OKX
3.8/10 total
A large custodial spot and derivatives exchange with full identity verification before you can trade. In February 2025 its operating company, Aux Cayes FinTech Co. Ltd, pleaded guilty in the Southern District of New York to running an unlicensed money transmitting business and paid over $504 million; the DOJ said staff had coached US customers on entering false countries of residence to get past verification. That is a resolved enforcement matter rather than a live threat to deposits, and OKX relaunched a separately run US entity in April 2025 under an external compliance consultant that runs through February 2027.
Scores
Weights are published in the method and applied identically to every entry.
For
- Base spot fees of 0.08% maker and 0.10% taker are low in absolute terms, well under half a percent
- Deep order books across spot, perpetuals and options on one account
- Documented public REST and WebSocket API with keys issued from the account dashboard
- The 2025 DOJ matter is closed with an agreed compliance monitor, so the regulatory overhang is defined rather than open-ended
Against
- Mandatory identity verification with document and liveness checks before any trading
- Fully custodial: OKX holds the keys for as long as your balance sits there
- Pleaded guilty in February 2025 to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, forfeiting roughly $420.3 million and paying an $84.4 million fine
- No verified onion service and no usable no-JavaScript path
- Historically served US users who lied about residency, which is a poor signal about how residency screening was enforced
Agent access 5/10
Full documented REST and WebSocket API, but it needs a verified account and issued API keys, so an agent with only a funded wallet cannot start from zero.
Reported separately and not counted in the total. It measures what an autonomous agent can do unattended, not whether the service is safe to use.
Fees
0.08% maker / 0.10% taker
Base-tier spot rates for a regular (Lv1) account before any volume or OKB-holding discount. Higher tiers fall toward 0.015% taker, so the quoted numbers are the worst case for a normal user, not the average.
Specification
- Type
- Custodial exchange
- KYC policy
- KYC required
- Custody model
- custodial
- Account required
- yes
- Assets
- 300+
- Chains
- 60+
- Operating since
- 2017
- Jurisdiction
- Seychelles
- Onion service
- no
- Works without JS
- no
- Open source
- no
- Facts checked
- 2026-07-31
Links
Plain links, no referral parameters. Verify the domain yourself; phishing clones of every service in this table exist.