The exchange register method
How is the exchange register built?
24 exchanges are on the register, and 14 hold an authorisation confirmed in an issuing register rather than claimed. 9 publish a proof of reserves, and 2 of those are attested by anybody else. 23 have terms that let them freeze an account. 185 clauses are quoted from their binding documents. No score is published on this register.
Documents last checked Reviewed by CryptoGuardz Register Desk, editorial desk
An exchange holds your coins. Everything on this register follows from that: which company is actually holding them, what a regulator has confirmed about that company rather than about a sibling, what a reserves page proves, and what the contract permits the holder to do with the balance while it holds it.
What goes on the register
A centralised exchange is included where it takes custody of user assets, serves retail users without an invitation, and publishes terms of service that could be retrieved. There are 24 entries. The order is not a ranking: they are ordered by how much of the counterparty the documents let a reader see, with the entries whose contracting entity could not be placed in any jurisdiction first.
What a registration check means
A registration is counted only where two things hold at once: the row is an authorisation, and the entry was found in the issuing authority’s own published register file rather than on the exchange’s website. 14 of 24 pass that test. Every confirmation records the register file, the date it was downloaded and the row as it read.
What a confirmed authorisation is not is a statement about the company you contract with. These registers are European, and a European authorisation is granted to a European subsidiary. eToro's confirmed authorisation is held by eToro (Europe) Ltd. The entity named in the terms that bind a user outside the European Economic Area is eToro (Europe) Limited, which is a different company in a different jurisdiction with a different regulator, or none. Printing the first as the holder of the second would credit one company with another company’s licence, which is the exact confusion this register exists to undo. So the holder is read out of the register row, never out of the entry’s own entity block.
A registration an exchange asserts somewhere and that no register confirmed is recorded as an unconfirmed claim, with the page it was claimed on. It is not counted, and it is not called false either. 10 of the 24 entries hold no confirmed authorisation at all.
Adverse registers
Regulators also publish registers of entities operating without authorisation. Those are read too, and a row recording that search is kept whether it found anything or not, because a search that returned nothing and a search nobody ran are different states. 1 of the 24 entries appear on such a register.
A row is treated as an adverse listing only where its own text describes a listing. A row whose text opens with the words Negative check is a search that found nothing, and the build now refuses a file in which the boolean beside such a row says otherwise. That check exists because the boolean was once set the wrong way on two entries, and a template that trusted it would have published that two named exchanges sit on a regulator’s non-compliance register.
What proof of reserves is tested against
Two questions, kept apart. The first is whether anything is published at all: 9 of 24. The second is whether what is published was signed by somebody other than the exchange, and that is the question the word proof is doing the work of. 2 of the 9 published exercises name an accountant, an auditor or an attestation firm. The test is written so that it stops returning that answer the day one of them publishes an engagement, rather than being a sentence somebody has to remember to update.
A reserves page shows assets. It does not show liabilities, it is a snapshot at a moment the exchange chose, and the scope limitation is usually written on the page itself. Where the exchange states that limitation in its own words, the entry quotes it rather than paraphrasing it. No entry treats a published reserve ratio as a solvency finding, because nothing on a reserves page supports one.
What the clauses record
185 clauses are quoted verbatim across the 24 entries, on the topics that decide what happens to a balance: account freeze, withdrawal suspension, asset segregation, insolvency, forced liquidation, unilateral amendment, arbitration and jurisdiction. Every one carries the URL it was read from and the date. Nothing is paraphrased, because the drafting is the finding.
Absence of a clause is itself recorded. 9 of the 24 entries contain no insolvency clause, which leaves a reader to infer their position as an unsecured creditor from a document that declines to state it. 1 of the 24 have a binding document that could not be retrieved at all, and on those entries the clause findings describe the European document only and are never read across.
What is not measured
No exchange on this register has been tested. No deposit has been made, no withdrawal has been timed, no order has been placed and no support ticket has been opened. Nothing here measures liquidity, spread, uptime, execution quality or whether an exchange pays out, and nothing here is derived from user reviews or complaint volume.
Nothing here audits a balance sheet. The register records what a reserves exercise claims and who signed it, which is a documentary finding and not an assurance one.
Why there is no score
There is no score on the exchange register and there is not going to be one until there is something to compute. The casino score has five components that were defined and weighted before anything was scored. Here there are no components: a confirmed European authorisation, a pooled-assets clause and a missing insolvency clause are not commensurable, and no weighting between them exists that anyone has argued for in public. 24 entries is also too few for a rank to mean anything other than the order they were read in.
A score is a claim that the things being compared differ along one measured dimension by a stated amount. Nothing in this register supports that claim, so a number here would be a measurement nobody made, dressed as one somebody did. The register publishes the fields instead and lets a reader weigh them, which is the part a single figure removes.
No Review, Rating or AggregateRating markup is emitted on any page in this section either, because none of those describes what is on the page.
How an absent value is written
| Token | What it means | On this register |
|---|---|---|
| Not measured | The measurement is in scope and we have not made it yet. The gap is ours. | Used for everything a desk cannot establish, such as execution quality or whether a withdrawal completes. |
| Not applicable | The concept does not fit this kind of entity at all. Reserved for a type mismatch, never for a count of zero. | Reserved for a field that cannot apply to an exchange. A count of zero confirmed authorisations is written as none, not as not applicable. |
| Not disclosed | The company publishes nothing on the point. The gap is theirs and it is a finding about them. | Used where the exchange publishes nothing, such as an entity number absent from the terms. |
| No data | We looked and either nothing exists or nothing would load. The gap is in the record. | Used where a page would not load or a register returned nothing, including a reserves page that rendered without reserve data. |
Corrections
If an entry about an exchange is wrong, send the primary source that corrects it to the address on the contact page. A correction needs the document, not a request: a link to the clause, the register row or the page that shows the recorded value is not what it was on the date we read it.
Corrections are published with their date at corrections, and the original value stays visible rather than being edited away. A change to what an entry records about a company is logged at the change log on the day it is made. A register whose history can be rewritten quietly is not a register.
Commercial disclosure
CryptoGuardz holds commercial affiliate relationships with 3 of the 24 operators on the casino register, named in full at the disclosure page and named again on every page that carries one of them. Being paid through them is the intended model rather than a description of the current build: no outbound link here carries affiliate tracking yet. No exchange on this register is a commercial partner, no page in this section carries an affiliate link, and no exchange has been contacted for comment before publication. No commercial relationship is an input to anything computed on this site, and the build rejects a data file that tries to set a derived value by hand.
The data
The register is published as a CSV with every column, its row count and its known gaps at the data page, and the entries themselves are at the exchange register.