Guide · Choosing an exchange

Four criteria fee pages won’t tell you.

Which exchange is “the best” is a question we don’t answer — Skontro recommends no venue, and every trading decision is yours, made on the platform of your choice. What can be answered structurally: what to check before entrusting an exchange with money — and where each criterion can be verified with measured, sourced data instead of marketing copy.

True cost at your order size

The advertised fee is a quarter of the truth. What matters is what a trade of your size costs all-in: fee plus measured spread plus network plus withdrawal. That is exactly what the live comparison measures across eleven venues — ten of them measured from live orderbooks — and the DEX route, ranked by what arrives with you, net. Check a venue not by its banner, but by its row in the comparison, at your order size.

To the live cost comparison → · background: understanding hidden fees

Reliability: will you get your money out?

The cheapest price is worthless if the withdrawal freezes. The Reliability Score rates every venue in the comparison across six dimensions: withdrawal reliability, proof of reserves, regulatory standing, security history, support quality and operational maturity. Every negative datapoint is dated and sourced; older incidents lose weight linearly over 24 months; no score can be bought.

And because the cheapest and the most reliable venue need not be the same, the comparison shows both numbers side by side — cost and score, reported separately, never blended into each other.

To the Reliability Scores → · background: exchange reliability, explained

Withdrawal fees — the exit toll

Published withdrawal fees differ between venues by more than a factor of 60 for the same asset on the same network (BTC, official fee schedules, verified 2026-06-10) — enough to erase a fee advantage on smaller trades entirely. Some venues publish no fixed number at all and pass through the live network fee instead; that is a data point, not a gap, and our tables print exactly that.

To the withdrawal fee tables →

What it costs to leave

An exchange choice is also a chain choice: when you later move coins to your own wallet or another platform, the venue’s supported networks and their fees decide what the move costs. The same asset can carry very different published withdrawal fees depending on the network — checking the route before the account exists is cheaper than discovering it after.

A quiet extra criterion while you’re on the venue’s API page: does the exchange offer API keys that can be restricted to read-only? Skontro imports history through such keys only — on connect, a key is technically validated as unable to trade, and that check repeats every seven days.

To the live Move check → · background: the cheapest way to move crypto