The year 2022 saw a historic breakdown of trust in exchanges and other crypto service providers. The collapses of Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Alex Mashinsky’s Celsius are still fresh in the community’s memory, with SBF’s criminal trial only recently concluding. These cases serve as a painful reminder that fraud and bad business practices can happen in corporations of any size and that crypto, as a nascent industry, is especially susceptible. A sleek website, high trading volume or primetime television ads are no guarantee that a customer’s savings will be safe.
To advance the industry, it is imperative to set new standards for centralized third-party service providers in crypto. To this end, a new report from Cointelegraph Research surveyed nine major crypto exchanges — Binance, Bit2Me, Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Bybit, Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN), HTX, Kraken and OKX — and compared them with a particular focus on consumer and funds protection.