Warnings, fines and bans per exchange

A fine makes the news. A warning does not. Yet that second list often says more about an exchange than the first: a regulator that warns the public does so because it cannot enforce anything itself. Below you will find both, plus the cease-and-desist orders and the withdrawn licences — 91 decisions, per exchange, with the source alongside.

What you see here

This overview contains four kinds of intervention, and the difference between them matters.

A warning is a notice to the public: this party has no licence with us. No penalty is attached to it. A cease-and-desist order goes further — the service provision in that country must actually stop. A fine is an imposed sanction, and a withdrawal means that a licence has gone.

We only include what we could trace back to the regulator itself. Of the 91 lines below, 88 refer directly to a press release, register or decision of the body in question. The three exceptions are listed at the bottom under the sources, with the reason.

What is nót in it is at least as important. Claims we could not substantiate with a working source — and there were about ten of those — we left out instead of publishing them with a caveat.

Personal fines are not in here — those are about people, not about exchanges. Changpeng Zhao personally paid $200 million and served four months; the three founders of BitMEX $60 million between them. Those are in the fines overview.

Per exchange, oldest first

Sixteen exchanges have one or more entries. They are in order of how many there are; within each exchange the oldest decision is at the top. Bittrex is still included because the fine is public, but that exchange no longer exists.

Binance 7× warnings · 7× fines · 6× cease-and-desist orders · 1× withdrawal

Our review of Binance →

MEXC 8× warnings · 1× cease-and-desist order

Our review of MEXC →

Bitget 9× warnings

Our review of Bitget →

Coinbase 5× fines · 2× court cases · 1× cease-and-desist order

Our review of Coinbase →

Bybit 5× warnings · 3× fines

Our review of Bybit →

BitMEX 5× fines · 1× warning

Our review of BitMEX →

Kraken 4× fines · 1× court case · 1× cease-and-desist order

Our review of Kraken →

Bitfinex 3× fines · 1× warning · 1× cease-and-desist order

Our review of Bitfinex →

OKX 4× fines

Our review of OKX →

Gemini 3× fines · 1× court case

KuCoin 4× fines

Bitstamp 1× fine · 1× cease-and-desist order · 1× court case

Our review of Bitstamp →

Crypto.com 1× fine

Our review of Crypto.com →

Hyperliquid 1× warning

Our review of Hyperliquid →

HTX (voorheen Huobi) 1× court case

Bittrex 1× fine

Four exchanges without a single entry

This is not a leftover category but a finding. For these four we found no warning, fine, cease-and-desist order or withdrawal at any regulator.

The pattern: almost never the trading itself

Read the ‘for what’ column from top to bottom and something stands out. Hardly any decision is about the trading, the prices or the product. They are almost all about the gate: operating without registration, taking on customers who have not been checked, failing to report suspicious transactions.

The second constant is that the same exchange is licensed in one country and on a blacklist in another. That is not a contradiction. A licence applies per jurisdiction, and an exchange that has a stamp in Lithuania or Malta has nothing with it in Japan or Australia.

There is a ranking in it too. Twenty of the 91 lines are about Binance alone, and there are seven countries among them that did not consult one another. That is something other than one regulator being strict.

And note the dates. The Japanese regulator wrote to Bybit in 2021, 2023 and 2024. If a warning is repeated, that means the first one had no effect.

How you should read this — and how not to

A warning is not a conviction. Regulators put parties on a list because they have no licence, not because anything has been proven. Some of those parties do have a European licence by now; Bybit, for example, is no longer on the French blacklist.

Conversely: no entry does not automatically mean better. It can also mean that an exchange is younger, or smaller, or never tried to serve markets where it had no licence. That last point is precisely the point, by the way.

The question that counts when choosing an exchange is not how many rows sit under a name, but: does this party have a licence in your country, and who can you turn to when it goes wrong.

Keeping it up to date

This list is a snapshot and it changes. Regulators take parties off their list if a licence does arrive after all, judges reduce fines on appeal, and new decisions are added.

We recheck the sources periodically and state the reference date. Is something not right, or are you missing a decision with a public source? Let us know — we will adjust it and mention when.

Sources and accountability

Every line in this overview refers to the body that took the decision. Sources used include: DNB and AFM (Netherlands), FCA (United Kingdom), BaFin (Germany), AMF (France), CONSOB (Italy), CNMV (Spain), FSMA (Belgium), KNF (Poland), Finanstilsynet (Norway), MFSA and FIAU (Malta), FSA and the Kanto Local Finance Bureau (Japan), SFC (Hong Kong), Securities Commission (Malaysia), ASIC (Australia), OSC and the Alberta Securities Commission (Canada), FIU-IND (India), CVM (Brazil), CIMA (Cayman Islands) and in the United States DOJ, FinCEN, OFAC, CFTC, SEC, NYDFS, DFPI, the attorneys general of New York and Oregon and the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation. Three lines do not rest on a primary source: Binance's undertaking to the Ontario Securities Commission (press release distribution), the Dutch fine on Crypto.com (DNB published the decision without a name; the link follows from the amount, the date and news reporting) and the judgment of the court of appeal in Grenoble against Bitstamp (two independent legal analyses, the full ruling is not publicly available). Amounts are in the currency in which they were imposed; we do not convert them and we do not add them up, because different bodies sometimes offset each other's amounts. Reference date 2 August 2026.