Gemini

Gemini is a New York trust company, and that charter is the answer to most of this question. A NYDFS trust charter imposes a fiduciary standard and capital requirements that a money-transmitter licence — what most US exchanges hold — does not. Alongside it sit audited financials, Deloitte SOC reports, and $200m of theft insurance placed through a captive insurer.

That insurance deserves emphasis because so little of it in this industry is real. Most exchange "insurance" is either a self-declared fund with no published trigger or a policy covering the operator rather than the customer. Gemini’s is scoped to theft and it is large.

It publishes no proof of reserves, and we take points for that: an audited balance sheet is evidence you accept, not evidence you check. It is the same gap Coinbase has, and the same defence applies — supervision and audit instead of cryptography.

The strongest single data point is behavioural. When the Earn programme collapsed, Gemini customers received 100% of their assets back in kind. Compare that with the standing record of this industry, where "reimbursement pledged" usually means nothing was independently confirmed years later, and it is exceptional.

One practical note, because the search data makes it necessary: people looking for "is Gemini safe" are now as likely to mean Google’s AI assistant as this exchange. They are unrelated companies sharing a word.

We score Gemini 3 out of 10 on cost and 3 out of 10 on liquidity, which are two of the lowest marks in the rating and the reason a well-run, well-regulated venue finishes mid-table overall.

Its retail pricing is among the least competitive in the category, and the order book is correspondingly thin: a trade large enough to matter moves the price further here than at the venues carrying real volume. Both of those cost you on every transaction, forever, in a way a charter does not offset.

The fiat side is genuinely strong — 9 out of 10 — so moving dollars in and out is easy, which matters more to some users than the spread on the trade itself.

The defensible case for Gemini is narrow and real: if what you want is a US fiduciary custodian with insurance you can point at, and you are not trading often enough for the spread to dominate, the charter is worth paying for. If you are trading regularly, the arithmetic is against it and no amount of regulatory quality changes that.