How We Review Exchanges

The short version

We score exchanges on six criteria, each 0–5, against evidence the exchange itself publishes. Commission, payout rate and partnership tier are not criteria, are not inputs to the score, and are not arguments to the scoring function in the code.

No exchange appears on this site — with or without a referral link — until its record has been filled in, checked against primary sources, dated, and marked verified.

The six criteria

Criterion	What is assessed	Evidence
Fee transparency	Is the full schedule published, current and legible, including tiers?	The venue's own fee page
Security practices	Published policy, audits, bounty programme, incident disclosures	The venue's security pages and post-incident reports
Regulatory disclosure	Registrations the venue publishes, checkable against the register	Regulator registers
Education quality	Is the venue's own educational material substantive and free of promotion?	The venue's learn section
Learner usability	Order types, demo mode, clarity for a first-time user	Direct examination of the platform
Support transparency	Published channels, hours and response commitments	The venue's support pages

The overall score is the mean of the six, expressed out of 100. There is no weighting, because weighting is where a thumb goes on a scale.

What is deliberately excluded

Commission and partnership terms. Excluded structurally, not by policy alone: the scoring function takes only the six criteria as arguments, so commercial terms cannot enter it without a visible code change.

Bonuses and promotions. Sign-up offers are marketing, they change constantly, and they are the least relevant factor in whether a venue suits you.

Volume and popularity rankings. Size is not quality, and volume figures are difficult to verify independently.

Price predictions, coin lists and "best coin to buy" content. Out of scope for this site entirely.

How money reaches this site

Some links to exchanges are referral links. If you open an account through one, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Where that applies, it is disclosed next to the link itself, not only in the footer.

Three safeguards:

1. Commission is not a scoring input. See above.
2. A record with no verified referral link still gets reviewed and published. The absence of a commercial relationship does not remove a venue from the site.
3. No call to action renders for an unverified record. If a record is not marked verified and its referral URL is not present, no link is shown — not a disabled one, not a placeholder. The gate is enforced in one function that every call to action passes through.

Full detail in the affiliate disclosure.

Verification and re-checking

Every record carries a verification date and the list of source URLs it was checked against. Both are shown on the review page.

Records are re-checked on a scheduled cadence. When a re-check changes a score, the change and its reason are recorded. When we get something wrong, we correct it under the correction policy — dated, and saying what changed.

What a review is not

It is not a recommendation, and it is not personal advice. A high score means a venue publishes more checkable information than a low-scoring one. It says nothing about whether trading there — or trading at all — is appropriate for you.

Current state of this installation

This build ships with placeholder records only. No real exchange has been reviewed, no referral relationship exists, and no referral link is published. Every record shows its placeholder status openly.