WhiteBIT

Is WhiteBIT safe?

WhiteBIT has a clean security record but asks you to take a lot on trust. In eight years we found no hack that cost its customers money, and Austria granted it 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 licence in June 2026. Against that, the company behind whitebit.com accounts is Peak Horizon Corp., registered in Panama, and WhiteBIT publishes no proof of reservesProof of reservesA report in which a crypto exchange shows that it holds enough coins to cover all customer balances, ideally checked by an outside firm.More in the glossary or audited accounts.

We score it 62/100, about level with OKX and Bybit, which have had bigger incidents but publish monthly reserve reports. EU-licensed exchanges such as Bitvavo score higher.

Who actually holds your money

This matters more than the brand. WhiteBIT's terms say that all crypto operations on the platform, "including futures and margin trading, custody services provision, Crypto Lending, and Crypto Borrow", are carried out by WhiteBIT Global, which is Peak Horizon Corp. in the Republic of Panama. A Lithuanian company, UAB Clear White Technologies, and a Hong Kong company provide software and support. The wider group lists firms in Poland, Bulgaria, Georgia, Switzerland, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

So if you open an account on whitebit.com today, your counterparty is an offshore company, not a supervised EU firm. If it failed, Panamanian insolvency law, not MiCAMiCAThe EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, which requires crypto exchanges and other providers to be licensed and supervised.More in the glossary, would decide what happened to your coins.

The Austrian MiCA licence

The ESMA register lists WB-Shields Innovations GmbH, trading as WhiteBIT EU, as authorised by Austria's Financial Market Authority on 18 June 2026. The licence covers custody, exchange of crypto for money and for other crypto, placing of tokens and transfers, passported to 29 EEA countries. It does not list operating a trading platform.

It is a real licence with capital, custody and segregation rules. But it belongs to a separate platform, whitebit.eu, which on 9 October 2026 still showed a "coming soon" page. Until EEA customers are moved there, the protection it brings is mostly a promise. A Croatian firm, WHITE TECH LTD, also holds 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 licence, but we could not confirm from primary sources how it relates to WhiteBIT.

WhiteBIT in the UK: approved adverts, not a licence

WhiteBIT now has a UK site, but no UK licence. On 20 May 2026 it launched whitebit.uk, which offers spot trading, instant conversion and GBP deposits by card and Faster Payments, plus lending and auto-invest for some users. We found no WhiteBIT company on the FCA's register of cryptoasset firms. Instead, the site's adverts are approved by Zeyro Ltd (FRN 1001386), an FCA-authorised firm with permission to approve other companies' promotions, crypto included. The site carries the FCA's standard warning that this is a high-risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.

That approval covers what WhiteBIT may say to UK customers, not how it holds their money. The UK user agreement puts crypto with the same Panama company, Peak Horizon Corp., and GBP payments with WB Technologies AG in Zug, a Swiss firm supervised for anti-money-launderingAnti-money launderingThe rules and checks that stop criminals from moving illegal money through banks, payment firms and crypto exchanges.More in the glossary purposes by the self-regulatory body VQF. The terms also let WhiteBIT convert pound deposits into a stablecoin such as USDT and show the balance in pounds. WhiteBIT's own launch post says the FSCSDeposit 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 does not cover crypto and the Financial Ombudsman may not be open to you.

No proof of reserves

This is the weakest part of the picture. Most large exchanges started publishing proof of reservesProof of reservesA report in which a crypto exchange shows that it holds enough coins to cover all customer balances, ideally checked by an outside firm.More in the glossary after FTX collapsed in 2022: a snapshot of what they owe customers, matched against wallets, with a Merkle treeMerkle treeA way to combine many records into one short code, so that each person can check their own record is included without seeing anyone else's.More in the glossary so you can check your own balance. We found no such report from WhiteBIT, and the obvious page on its site returned "page not found". Peak Horizon Corp. does not publish audited accounts either.

WhiteBIT says it keeps 96% of assets in cold walletsCold storageKeeping crypto keys on a device or medium that is not connected to the internet, which protects them from most online attacks.More in the glossary and uses a web application firewall. Hacken, a security firm, has run penetration tests and smart contract audits for it, and WhiteBIT pays up to $10,000 per critical bug through a public bounty. Those measures cut the risk of theft. They say nothing about whether customer balances are fully backed.

Security record and legal record

We found no reported breach of WhiteBIT's own wallets. In 2024, by its own account, it froze stolen funds after other firms were hacked, including about $760,000 in Solana traced to the Rain.com theft, which it handed to the FBI under a court order.

We also found no fine or enforcement action by an EU, UK or US regulator. The one state action against WhiteBIT is political: in January 2026 Russia's Prosecutor General declared WhiteBIT and its parent W Group "undesirable organisations", pointing to about $11 million the company gave to Ukraine's army and civilians in 2022. WhiteBIT has not served Russian users since 2022, so this changes nothing for customers elsewhere.

How to use WhiteBIT more safely

1. Treat it as a place to trade, not to store savings. Without proof of reservesProof of reservesA report in which a crypto exchange shows that it holds enough coins to cover all customer balances, ideally checked by an outside firm.More in the glossary you cannot check that your balance is backed.
2. Turn on app-based two-factor authenticationTwo-factor authenticationSigning in with a second proof of identity on top of your password, such as a code from an app, a security key or a passkey.More in the glossary and the withdrawal address allowlist.
3. Be careful with lending, savings and futures products. They run through the same Panama company, and earning yield usually means your coins are used by someone else.
4. If you live in the EEA, watch for the move to whitebit.eu. Once your account sits with the Austrian-licensed company, MiCAMiCAThe EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, which requires crypto exchanges and other providers to be licensed and supervised.More in the glossary custody and segregation rules apply to it.
5. In the UK, whitebit.uk changes the address but not the counterparty. If FCA oversight and access to the Financial Ombudsman matter to you, check the FCA register for the company you would actually sign up with.

How we scored it

Security history (85) is WhiteBIT's strongest factor: no customer losses to hackers that we could find. Reserves (35) is its weakest, because there is no public proof of reservesProof of reservesA report in which a crypto exchange shows that it holds enough coins to cover all customer balances, ideally checked by an outside firm.More in the glossary or audited accounts. Licensing and custody (50 each) reflect a Panama counterparty today and an Austrian licence that has not yet gone live; the 2026 UK launch did not change them, because it came with approved adverts rather than FCA registration. Confidence is low because WhiteBIT's own site blocked parts of our review and we could not confirm its national registrations.