The question of the security among the cryptocurrency exchanges stays a sensitive topic for all traders and investors. After the hacking attack on the Facebook’s access tokens and the Cambridge Analytica case, the web security became even a more worrying issue.
The research group of ICOrating published a new inquiry with a detailed check up of the most popular crypto exchanges. The rating agency motivates the need of that research explaining that:
Over the past 8 years, about 31 crypto exchanges have been hacked and more than a 1 billion dollars (actually, $ 1.3 bn) stolen. Some of the crypto exchanges learned from their mistakes and managed to recover, the others went bankrupt and several the most “happy” ones, such as Mt.Gox, Bitcoinica, PicoStocks, Bitcurex, have been attacked even multiple times.
Now, the number of crypto exchanges offering services keeps emerging. New ones open almost every day and billions of investors go online to make funds. These facts, of course, attract hackers as ‘bees to honey’, as they say, and the safety issue is alarming.
The research focused only on exchanges with more than a million USD of trading volume per day and the total number of platforms is 100. The parameters of examination include four main categories, each with subcategories and a range of points. The four central features of observation are the following:
- Console Errors
- User Account Security
- Registrar and Domain Security
- Web Protocols Security
The result of the Console Errors analysis showed the erratic number of 32% of all exchanges have code disruptions, which would lead to defects and leaves them vulnerable to breaches.
The second category is crucial for all traders and investors. Unfortunately, here the level is not so high, too, because only 46% of all platforms meet the security requirements (which are passwords with more than 8 characters, verification process, etc.).
For the Registrar and Domain Security, the inquiry reassured users that there are no exchanges which do not reply to all criteria. Though, there are just 4% scoring 4 out of 5 for this test.
And the last one, Web Protocol Security, showed that only 10% possess all the security headers and 29% have absolutely no headers.
All in all, ICORating prepared a table ranking all 100 exchanges. Coinbase Pro ranks #1 with 89 points, meeting almost all criteria. On the last place stays OKCoin.cn with only 15 points. Here is an excerpt of the top 10:
Even though Coinbase Pro ranked so high, the trading volume charts show differently.
BitMEX holds the premiership in 24 hours trading volume with the significant 16.43% of the whole cryptocurrency market, followed by bitFlyer with 16.39%. Binance stays third with 6.9%, according to CoinHills. Here are the top 10 performers:
