LBank: crypto exchanges rating breakdown

Custody of funds: 2/10

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 2 of 10 against a category median of 5, which places it 26th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 40% weight that is 1.20 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 1.

An announcement, not a proof. LBank pledged a Merkle-tree proof of reserves in 2022 and published an article about disclosing “select Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet addresses” in 2024. We found no live portal, no self-verification tool, no dated snapshot and no auditor. Disclosing some of your wallets is not a proof of reserves; without a liability total it says nothing about whether your balance is backed. A $100m fund — for futures traders hit by price wicks, paying 120% on liquidations caused by a bad candle. It has nothing to do with theft of your assets.

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: 3/10

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 3 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 24th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 11% weight that is 0.33 points below the median contribution 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.

~823 spot pairs across ~801 coins

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.

Could not be sourced.

KYC and access: 1/10

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 1 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 28th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 8% weight that is 0.40 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 1.

No tier table and no withdrawal limits published anywhere we could find. United States: LBank’s user agreement excludes residents and entities of the United States and mainland China. European Union: None — absent from the ESMA register. No EU country appears on its restricted list, so it serves EU users with no CASP licence after the transition closed.

Product, API and docs: 4/10

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 4 of 10 against a category median of 5.5, which places it 27th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 5% weight that is 0.07 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.