Bybit: 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.

Among the best here: monthly, liability-inclusive via a Merkle tree, and attested by a named third-party firm — most recently in June 2026, at over 100% coverage of every in-scope asset. The verification tool is open source. The famous ~$986m “insurance fund” is a derivatives liquidation backstop, not theft cover, and we do not count it as one. What Bybit has instead is the only thing that ever really counts: a proven ability to pay. In February 2025 it lost roughly $1.4–1.5bn — the largest exchange theft on record — through a compromised third-party signing tool rather than its own systems. Withdrawals never stopped, the gap was closed in about 72 hours, and no user lost money. That is not a promise; it happened.

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: 8/10

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 8 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 5th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 11% weight that is 0.22 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

Assets and networks: 7/10

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 7 of 10 against a category median of 6.5, which places it 11th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 9% weight that is 0.04 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

Solid coverage of the majors; a thinner long tail than the leaders

Fiat on/off ramp: 2/10

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 2 of 10 against a category median of 5.5, which places it 21st of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 11% weight that is 0.39 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

The weakest fiat rails in the table, and it is not close: direct fiat in and out exists in exactly two currencies. Everything else routes through cards or peer-to-peer.

KYC and access: 8/10

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 8 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 2nd of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 8% weight that is 0.16 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 1.

Tiers and limits published in full, including exactly what a non-KYC account cannot do. Better disclosure than most. United States: The United States is an Excluded Jurisdiction in Bybit’s service agreement. There is no Bybit US retail platform. European Union: MiCA CASP — FMA (Austria). Bybit EU GmbH, licensed May 2025. But the authorisation does NOT cover operating a trading platform, order execution or derivatives — so the European product is materially narrower than the global one.

Product, API and docs: 6/10

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

Good API documentation with explicit rate limits. No status page with uptime history.