There’s only one A-Tier decentralized exchange

Do your own research. 

You hear it often in crypto. It’s an admirable directive, encouraging self-reliance and trust in one’s own judgement. But it can feel impossible given the cacophony of chains, protocols, tokens, and exchanges. 

DefiLlama has made it easy to understand and compare chains, protocols, and tokens. Now, we’re making it easy to understand and compare exchanges. 

Our brand-new Find my Exchange tool lets you see which exchanges list the tokens you own, which exchanges work in your country, the fees they charge, and much more.

Real rankings 

Find my Exchange was inspired by the unexpected popularity of DefiLlama’s MiCA dashboard, which lists the exchanges subject to the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation. 

“There was demand not just to use DefiLlama for research, but really to use it as a discovery platform for different types of crypto apps,” Patrick Scott, DefiLlama’s chief revenue officer, said. 

“What we learned was, people were interested in using it to discover things to use, not just to buy. Historically, most of the site has revolved around metrics [used] to decide whether or not to invest in something.”

Find my Exchange lists more than 50 exchanges, centralized and decentralized. They’re ranked in tiers, with scores based solely on metrics DefiLlama could measure or verify.

DefiLlama isn’t the first to rank exchanges. But most earlier attempts rank exchanges on volume, a self-reported and easily manipulated metric.  

Find my Exchange uses what we’re calling the REAL ranking. It scores exchanges on:

• Reserves on chain or in filed accounts

• Execution from tick-level fills

• Activity, in the form of volume and open interest our own order-book snapshots could support 

• Liquidity, in the form of resting depth we observed

The final score is the weighted mean of those four pillars. Reserves and execution each account for 30% of an exchange’s score.  Activity and liquidity both count for 20%.

The S-tier required a rating of at least 85, a bar only Binance cleared due to its exceptional activity and liquidity scores. Hyperliquid was the highest-rated decentralized exchange. It was also the only A-tier DEX. 

For the most part, Find my Exchange does not punish exchanges for metrics we can’t measure. For example, if we couldn’t measure an exchange’s reserves, we didn’t give it a zero in that category. Instead, its weight was redistributed over the pillars we did measure.

Traders might find the execution data especially useful. Among other things, it considers the all-in cost of a $10,000 order at the exchange’s base fee tier and actual slippage at fixed order sizes.

On-ramps and off-ramps 

Find my Exchange also provides valuable data on the most basic aspects of exchanges’ operations, including the cost of converting fiat to Bitcoin or Bitcoin to fiat; the rails the exchanges rely on; the fiat currencies they accept; and the types of documents and verification steps they require.

Take Coinbase. In the US, converting $1,000 to Bitcoin costs $7.62. Converting $1,000 in Bitcoin to USD costs $6.11. On-ramp rails include ACH, FedWire, SWIFT, and cards. To use the exchange, you need to provide a government ID and a selfie. 

Maybe you don’t live in the US, though. Maybe you live in Germany. There, a $1,000 fiat-to-Bitcoin round-trip on Coinbase will cost $26 (almost double what it costs in the US). On-ramp options are limited to SEPA and cards, and using the exchange will require a proof of address in addition to a selfie and one’s government ID. 

Maybe you find that a bit expensive or burdensome. In Germany, that same round-trip will cost almost $8 less on Kraken, which accepts additional fiat currencies and requires fewer documents to use. 

Maybe you’re just interested in a single token. A token finder tool lets you find the exchanges that list that token, filtered by country. 

Find my Exchange is now the home for some preexisting DefiLlama dashboards, including centralized exchange reserves and exchange’s markets.