Bitstamp: crypto exchanges rating breakdown

Custody of funds: 7/10

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 7 of 10 against a category median of 5, which places it 6th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 40% weight that is 0.80 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 1.

None — and this is the one that deserves a raised eyebrow. Bitstamp publicly committed to a proof-of-reserves audit in November 2022 and, as far as we can find, never shipped it. Its own page even argues that transparency “goes well beyond the snapshot in time evidence provided by a PoR”. What it offers instead is an annual audit by an unnamed Big Four firm whose reports are not published — which you cannot check, and which is therefore not equivalent to a Merkle-tree proof. A genuine crime policy — not a derivatives backstop: employee theft, computer fraud and funds-transfer fraud, brokered by Paragon and underwritten at Lloyd’s of London. Real protection. But Bitstamp has never stated its size; the widely-quoted “$300m” traces to 2021 trade press, not to Bitstamp, so we do not repeat it.

True cost of trading: 6/10

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 6 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 14th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 16% weight that is exactly level with the median of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

Liquidity and execution: 5/10

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 5 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 17th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 11% weight that is 0.11 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

Assets and networks: 4/10

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 4 of 10 against a category median of 6.5, which places it 24th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 9% weight that is 0.23 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

~187 spot pairs across ~100 coins — a deliberately short list

Fiat on/off ramp: 9/10

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 9 of 10 against a category median of 5.5, which places it 2nd of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 11% weight that is 0.39 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

Strong: EUR (SEPA and Instant SEPA), USD (ACH, wire) and GBP (Faster Payments) — direct deposit and withdrawal, not a third-party gateway.

KYC and access: 5/10

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 5 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 17th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 8% weight that is 0.08 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 1.

Level 1 / Level 2 tiers exist, but the actual withdrawal limits are not verifiable before sign-up. The figures circulating online appear only on review farms, so we do not publish them. United States: Served via Bitstamp USA, Inc. Acquired by Robinhood in June 2025 and now branded “Bitstamp by Robinhood”. We could not source a definitive list of excluded states, so we do not publish one. European Union: MiCA CASP — CSSF (Luxembourg). Bitstamp Europe S.A., licensed May 2025; covers trading platform, order execution and custody across the EEA.

Product, API and docs: 8/10

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 8 of 10 against a category median of 5.5, which places it 3rd of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 5% weight that is 0.13 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 4.

Documented API rate limits (400 requests/second), and one of the few venues here with a real status page publishing 90-day uptime per component.