Why volume tells you nothing
Start with what is useless to compare. Daily volume is the first thing any ranking shows and it means almost nothing: venues count it differently, and on some platforms the top of the list is occupied by tokenised equities with fantastical figures.
How far that distorts the picture showed up while preparing our comparison: one venue's total came to 227 billion dollars against Binance's 9 billion, entirely thanks to tickers like RSPY and RNVDA. So we left volume out of the table altogether.
What to look at instead
Book depth. The only thing determining whether your order fills at the visible price. Check it on your actual pair, not in a ranking: look at what rests in the book at your size.
Withdrawal networks and their fees. For cross-venue arbitrage this matters more than price. The coin has to move, and if two venues share no network the route is impossible in principle. The fee does not scale with the amount: a thousand and ten thousand over TRON cost the same.
The maker tariff. For same-venue schemes it decides everything. MEXC's zero maker fee is the reason triangular arbitrage works almost exclusively there today.
P2P coverage. If you work with fiat, the number of currencies and advertisements matters more than everything else combined.
What rankings usually omit
Two things worth knowing before you fund an account.
Regulatory history. Binance, OKX and KuCoin have all settled with US authorities in recent years, for sums in the hundreds of millions and billions. Not a reason to avoid them, but a reason to understand why source-of-funds checks have tightened.
Hack history. Bybit lost around one and a half billion dollars in 2025 — the largest theft in the industry's history. KuCoin lost 280 million in 2020, BingX tens of millions in 2024. In all three the exchange covered the loss and users were unaffected, and that matters more than the breach itself: what counts is the venue's ability to close the gap from its own resources.
The practical conclusion
There is no single best exchange — different jobs need different ones. Binance and OKX for deep spot, MEXC and Gate for a wide listing, MEXC for same-venue schemes because of the zero maker fee, Binance and OKX for P2P. Walkthroughs of each venue with live network and fee data are in the exchanges section.
And a rule independent of the choice: keep on an exchange what you trade with, not what you have.