is. One thing worth knowing before you read any ranking, ours included: paid placements sit above the list and never inside it.

The figures come from CoinGecko, which reports exchange turnover in bitcoin rather than dollars, so we convert each number with the bitcoin price at the moment of the refresh. That conversion is why our totals move slightly against sites that snapshot at a different hour.

What volume measures

Volume is the default sort, and it answers one question: where the most money is changing hands. It says nothing about custody, insurance or whether you can open an account from your country. Two other sorts sit next to it, by founding year and alphabetically, and every filter and sort has its own address, so a list of P2P venues above a volume floor is a page you can bookmark or send to someone.

The seven with a licence

Seven of the 16 carry a licence badge. We set that badge against a regulator's own record, not against the exchange's marketing, and it marks a licence rather than our endorsement of the venue. The other nine operate without one in the jurisdictions we track. Which jurisdictions those are, and what each of them permits, sits on our regulation map.

Kraken and Bitstamp are the oldest names in the list, both from 2011, and Crypto.com Exchange is the newest, from 2019. Age sits on every card because a venue that came through 2014, 2018 and 2022 has been tested by three different kinds of market.

Inside each exchange page

Every card opens into the same five sections: an overview, regulation and regional availability, the products the venue runs, our news about that exchange, and reader reviews. The news block is why the pages stay current without anyone editing them. When we publish something about Kraken, it appears on the Kraken page that day.

Reviews are the thin part, and we would rather say so than pad the number. Two readers have left one so far.

How to use it in five minutes

• Sort by volume to see where liquidity is, then open the two or three names you recognise.
• Read Regulation and Availability before Products. A venue you cannot legally use is not a shortlist candidate.
• Check the founding year and the licence badge together. Old and licensed is a different risk from old and unlicensed.
• Use the news block on the card. A quiet exchange page usually means a quiet exchange.

Rankings like this one earn money from the exchanges they list. That is why the ordering rule and the paid slots are printed on the page itself. If you find a number there that disagrees with an exchange's own reporting, tell us, and the correction gets the same weight as the original.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.