MEXC: 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.

The surprise of this table. MEXC publishes a monthly Merkle-tree proof covering liabilities, and it is attested by a named third-party security firm — putting it in a category almost nobody else in its tier reaches. The most recent snapshot we could see was June 2026, with reserve ratios well above 100%. A $100m Guardian Fund, explicitly scoped to hacking and “unforeseen risks” rather than derivatives liquidations — and, uniquely here, it publishes an on-chain address you can actually go and check. That is the difference between a fund and a claim. It has never been tested by a payout, because MEXC has never been hacked.

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: 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: 10/10

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 10 of 10 against a category median of 6.5, which places it 1st of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 9% weight that is 0.32 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

~2,175 spot pairs across ~1,734 coins — the widest catalogue in the table

Fiat on/off ramp: 5/10

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 5 of 10 against a category median of 5.5, which places it 15th of 28 among centralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 11% weight that is 0.06 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.

EUR via SEPA, both ways — the only full bank rail. Everything else is card or peer-to-peer.

KYC and access: 7/10

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

Published: 80 BTC/24h at the entry tier, 200 BTC once advanced. Withdrawal requires verification. United States: The United States is a Prohibited Jurisdiction in MEXC’s own user agreement. European Union: None — absent from the ESMA register. No CASP authorisation. Two regulators have issued unauthorised-firm warnings: the Dutch AFM (September 2025) and Germany’s BaFin (2023). Whether it cut off EEA users at the 1 July 2026 deadline could not be sourced.

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.