How to Verify a Crypto Exchange in Four Checks

The procedure below is the one used to produce every entry in this site’s verification logs. It is written so that you can run it yourself, on any platform, without trusting this site’s conclusions — which is the point. It takes about fifteen minutes and it is worth considerably more than fifteen minutes of reading reviews.

Step 1 — The regulator’s register, not the company’s claim

This is the highest-value check and most people skip it, because a licence number printed on a website looks like the check has already been done for them. It has not. Anyone can print a number on a page.

The correct move is to go to the regulator’s own site and search there. In the United States, a business transmitting money — which includes cryptocurrency exchanges under existing federal guidance — is required to register with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and FinCEN publishes what that registration involves and maintains a searchable registrant list. Other jurisdictions maintain direct equivalents, and the national financial regulator’s site is the place to start in each case.

Two things worth knowing about the result. Registration is a floor, not a seal of approval — it means a business is visible to regulators and has filed the required paperwork, not that it is well run or that your funds are insured. But its absence, for a platform actively soliciting customers in that jurisdiction, is a serious finding on its own.

Step 2 — Ask who paid for each favourable article

Search a platform’s name and you will usually find articles. The question that matters is not how many, but who published them and on what basis.

Source type	What it actually is	Evidential weight
Paid press-release wire	The company’s own text, submitted and paid for, printed unverified	None — equivalent to the company’s homepage
Company-operated blog, forum space, or social profile	Self-published marketing	None
Content marketing on a third-party blog	Often paid placement; check whether the site discloses sponsorship	Low, and unclear without disclosure
Independent reporting by an established publication	Journalism, with an editor and a correction policy	Meaningful
Regulatory filing, enforcement action, or court record	A primary document	Highest

Press-release wires are easy to identify once you know to look: their domains say so, and the pages usually carry an explicit line noting the release was supplied by the named company. A platform whose entire favourable footprint sits in the top two rows of that table has told you something.

Step 3 — Check the aggregators

The major market-data aggregators list nearly every exchange with meaningful trading volume, and publish reported volume alongside their own confidence signals about whether that volume looks real. This check takes under a minute.

Read the result carefully rather than as a pass/fail. A genuinely new or deliberately niche venue may not be listed yet, which is unremarkable. What is not unremarkable is a platform describing itself as globally established and high-volume that does not appear at all — that is a direct contradiction between the claim and the record.

Step 4 — Test the exit before trusting the entrance

Every platform in this category makes deposits easy. That is not evidence of anything; it is the part of the process they most want to work. The informative test is the reverse direction.

Where you have decided to proceed at all, move a small amount in and then immediately withdraw it back out to a wallet or account you control, before committing anything that matters. What you are looking for is not whether the withdrawal is instant — genuine platforms have delays, review queues, and network confirmation times — but whether it completes at all, and whether attempting it produces a demand for a payment that was never mentioned at deposit.

A displayed balance is a number the operator renders on a page. A completed withdrawal is the only proof of custody.

Signals that carry less weight than people assume

Some checks feel reassuring and are close to worthless, which matters because relying on them can substitute for the four steps above.

• A professional-looking interface. Templates are cheap. Visual polish tells you about a budget, not about custody of funds.
• Testimonials and star ratings on the platform’s own site. Self-published and unverifiable by construction.
• Named partnerships or media logos, unless confirmed from the other side. A logo grid is an image file. Check whether the named partner mentions the relationship anywhere on its own site.
• A long list of supported assets. A list is text on a page and costs nothing to extend.
• An active social media presence with high engagement. Both are purchasable and routinely purchased.

None of these are evidence that a platform is fraudulent, either — legitimate exchanges have polished interfaces and social accounts too. The point is narrower: they do not distinguish between the two cases, so they cannot do the work of the checks that do.

Putting it together

Run the four checks in order and stop early if the first one fails badly. A platform actively soliciting deposits in a jurisdiction where it holds no traceable registration, with no coverage anybody did not pay for, is not a close call requiring the remaining steps.

Applied to a specific case, the method produces something like our log on XDY Exchange — a set of dated entries, each recording what was checked and what came back, that you can re-run and disagree with. See the methodology page for what each verdict in those logs means.

Frequently asked questions