Nexo

Is Nexo safe?

Nexo has a cleaner security record than most offshore platforms, but it is a lender, so the question is different. We found no hack of customer funds, and its assets sit with well-known custodians. The catch is what happens to coins you put into its yield product: the US SEC found that Nexo used them at its own discretion to earn money for the business. That makes you a lender to Nexo, with no deposit insuranceDeposit insuranceA government-backed scheme that repays bank customers up to a set limit if their bank fails, such as the FDIC in the US or the FSCS in the UK.More in the glossary and, today, no public accountant's check of its reserves. We score it 54/100, above Binance and below Crypto.com.

Earn is the risk, not hackers

Nexo pays interest on crypto because it lends and deploys that crypto. In its January 2023 order the SEC said Nexo "exercised its discretion to use investors' crypto assets in various ways to generate income for its own business" and to pay interest. That is the same basic model as Celsius and BlockFi, which both failed in 2022 and left customers waiting for years in bankruptcy.

Nexo did not fail. It kept withdrawals open through 2022. But a better outcome in one crisis is not a legal protection. Coins in a yield product are only as safe as Nexo's loan book and the collateral behind it, and Nexo does not publish audited accounts that would let you check either.

The US settlements

Year	Authority	Outcome
2023	SEC	$22.5 million penalty, cease-and-desist over unregistered Earn product
2023	US state regulators	$22.5 million in parallel settlements
2026	California DFPI	$500,000 penalty for unlicensed lending, 2018–2022

The SEC said Nexo offered its Earn Interest Product to US investors from about June 2020 without registering it. Nexo stopped taking new US Earn investors in 2022, agreed to stop offering it in the US for good, and paid $45 million in total without admitting or denying the findings.

California's Department of Financial Protection and Innovation followed in January 2026. It found that Nexo Capital made loans to Californians from July 2018 to November 2022 without a lending licence and did not check the ability to repay of 5,456 residents. Nexo agreed to a $500,000 penalty and to move California customers to Nexo Financial LLC, which holds a California finance lender licence. Nexo has since returned to the US market with Bakkt as its custody and trading partner.

Bulgaria

Nexo's founders are Bulgarian. In early 2023 Bulgarian prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into the company and its executives. The case was later closed without charges, and in January 2024 Nexo filed a claim for more than $3 billion against Bulgaria at the World Bank's arbitration centre, ICSID, calling the investigation politically motivated. No court has found wrongdoing by Nexo in that case.

Licences and reserves

Nexo's licence list is long but light. It holds a California finance lender licence and a Seychelles securities dealer licence, and registrations with AUSTRAC in Australia, Argentina's CNV and Poland's finance ministry. In the EEA it now works through partners: Tangany, a MiCAMiCAThe EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, which requires crypto exchanges and other providers to be licensed and supervised.More in the glossary-licensed custodian in Munich, and DLT Finance, a Frankfurt investment firm. That gives EEA customers a regulated custodian, which is a real gain, but Nexo itself is not on the MiCA register and has no UK authorisation.

On reserves, Nexo was an early mover. In 2021 it hired Armanino for a real-time attestation showing assets above customer liabilities. That attestation is no longer shown on Nexo's website, and we found no replacement there in October 2026.

How to use Nexo more safely

1. Treat Earn balances as an unsecured loan to Nexo and size them accordingly.
2. If you borrow against crypto, watch the loan-to-value ratio; a sharp price fall can trigger automatic liquidation of your collateral.
3. Turn on an authenticator app and Nexo's withdrawal address allowlist.
4. Use the Channel Validator on Nexo's site before trusting any message that claims to come from Nexo.
5. For simple buying and holding, a licensed exchange plus your own wallet avoids lender risk entirely.

How we scored it

Security history (82) is Nexo's strongest factor, with no reported customer losses to hacks. Reserves (35) is its weakest: there is no current public attestation and no audited accounts for a business that lends customer assets. Legal record (45) reflects the $45 million US settlement and the 2026 California penalty, offset slightly by the dropped Bulgarian case. Compare Bitfinex, another platform where customers carried the company's losses in the past.