Bybit

Bybit prices itself against Binance rather than against the fiat-friendly European exchanges, and it shows.

Spot is 0.1000% maker and 0.1000% taker for non-VIP accounts, on bybit.com and on bybit.eu alike, falling through a VIP ladder driven by 30-day volume and account balance. Against Bitstamp's entry tier of 0.30% and 0.40%, or Kraken's 0.40% and 0.80%, that is a large structural advantage for anyone trading regularly.

USDT perpetual contracts are 0.0200% maker and 0.0550% taker at the standard tier, with the same base rates on inverse contracts. Binance's equivalent is 0.0200% and 0.0500%, so Bybit is fractionally more expensive on the taker side and identical on the maker side. Options are USDC-settled and priced from a separate schedule quoted against the index price with a cap expressed as a share of the premium — a different unit, so no headline figure is recorded here.

The cost that catches people out is not a Bybit fee at all. The funding rate on perpetual contracts changes hands between longs and shorts every eight hours. On a position held for weeks it routinely dwarfs the 0.0550% taker charge, and in a strongly trending market it can run to several percent annualised in either direction. Anyone comparing Bybit's perpetuals with a conventional futures contract on cost alone is comparing the wrong numbers.

Elsewhere: spot margin interest accrues hourly per borrowed coin; Copy Trading lead traders take up to 10% of follower profits on top of ordinary trading fees; crypto withdrawal fees are set per asset by Bybit and shown before confirmation rather than published as a fixed schedule. In the EEA, the Austrian e-money entity issues dedicated IBANs, which makes SEPA the cheap funding rail; cards carry the provider's own percentage charge. There is no inactivity fee, no custody fee and no minimum deposit.

Bybit's safety case has to be argued on two fronts at once, and both matter.

The theft. On 21 February 2025, during a routine transfer from an Ethereum cold wallet to a warm wallet, attackers compromised the Safe multisig signing interface — masking what the signers were approving and altering the wallet's contract logic — and moved roughly 401,347 ETH plus 90,375 stETH, 15,000 cmETH and 8,000 mETH — about USD 1.46 billion in total, of which the plain ETH was USD 1.12 billion. It is the largest crypto theft ever recorded and was attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group, which laundered most of it through mixers within days. Bybit did not halt withdrawals. It raised close to 447,000 ETH — the figure comes from Hacken, Bybit's proof-of-reserves auditor; Bybit itself states USD 1.23 billion and names further counterparties — through emergency funding from Galaxy Digital, FalconX and Wintermute, restored the balance sheet inside roughly 72 hours, and on 26 February 2025 a proof-of-reserves audit by Hacken confirmed collateralisation above 100% across BTC, ETH, USDT, XRP and more than 35 further assets; the narrower BTC/ETH/SOL/USDT/USDC. Chief executive Ben Zhou stated publicly that Bybit was solvent even if nothing were recovered. No customer lost funds. Bybit also launched a public bounty platform to trace the stolen assets.

Weigh that honestly in both directions. The response was as good as any exchange has managed under that kind of pressure, and it is real evidence about capital and governance. The failure that made it possible was a signing-process weakness in cold-wallet operations — the single control a custodian exists to get right.

The regulatory record. Bybit EU GmbH holds a MiCA Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorisation from the Austrian FMA, granted 28 May 2025 and passported across the EEA, with the European headquarters in Vienna; Bybit Payments GmbH added an Austrian Electronic Money Institution licence on 4 August 2026, allowing e-money issuance, payment services and dedicated IBANs. Outside Europe there is VARA licensing in Dubai alongside federal SCA permissions, an AFSA licence in the Astana International Financial Centre and a virtual-asset registration with the National Bank of Georgia.

The history behind those licences is less flattering. The Dutch central bank fined Bybit EUR 2,250,000 in October 2024 for serving Dutch customers without registration; Japan's FSA issued warnings in 2023 and 2024 before Bybit withdrew from the market entirely in 2026; India's financial intelligence unit penalised it for the same pattern. That pattern — enter first, get licensed later — is exactly what MiCA was written to stop, and it is the strongest argument for treating the Austrian authorisation as the start of a track record rather than the proof of one.

Two hard limits: Bybit Fintech Limited is registered in the British Virgin Islands, is not publicly traded and publishes no audited financial statements; and no compensation scheme covers crypto assets held at Bybit anywhere, MiCA included.

Bybit was built as a derivatives venue and the interface still reflects that priority, which is a compliment.

The web terminal puts spot, spot margin, USDT and inverse perpetuals, options, Copy Trading and Earn under one login, running on a unified trading account so a single collateral pool backs positions across product lines. Position and margin management, conditional and trailing orders, liquidation-price display and funding-rate context are all first-class rather than afterthoughts — the things that decide whether a leveraged position is manageable are on the screen where you need them. A native desktop client mirrors it for multi-monitor setups.

The v5 API is the quiet strength. One account model, one authentication scheme, REST and WebSocket coverage across spot, margin, perpetuals and options, and a public testnet. It is well documented and supported by essentially every serious third-party bot framework, which puts Bybit second only to Binance as a target for automated strategies.

The mobile app is unusually complete. Perpetuals, options, copy trading and Earn all work properly on the phone rather than being reduced to a buy button, and the app rates well on both stores.

Copy Trading is one of the largest such marketplaces in crypto. Lead traders publish verified histories including drawdown, followers allocate capital, and the lead takes up to 10% of profits. The transparency is better than most competitors offer. The structural warning stands regardless: copying a leveraged perpetuals strategy transfers someone else's risk appetite onto your capital, and a published track record on a venue this young covers very few market regimes.

Bybit EU (bybit.eu) is a separate platform for EEA residents with the same look and a much smaller menu — spot, spot margin to 10x, Earn and the Card. Knowing which of the two you are actually on is the first thing a European user has to get straight.

Bybit lists roughly 425 coins across about 580 spot pairs, with a considerably larger universe once perpetual contracts are counted. That is narrower than Binance and far wider than Bitstamp.

The product stack is where it competes:

• USDT and inverse perpetual contracts on the majors and a long tail of altcoins, running to 100x on the largest pairs for qualifying accounts, with tiered maximums that step down as position size grows
• USDC-settled European-style options on the majors
• Spot margin to 10x on eligible pairs, with hourly interest published per coin
• TradFi perpetuals, launched April 2026 — cash-settled USDT-quoted contracts referencing dozens of US stocks, three global ETFs and three commodities (gold, silver and crude oil), capped at 10x and margined from the same collateral pool as crypto
• IPO Express, offering tokenised subscription exposure to new listings
• Earn, spanning flexible and fixed savings, on-chain staking, dual investment and structured products
• Copy Trading, the Bybit Card in supported markets, and launch and airdrop programmes

The distinction that matters most for a German, Austrian or Swiss reader is twofold. First, the TradFi perpetuals are derivatives, not investments. A contract referencing a US share gives you leveraged price exposure with a funding cost every eight hours; it gives you no ownership, no dividends and no shareholder rights, and it can be liquidated. It is not a substitute for a share in a Depot.

Second, and more practically: none of the derivatives are available to you. Crypto derivatives fall under MiFID II rather than MiCA, Bybit has applied for that permission but does not hold it, so Bybit EU offers spot and spot margin only. If perpetuals are why Bybit is on your shortlist, an EEA account will not deliver them.

Opening an account is quick — registration takes minutes and identity verification usually clears the same day. There is no minimum deposit beyond per-asset network minimums.

Which entity you land on is determined by residence. EEA residents are routed to Bybit EU GmbH under the Austrian MiCA authorisation and use bybit.eu; everyone else who is eligible uses the global bybit.com. Existing EEA users were migrated ahead of the MiCA transitional deadline of 30 June 2026, and the two platforms are not interchangeable.

Funding in Europe improved sharply in August 2026, when Bybit Payments GmbH received its Austrian e-money licence. That allows Bybit to issue dedicated IBANs in the customer's own name and to run SEPA and SEPA Instant directly rather than through a third-party processor — cheaper, faster and considerably less prone to the rejected-transfer problems that plague offshore exchanges dealing with European banks. Crypto deposits are free. Card and payment-provider deposits carry the provider's percentage charge. In markets without a direct banking rail, P2P trading fills the gap.

Crypto withdrawals are priced per asset by Bybit, shown before confirmation, and normally clear within minutes once security holds release.

Country access. Bybit's service agreement restricts a defined list of jurisdictions, and the important exclusions for a European or North American reader are the United States, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland China and Japan, plus the comprehensively sanctioned jurisdictions — Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan and the occupied Ukrainian territories. Dubai residents are directed to the locally licensed Bybit MENA entity rather than the global platform. Bybit returned to the United Kingdom in December 2025 through a partnership with FCA-regulated Archax, and France came off the AMF blacklist. Check Bybit's own restricted-countries page before depositing: this list moves.

Bybit's content operation is competent and clearly aimed at people who intend to trade, which is both its strength and its limitation.

Bybit Learn covers the basics through to derivatives mechanics — margin modes, funding rates, liquidation and maintenance-margin arithmetic, options greeks, order types — and it does the derivatives material better than most exchange education libraries, because that is the audience Bybit actually serves. It is neither as broad nor as neutral as Binance Academy, but on the specific question of how a perpetual contract works it is genuinely useful.

Market coverage runs to daily and weekly market notes, on-chain and derivatives-flow commentary, and periodic institutional research produced with third-party data providers. Open interest, funding history and long-short ratio data are exposed both on the platform and through the API, which is the material a derivatives trader actually needs and which most retail-facing exchanges bury.

On the platform itself you get TradingView-grade charting, full depth and funding context on every contract, and a public testnet for strategy work before capital is committed.

What is thin is anything resembling investment research. There are no analyst price targets, no fundamental coverage, no screening tools for long-term holders, and nothing addressed to someone building a portfolio rather than a position. Bybit's own incentives point at volume, and the education funnel points the same way — the material that teaches you to size a leveraged position is far more developed than any material that would talk you out of taking one. Treat the mechanics as a resource and the market calls as marketing.

Support is better than Binance's and short of what a regulated European broker would consider normal.

The published coverage is 24/7 live chat in a long list of languages, backed by a ticket queue and a large help centre. There is no published retail telephone line, which for a firm now holding an Austrian licence and marketing to EEA consumers is a notable gap — the German-speaking investors Bybit EU is courting are used to being able to call someone.

In practice the first-line experience is reasonably quick. Chat reaches a human without an extended bot loop more often than at most large exchanges, and routine questions about deposits, verification, funding rates or how a product behaves get answered competently. The help-centre articles on derivatives mechanics are unusually detailed and are worth reading before opening a position rather than after.

The weaknesses are the familiar ones. Account restrictions and compliance reviews are where the queue slows and communication thins out, and escalation paths are opaque. The split between bybit.com and bybit.eu creates its own friction: a question that touches both — a migrated balance, a product that exists on one platform and not the other — can bounce between teams that do not share a view of your account.

The strongest evidence in Bybit's favour on support is not routine at all. During the February 2025 breach the firm communicated continuously, kept withdrawals open and processed an extraordinary volume of them without freezing customers out. Under the worst operational stress the industry has produced, the machine held. That is not the same as a good day-to-day support experience, but it is a more meaningful test than most.