Bybit vs Kraken — which broker is better?

Pros

• USDT perpetual contracts at 0.0200% maker and 0.0550% taker, with a deep book that makes Bybit the strongest derivatives alternative to Binance
• Spot at 0.1000% maker and taker for non-VIP accounts — three to four times cheaper than Bitstamp's entry tier and well under Kraken's
• MiCA Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorisation from the Austrian FMA since 28 May 2025, passported across the EEA, plus an Austrian e-money licence from 4 August 2026 giving EEA clients dedicated IBANs
• Absorbed the largest theft in crypto history — about USD 1.46 billion in February 2025 — without passing a cent of it to customers, restoring 1:1 reserves within roughly 72 hours and publishing a third-party audit five days later
• A unified v5 API covering spot, margin, perpetuals and options under one account model, with a public testnet and broad third-party bot support
• One of the largest copy-trading marketplaces in crypto, with verified lead-trader histories and published drawdown statistics rather than cherry-picked returns
• TradFi perpetuals since April 2026 give leveraged exposure to US stocks, global ETFs, gold, silver and crude oil from the same collateral pool as crypto

Cons

• EEA residents get spot and spot margin only. Perpetuals, options and TradFi contracts require the global platform, which Bybit EU customers may not use, because those products need a MiFID II licence Bybit has applied for but not obtained
• The February 2025 breach was the largest crypto theft on record and stemmed from a compromised multisig signing interface — the response was exemplary, the underlying control failure was not
• Bybit Fintech Limited is registered in the British Virgin Islands, is not publicly traded and publishes no audited financial statements; transparency rests on third-party proof-of-reserves attestations
• A pattern of entering markets before securing permission: a EUR 2,250,000 fine from the Dutch central bank in 2024, formal warnings and then a full exit in Japan, and a penalty from India's financial intelligence unit
• No compensation scheme applies to crypto assets at Bybit anywhere, including under the Austrian MiCA authorisation
• Support is chat and ticket only, with no published retail phone line, and the product surface — perpetuals, options, Earn, Copy Trading, Card, launch products, tokenised IPOs — is large enough that risk disclosures are easy to skim past

Pros

• Wyoming SPDI bank charter through Kraken Financial — a full-reserve institution required to hold 100% unencumbered liquid assets against customer fiat, with a Federal Reserve limited-purpose master account
• Two MiCA Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorisations plus an EMI licence from the Central Bank of Ireland, passported across all 30 EEA countries
• The first crypto-native firm to hold all three CFTC licences — DCM, DCO and FCM — through Bitnomial, plus a second FCM in Kraken Derivatives US
• SEC-registered broker-dealer (Kraken Securities LLC) and registered investment adviser (Kraken Adviser LLC)
• 831 assets and 1,432 trading pairs on the public API as of August 2026, spanning spot, margin, futures, options, forex markets and indices
• Cash deposits are free on every major rail — EUR SEPA and SEPA Instant, USD ACH and FedWire, GBP Faster Payments, CHF SIC — with fully published withdrawal fees
• Staking commission of 20% on flexible on-chain staking, well below Coinbase's 35%
• Kraken Pro, a native desktop client, a mature API and a CLI aimed at automated agents — a genuinely deep tooling stack for a crypto venue

Cons

• Entry-tier spot pricing of 0.40% maker and 0.80% taker is the most expensive base rate among major regulated venues, and you need USD 10,000 of 30-day volume before it drops below 0.40% taker
• The simple app charges 1% on instant buys, 1.5% on custom orders and a punitive flat 3% on conversions below the minimum order size
• Zero-fee buying, selling and converting in the app (up to USD 10,000 a month, not Kraken Pro trades) is behind a USD 4.99 monthly Kraken+ subscription rather than built into the base schedule
• Payward is privately held and does not publish audited financial statements; Proof of Reserves attestations are useful but are not the same thing
• The 11,000 commission-free stocks and ETFs are US-only — EEA clients get xStocks tokenised equities, which are crypto-asset products with different rights and no share ownership
• Product sprawl is real: Kraken, Kraken Pro, Kraken Desktop, Krak, NinjaTrader, Bitnomial, Breakout and xStocks sit under one brand with different entities, licences and eligibility rules per country