Last updated: 15 October 2026. The ranking currently covers 10 exchanges. I’ll add more over time, as they prove worth including.
Why You Should Trust This Ranking
I’ll say this upfront: I earn money through referral links to the exchanges I’m rating. That’s the standard model for comparison sites in this space, and I’m not hiding it (more detail on the Affiliate Disclosure page). To keep the ranking useful instead of promotional, I:
- publish the criteria and weights publicly and don’t change them after the fact to favor any one exchange;
- calculate 5 of the 7 criteria automatically, every day, from a transparent formula built on public data, with no subjective guesswork (exact formulas below);
- clearly label the other 2 (30% of the weight combined) as my own personal judgment, instead of passing them off as objective fact;
- pull volume and liquidity figures from an independent source (CoinGecko), not from what each exchange claims about itself.
Scale and Formula
Every exchange gets a score from 1 to 10 on each of 7 criteria. The final score is a weighted average, rounded to one decimal place. In the automated criteria, the best value among the ranked exchanges gets 10, the worst gets 1, and the rest fall in between proportionally. If two exchanges tie, the one with the higher CoinGecko Trust Score ranks above the other; if that’s tied too, higher 24-hour trading volume breaks the tie. A score only appears once all 7 criteria are filled in, including the two I assess personally.
Criteria
Licensing: 20% (automated)
Registration status in a public regulator’s registry (for example, ESMA for MiCA in the EU): licensed → 10 points, unlicensed → 4 points. Registry: ESMA. The verification date, the licensed entity’s name and the source are on each exchange’s review page.
Ukraine Market Support: 20% (personal assessment)
Direct or P2P UAH trading pairs, support for Ukrainian payment systems, and a Ukrainian-language interface. I assess this from each exchange’s official sources and recheck it periodically. It is a single 1–10 judgment across those factors: there is no points table or formula. This one’s a legacy of where eTop started: if you’re not trading from Ukraine, it won’t matter much to your own decision, but it’s part of why an otherwise strong exchange can still score lower here than on a purely global ranking.
Fees: 15% (automated)
Half the score is the taker fee and half is the minimum USDT withdrawal fee; each is scored between the best and worst values in this list. A lower fee scores higher. The fee is the spot rate at the base tier (VIP 0); futures fees appear in the table for reference and do not affect the score.
Reputation: 17% (automated)
Average of two independent signals: the official app’s rating in the Ukrainian App Store storefront (0–5 scale, converted to 0–10) and the main domain’s Tranco popularity rank on the same scale across the exchanges in this list: a better rank scores higher.
Liquidity: 15% (automated)
Equal to CoinGecko’s Trust Score, an independent assessment of order-book depth and reliability, not a figure the exchange reports about itself.
Ease of Use: 10% (personal assessment)
My own judgment of the interface and mobile app, based on actually using them, with no formula.
Coin Selection: 3% (automated)
Total trading pairs plus listed coins, on the same scale: more scores higher. Deliberately low weight: a huge number of listings isn’t always a sign of quality, since some exchanges list hundreds of obscure tokens, so this is a minor bonus factor rather than a major one.
What’s Shown in the Table but Doesn’t Count Toward the Formula
“Trust Score” is the same independent CoinGecko figure that directly makes up the Liquidity criterion above; I show it separately for transparency. “Verified” is the date of the last data check for the exchange, not a quality indicator. “Bonus” is promotional information about the new-user reward on the exchange’s sign-up page and doesn’t affect any score. “Reserves” is the balance held in the exchange’s publicly tracked wallets per CoinMarketCap data. It is not an audited figure, not available for every exchange, and not part of any score either.
How Often the Ranking Updates
The 5 automated criteria (Licensing, Fees, Reputation, Liquidity, Coin Selection) recalculate daily, along with the rest of the table’s data. I review and update the 2 personal-assessment criteria (Ukraine Market Support, Ease of Use) roughly once a month, and off-schedule when I learn of a major incident at one of the exchanges.
Limits of This Methodology
Scores reflect the state of things as of the check date. Exchanges can change fees, terms, and feature availability without notice, so always confirm current terms on the exchange’s own site before signing up. The automated criteria rank exchanges against each other within this specific list: adding a new exchange can shift other exchanges’ scores even if nothing about those exchanges actually changed.