The naked truth about crypto exchanges: ranking of the best and worst exchanges in the world

Today there are about 300 crypto exchanges in the world, of which only about 20 deserve at least some attention. I analyzed the ratings of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges and from them I chose all Russian-language exchanges with deposits and withdrawals in rubles. It turned out that there are only 5 of them and they are all small!

I will tell you about these exchanges what is not written in other reviews, that is, the whole truth. I will also tell you about the 5 largest international exchanges and whether Russian citizens can work with them.

All other reviews on the Internet are the same article, which different copywriters copy from each other. This review of exchanges is based on my personal experience with them.

• Top 15 cryptocurrency exchanges (list of the most famous and 2 of my favorites!);
• review of the Top 10 best cryptocurrencies for investment;
• the best way to earn bitcoins;
• how to buy bitcoins cheaply in Russia.

A little poetry or how to choose a reliable cryptocurrency exchange?

For me personally, it is important that the exchange is created by well-known investors with a good reputation. What is important to you? How do you choose an exchange? If the owners of a cryptocurrency exchange are very rich, they have only successful projects in their business portfolio and they value their reputation, then if something happens to the exchange, they will save it and invest money in it. And that's why…

Why I don’t like getting involved with anonymous Russian companies, or how two large exchanges went bankrupt

There was such an anonymous Russian cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e. In 2014, it ranked third in terms of trading volume of bitcoins for dollars. Its owner was unknown. In the summer of 2022, the exchange was closed by the FBI. Reuters announced the detention of Alexander Vinnik on July 25, 2022 on charges of money laundering. In documents from the US Department of Justice, Alexander Vinnik is named as one of the leaders of a criminal organization that laundered money using bitcoins and the BTC-e exchange.

He may not have laundered money, but who needs all this trouble? Companies founded by well-known Western venture funds, large entrepreneurs and financiers, or at least simply our compatriots who do not hide their name, work experience and history, do not find themselves in such situations...

Someone might argue that, for example, the closed Mt.Gox exchange was not Russian and anonymous, yes, I agree, it belonged to the Frenchman Marc Karpeles, but it cannot be said about him that he has a good reputation, and personally I trust companies more created by reputable funds or well-known successful people with a good reputation, aimed at creating a large business.

I personally don’t work with anonymous sites with unknown founders and leaders.

Therefore, I was faced with the question - which exchange is the most reliable? How not to lose your funds? For this purpose, I studied all the largest exchanges by turnover and received answers to the following questions:

1. Where to check ratings of cryptocurrency exchanges?
2. Which exchanges work with deposits and withdrawals of money in rubles?
3. What exchanges are there in Russian?
4. Which exchanges are the most reliable? Which one to choose so as not to burn out?

At the end of the article I will write which exchange I chose for myself to work with. Why did you choose it and what are the risks involved? Let's start with where you can find information about all the existing exchanges.

LiveCoin

Go – https://www.livecoin.net/

Country: UK

Domain registration: 03/04/2014

LiveCoin is a convenient platform for trading cryptocurrency targeting users from all over the globe. The first evidence of this fact is the multilingual nature of the site: English, Russian, French, Italian, Turkish, etc. The site also contains a training video for novice miners and brief illustrated instructions for working with the exchange.

Advantages of the exchange:

• simple and convenient interface;
• a large number of couples;
• relatively low commission (from 0.02% to 0.2%);
• cryptocurrency can be sold/purchased/exchanged;
• prompt completion of all operations;
• replenish your account with any currency;
• work with OkPay, Payeer, Capitalist, PerfectMoney;
• possibility of withdrawal to Visa and MasterCard cards;
• lack of mandatory verification;
• support for 2FA, SSL and DDoS protection;
• Bitcoin rate bets;
• Availability of Russian-speaking technical support.

Disadvantages of the exchange:

• low trading volumes on forks;
• possible delays in payments;
• large commission for small amounts;
• lack of telephone support.

Rating of crypto exchanges in the world

It seems natural to me to compare cryptocurrency exchanges by turnover and work with the largest market players. Therefore, I check the ranking of exchanges by turnover on the website cryptocompare.com, where there is a chart of the largest exchanges by turnover:

Chart-rating of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world by turnover

As you can see, the TOP 5 largest crypto exchanges are:

1. Bitfinex.
2. Coinbase (GDAX).
3. Bitstamp.
4. Kraken.
5. Gemini.

But this data changes over time. Do these exchanges work with Russians? Read on.

Can you trust cryptocompare.com? The answer is simple - you can’t, I don’t trust you. Many exchanges fake their turnover. There are even some freelancers who provide services for increasing the turnover of crypto exchanges. You can additionally check the data from this service on an equally popular website: CoinMarketCap.com. To evaluate an exchange, I rely on these two sites, as well as what the press writes about a particular exchange, reviews on the Internet and my personal experience.

Investment

This is an option for those who do not want to trade shorts all day. The basis of this method of earning money is creating an investment portfolio with stable assets and promising, but more risky ones.

The composition of the portfolio is tailored to the investor and his acceptable level of risk that he can absorb. But the most difficult thing is to choose cryptocurrencies for investment. After all, you need to make sure that the project is developing, it has a future, it is popular in the market, and the value of the tokens will only increase.

If everything is done correctly, then the investor invests funds and only occasionally records the factors of rising or falling prices. Next, the right moment is selected to sell in order to obtain maximum profit.

Rating of cryptocurrency exchanges in Russian with input and output in rubles

I studied in detail the Top 20 exchanges on the website cryptocompare.com, and it turned out that almost all the largest exchanges are not available in Russian, except for the largest bitfinex.com. But not everything has been translated into it. Previously, on this exchange the minimum amount required to operate was $10,000. Now they work with a minimum payment amount of $25 and you can top up your balance with a bank card.

And five more exchanges are available in Russian and allow you to deposit and withdraw funds in rubles using Visa/Mastercard bank cards, as well as Webmoney and Yandex Money through the Qiwi payment system. It turned out that all exchanges that are well translated into Russian also work with rubles. These are the exchanges:

Table of Russian-language crypto exchanges with input and output in rubles

What can you say about these exchanges? REVIEW OF CRYPTO EXCHANGES IN RUSSIAN

Unfortunately, all these exchanges are small and I know nothing about their creators. Those. they are anonymous. If problems arise, no one will fight for their reputation. And all these exchanges have bad reviews on the Internet.

If you type a query like “exchange name” plus the word “scam” (fraud in English) into the Google search bar about any of these exchanges, then a lot of bad reviews will appear about all exchanges. Further details about each of the Russian exchanges.

FINNISH EXCHANGE LOCALBITCOINS - my choice for buying bitcoins for rubles

Website: LocalBitcoins.net.
The only exchange that I have a lot of confidence in is LocalBitcoins. It is not anonymous, decentralized, and is recommended by Forbes and other Western media.

Here's what the American Forbes magazine writes about this service: “Use LocalBitcoins to find people who are willing to buy your bitcoins for regular money” in the article: “How to travel the world for bitcoins.” In this article, they recommend using this particular exchange to exchange bitcoins for local currency.

LocalBitcoins is not exactly an exchange, it is an intermediary platform so that Bitcoin owners can safely sell and buy Bitcoins from each other in any country in the world. This service is also called a decentralized exchange, and I don’t know of any others that are as large and well-known. There is definitely no other service like this in the Top 20 exchanges. Yes, this site only works with bitcoins. And they do not charge any commissions for transactions from ordinary users, that is, you can buy or sell bitcoins there without commission. And only those who trade professionally and place advertisements for buying and selling bitcoins will have to pay 1% of the amount of each transaction.

This is a Finnish company founded in 2012 by Jeremys Kangas. The fact that the company has existed for so long, it is not anonymous, its owner is not hiding, it is recommended by Forbes and other world publications write about it - all this inspires confidence in me. Of course, this does not insure against bankruptcies, etc., but, you see, it still inspires more trust than some anonymous small Russian sites.

In addition, as it turned out, taking into account commissions for depositing and withdrawing money, the rate for buying and selling bitcoins for rubles on this exchange will be the same as on four other Russian exchanges. And if you need to buy other cryptocurrencies, then you can first buy bitcoins on LocalBitcoins, and then buy other cryptocurrencies with bitcoins not on small Russian exchanges, but on the largest international ones. But for this you will need at least basic knowledge of English.

I myself work with localbitcoins and I like it. The only negative: you can only buy and sell bitcoins there, but the plus is that bitcoins can be bought by any means (Visa/Mastercard, Qiwi, PayPal, bank transfer, WebMoney, Yandex Money, personal meeting in your city).

There is another service similar to LocalBitcoins - bisq.network, which is open source, you can install the program on your computer and trade directly with other people. This is a very interesting service and is definitely worth trying, but I’m somehow more accustomed to trading on LoklaBitcoins.

RUSSIAN EXCHANGE CEX – former miners, Wikipedia and 22 cryptocurrencies

Website: cex.io.

Of all the exchanges listed above, the largest is CEX, which was registered in 2013 in London, and before that, as written on Wikipedia, its owners specialized in mining and owned the “GHash.IO” pool, which in 2014 covered 42% of the total capacity Bitcoin mining.

A couple of years ago they traded only 9 coins, but now they have 22 coins, which means the exchange is developing.

As written in the English-language Wikipedia, the owner is someone “Oleksandr Lutskevych”. And he came up with a cool name - “sex” in Russian.