Poloniex
2.6/10 total
One of the dominant altcoin exchanges of the 2014 to 2017 era, now a much smaller venue majority-owned by Tron founder Justin Sun. On 10 November 2023 its hot wallets were drained of roughly $126 million across Ethereum, Tron and Bitcoin, including 875 BTC and over 288 million TRX. Sun confirmed the breach and said affected funds would be reimbursed because the exchange held a healthy financial position; we could not find a public confirmation that reimbursement was completed, and the venue publishes little that can be checked from outside.
Scores
Weights are published in the method and applied identically to every entry.
For
- Still operating after more than a decade, with a public market data API that works without an account
- The 2023 hot wallet loss was publicly acknowledged by its owner rather than denied
- Retains a long tail of older altcoin pairs that newer venues never listed
Against
- Mandatory identity verification before trading
- Lost roughly $126 million from hot wallets in November 2023, and we found no public confirmation that the promised reimbursement was completed
- Publishes almost nothing checkable from outside: no readable fee schedule, no disclosed operating entity or jurisdiction
- Much thinner liquidity than in its 2017 peak, so quoted prices can move against size
- Fully custodial, no verified onion service, no no-JavaScript path
Agent access 4/10
Public market data endpoints respond without authentication, but trading needs a verified account and issued keys, and the documentation is thinner than its peers.
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
not published on a readable page
We could not read a base-tier spot fee schedule without logging in: the public fee page renders nothing without JavaScript and an account. Treat any fee figure you see quoted elsewhere as unconfirmed until you can see it inside your own account.
Specification
- Type
- Custodial exchange
- KYC policy
- KYC required
- Custody model
- custodial
- Account required
- yes
- Assets
- 300+
- Chains
- 20+
- Operating since
- 2014
- Jurisdiction
- undisclosed
- 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.