Bitrue: crypto exchanges rating breakdown

Custody of funds: 3/10

Proof-of-reserves: does it exist, who attests it, does it include liabilities (a PoR without liabilities is close to meaningless), how often. Insurance fund: size, is the address public, and has it ever actually paid out. Hack history — and above all whether users were made whole. Licences by jurisdiction, and the enforcement record behind them. Every claim here is sourced to a primary document: a regulator’s register, a court filing, or the venue’s own published proof.

Scored 3 of 10 against a category median of 5, which places it 19th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 40% weight that is 0.80 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 1.

A promise from 2022, in the future tense: a third party “will conduct” an annual audit. It never happened. There is no Merkle tree, no reserve ratio, no attestor and no report. What Bitrue does publish is the address of its insurance wallet — which proves a company reserve exists, and says nothing about whether your balance is backed. Genuinely designed as a theft fund, which is rarer than it should be: Bitrue commits in writing to reimburse users from it after a hot-wallet breach, and publishes the wallet addresses. Two problems. It states 25m XRP; the address held roughly 18m when we checked it on-chain. And a large part of the fund is Bitrue’s own exchange token — an asset that would collapse in precisely the scenario the fund exists to cover.

True cost of trading: 10/10

Measured by us, not read off a fee page. We walk the live order book and fill $1,000 / $10,000 / $100,000 of BTC/USDT, then add the venue’s published taker fee. That sum — fee + spread + realised slippage — is the effective cost. Separately: the markup on network withdrawal fees, and the hidden spread inside “convert” / “buy in one click” flows.

Scored 10 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 1st of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 16% weight that is 0.64 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

Liquidity and execution: 6/10

Order-book depth within ±0.1% and ±0.5% of mid, measured from the live book. Uptime over 12 months from the status page. Behaviour under stress: were there outages on days the market moved more than 5%.

Scored 6 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 12th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 11% weight that is exactly level with the median of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

Assets and networks: 8/10

Number of pairs, adjusted for quality: the share of listings delisted within a year. Which networks are actually supported for deposit and withdrawal — not merely “supports USDT”.

Scored 8 of 10 against a category median of 6.5, which places it 6th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 9% weight that is 0.14 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

1,642 actively trading spot pairs, fetched live from its own API

Fiat on/off ramp: 1/10

Which methods are actually available per country, their fees, and their limits per verification tier — read from the venue’s published terms and cited. Where a venue does not publish this, that opacity is itself the finding, and it scores accordingly.

Scored 1 of 10 against a category median of 5.5, which places it 22nd of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 11% weight that is 0.49 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

None. A third-party card on-ramp for buying only. There is no way to withdraw fiat at all.

KYC and access: 6/10

Verification tiers and their limits, what is genuinely usable without verification, and the country deny-list — from the venue’s published policy, cited. A venue that will not tell you your withdrawal ceiling before you sign up is marked down for it.

Scored 6 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 14th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 8% weight that is exactly level with the median of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 1.

Published: 2 BTC per withdrawal at the entry tier, 500 BTC once fully verified. United States: Its terms exclude the United States, mainland China, Hong Kong, Canada, India, Singapore and the Netherlands. European Union: None — a Polish VASP registration is not a MiCA licence. Absent from the ESMA CASP register. Its own terms exclude the Netherlands.

Product, API and docs: 5/10

API documentation quality, whether rate limits are documented, whether a public status page with uptime history exists, and the API response latency we measured ourselves while pulling the order book.

Scored 5 of 10 against a category median of 5.5, which places it 15th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 5% weight that is 0.03 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 4.

Documented API and rate limits. No status page.