Kraken vs Bybit.

Which is safer? — the sourced record

Both venues are MiCAR-licensed a month apart in 2025 — Bybit via Austria’s FMA (decision 2025-05-28, European HQ in Vienna), Kraken via the Central Bank of Ireland (announced 2025-06-25, plus MiFID and e-money licences). Their proof-of-reserves programs are the strongest two in our comparison, with different cadences: Bybit monthly, Merkle-tree, audited by Hacken with on-chain wallets (December 2025: BTC 105%, ETH 101%, USDT 102%); Kraken quarterly, auditor-assisted, with per-client self-verification across spot, margin, futures and staked assets (~$21.5B verified in March 2025).

The incident records are very different in scale. Bybit absorbed the largest crypto theft on record on 2025-02-21 — approximately $1.4–1.5B in ETH via compromised third-party wallet infrastructure, FBI-attributed to Lazarus — and the documented operational response is why its score did not collapse: withdrawals stayed open, 99.994% of over 350,000 requests were processed within ~10 hours, the gap was closed within ~72 hours, and 1:1 backing was restored and subsequently audited, with no user losses reported. Kraken’s heaviest recent entries are a June 2024 zero-day balance-inflation bug (~$3M withdrawn by security researchers, patched in 47 minutes, funds returned) and an AUD 8M Australian court order over a margin product (December 2024). Kraken, founded 2011, has no platform-wide withdrawal halt documented in 36 months of public status history.

India’s FIU penalty against Bybit (~$1.06M, paid, with registration completed in February 2025) rounds out its regulatory record; Kraken’s US chapter closed with its SEC suit dismissed with prejudice in March 2025, after a $30M staking settlement in 2023. The live scores above weigh every entry with 24-month decay — the sourced basis, incident by incident, is one click away on each venue page.

Which is cheaper? — what stays true between snapshots

The live cards above carry the published base-tier fees and the measured all-in cost of the same $1,000 BTC buy — the spread component is measured fresh against each orderbook. Both venues publish a fixed BTC withdrawal fee (shown live above from their published schedules), so the withdrawal leg is comparable on this page.

One stable Kraken caveat: its Instant Buy flow carries a curated typical markup of roughly 1.5% spread plus 0.9% processing (150–240 bps, verified 2026-06-10) that the spot orderbook does not. Bybit has no curated convert row — not assessed, which is a coverage statement, not a zero. Our table prices spot on both venues.