The site's referral record is not registered; the code, benefits and commercial arrangement in the account-opening guide remain unverified. Precisely because that relationship exists, this page reaches no conclusion about any platform's compliance. Full disclosure.
What "regulated" means on each platform's own terms
This page is deliberately restrained. We do not judge which platform is more compliant — that needs a qualification we do not have. What we can do is separate the words and show you how to check.
"Regulated" has no single meaning. It can describe a licence that took substantive review to obtain, or a registration that took filling in a form. In marketing copy the two look identical.
Three words used interchangeably
Licence, registration and authorisation get treated as synonyms. Their strength differs a lot.
A licence usually means a regulator examined the firm's capital, controls, personnel and business model, supervises it afterwards, and can withdraw the permission. It is expensive to obtain and correspondingly meaningful.
A registration usually means the firm filed what it was required to file — commonly an obligation under an anti-money-laundering framework. The regulator knows it exists; it has not necessarily examined how it operates. In many jurisdictions the bar is not high.
A filing or notification varies more still, sometimes close to registration, sometimes only an information submission.
Why the distinction is worth money
A firm that has only completed an anti-money-laundering registration can accurately say it is "regulated by" a named authority. The sentence is literally true. But the reader hears "someone is examining this firm", when the reality may be closer to "someone knows it exists". That gap is the whole point of this page.
Licensed there is not protected here
Regulation has a geographic and functional scope. A licence obtained in one place covers the business and customers that fall inside its terms. If you are outside that scope, the licence may mean very little for you in practice — you are neither within the local complaints process nor covered by any local compensation arrangement.
Directly related to this is which legal entity you are contracting with. A brand often runs several entities serving different regions. The licence shown on the website may belong to one; the agreement you accept may be with another. Checking is easy: open the user agreement and read the opening lines naming the counterparty.
We met a concrete version of this while checking fee sources: one exchange brand's global site and US site are separate entities with separate fee tables, differing by more than three times on the taker side. The fee structures page has the detail. Different entity, different prices, different responsible party.
How to check a claimed number
This is the practical part. Four steps, no specialist background needed.
- Find the number. Usually in the footer, the terms page or the "about" page. If there is only a claim of being regulated and no number at all, that claim cannot be checked — which is itself information.
- Look it up in the issuing authority's own public register. Not a screenshot or a restatement from the platform. Most authorities publish a searchable register.
- Check three things: that the entity name matches the one you are contracting with; that the status is current rather than revoked, suspended or lapsed; and that the permission scope covers the activity you intend to use. A payments registration is not authorisation to run a crypto exchange.
- Look at the dates. Registers usually show when the permission was granted and last updated. An entry untouched for years is worth a second look.
What this produces is not "this platform is compliant" or "this one is not". It produces "what they said is, or is not, accurate". The first needs professional judgement; the second only needs you to check.
Common phrases and what they leave out
| What you will see | What it does not say |
|---|---|
| Regulated by X | Which category of permission, covering which activities, and whether your region is inside the scope |
| Registered in X | Company registration and financial-services authorisation are different things; anyone can do the first |
| Holds licences in several countries | Which entity holds each one, and which entity you are contracting with |
| Compliant with X standard | Whether anyone independent verified it, or whether it is self-asserted |
| User assets are protected | By what mechanism, funded by whom, with what cap and what triggers |
The right reaction to these phrases is not suspicion but filling in the right-hand column. The answers are usually in the terms page; they just need looking up.
What being regulated does and does not get you
The reason to care about any of this is a practical question: if the platform fails, does regulatory status help you? The answer is more limited than most people assume, and it varies by what the permission actually covers.
In traditional finance, certain regulated activities come with a compensation scheme — a fund that pays customers up to a cap when a firm fails. Crypto activities frequently sit outside those schemes even when the firm holding the permission is otherwise regulated, because the scheme covers specific defined activities and this is often not one of them. A firm can therefore be genuinely, meaningfully regulated while your holdings with it are entirely uncovered.
What regulation more commonly delivers is different and still worth having: conduct requirements, reporting obligations, complaint routes, and a body with the power to intervene. Requirements to keep client assets segregated, where they apply, matter a great deal in an insolvency — they decide whether your assets are yours or part of the estate.
Which produces one question worth more than the licence number itself, and it is answerable from the terms page rather than a register: are client assets held separately from the firm's own, and does the agreement say so? The answer, either way, tells you more about your position if things go wrong than any regulatory badge on the homepage.
The other half of the practical question is where a dispute would be heard. A permission granted in a jurisdiction whose complaints process you cannot realistically use, under an agreement specifying a venue you cannot realistically reach, is a set of rights that exist on paper and not in a form you could exercise. That combination is worth checking together rather than separately.
Keep the entity trail, not the badge
If the amount you are placing on a platform matters to you, save the small set of documents that establishes the relationship: the version of the user agreement you accepted, the legal entity named in it, the public-register result for that entity, and the page describing the complaint route. A marketing page saying "licensed globally" is not part of that trail because it does not identify what applied to your account.
The reason to keep copies is not distrust. Websites change, entities migrate customers between affiliates, and terms are replaced. If a later dispute turns on which company held the account or which version of a segregation clause applied, today's live page may describe a different arrangement. A dated copy lets you show what was represented when you funded the account. It is far more useful than a screenshot of a regulator logo with no entity name attached.
Read the four documents together. A register entry can be current while the agreement sends your account to another entity. The correct entity can be named while the permission covers only a narrower activity. A permission can cover the service while the complaint route excludes customers outside a particular region. None of these facts cancels the others; the relationship is the overlap among them.
When to run the check again
Regulatory status is not a permanent attribute of a brand. Permissions can be varied, suspended or surrendered; customer contracts can move to a new entity; and products can be offered by different affiliates under the same interface. Rechecking on a calendar is less useful than rechecking when something material changes.
Useful triggers are a new user agreement, a notice that your servicing entity is changing, a move to another country, access to a new product, or a meaningful increase in the balance you leave on the platform. Each trigger changes at least one part of the earlier answer. The check is the same one: entity, current status, scope, client-asset language and complaint route.
If the answer is hard to reconstruct from primary documents, that difficulty is information in its own right. It does not prove misconduct. It does tell you that enforcing your position later may also be difficult, and that is a legitimate input into how much exposure you are willing to leave there.
What this page will not do
We do not rank, score, or say which platform is more compliant. Three practical reasons.
First, the source contains an exchange referral arrangement that is not yet registered, so this site should not claim a neutral position on the question. Second, judging compliance requires legal and regulatory expertise we do not have. Third, this status changes quickly, and a fixed conclusion starts misleading people within months.
Only the method holds up over time. The four steps above will work next year and the year after; no list of "compliant platforms" will.
If what you actually need is an overall check before funding an account, the seven-item checklist puts regulatory verification in its proper place — important, but not first.