Check the foundation first.

• What happens to your account if the venue fails 5 Nov 2026 / safety

  If the venue holding your account fails, trading and withdrawals stop first, and an insolvency practitioner takes control of everything that is left. What you get back depends on whether your money and coins were held as your property in a segregated client pool or simply recorded as a debt the venue owed you, and on which legal entity signed your account agreement. Property held for you sits outside the failed firm's estate; a debt owed to you joins the queue of creditors.

• Dealing desk or straight-through: who is on the other side of your trade 4 Nov 2026 / safety

  A dealing desk broker takes the other side of your trade itself: when you buy, it sells to you from its own book, so your loss is its gain. A straight-through broker passes your order to an outside liquidity provider and earns from a markup or commission instead, so it does not hold the opposite position. The first model creates a conflict of interest; the second removes that conflict but hands you the outside provider's pricing, which can be worse in thin conditions.

• Clone firms: when the licence is real and the website is not 3 Nov 2026 / safety

  A clone firm is a fake broker that borrows the identity of a real licensed one: the same company name, the same registration number, often a copied website on a slightly different address. The licence it quotes is genuine, which is why checking the licence alone passes. What fails is everything that moves money, because the deposit details and the contact channels belong to the clone, not to the licensed firm.

• Cold storage and hot wallets: where an exchange keeps your coins 2 Nov 2026 / safety

  A hot wallet is a private key sitting on a machine connected to the internet, so it can sign a transaction the moment one is needed. Cold storage is a key kept on hardware with no network path, so moving funds out of it requires a deliberate human procedure. Every venue that lets customers withdraw must keep some funds hot, because withdrawals arrive at unpredictable times and cold storage cannot answer them on demand.

• Offshore licences: what you give up, and what you get 1 Nov 2026 / safety

  An offshore licence is permission to operate issued by a jurisdiction that asks less of the firm: less capital, lighter reporting, and usually no compensation fund if the firm fails. Brokers hold them because the lighter rules allow products and leverage their strict entities cannot offer, and because onboarding is cheaper. What you get is access and flexibility; what you give up is the enforcement machinery that would otherwise sit behind your balance.

• Investor compensation schemes: who pays when the firm cannot 31 Oct 2026 / safety

  An investor compensation scheme is a pooled fund, usually financed by levies on licensed firms, that pays a capped amount to clients when one of those firms fails and cannot return their money or assets. It covers the failure of the firm, not the performance of your trades. Eligibility depends on which legal entity holds your account and whether that entity is a member of the scheme, which is not always the entity whose brand is on the website.

Where people trade

Published figures from each venue's own fee schedule and terms. Broker Bedrock does not claim its own account measurements, and a link being a referral link never changes the order.

Our editor's pick for whether your money is safe where it sits is OKX. Read why before you act on it.