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Exchanges

A centralised exchange is a company that holds the crypto for you. A decentralised exchange does not. Then five firms, picked by a size on one list. The size is not a judgement, and it is not a count of which exchanges people in the UK use.

A firm's own description is here only if its site came back. On this reading, those sites did not. The register search is what came back.

Information, not advice. A clean result does not make anything a good investment.

Centralised and decentralised

A centralised exchange is a business that lets you buy crypto with ordinary money, such as pounds. It holds any ETH you buy until you send it to a wallet you control. You can get the account back with a username and password, because the exchange is holding the crypto. If the exchange gets into financial trouble, that crypto is at risk.

A decentralised exchange lets you swap one token for another without handing the crypto to a company. You keep control of it, and you can trade when you want.

  • Source: How to get ETH, ethereum.org (page updated 30 Apr 2026) · read 26 Oct 2026
  • Source: Decentralized finance (DeFi), ethereum.org (page updated 26 Jul 2026) · read 26 Oct 2026
  • Source: Ethereum wallets, ethereum.org (page updated 24 Feb 2026) · read 26 Oct 2026
  • Source: Cryptoassets, Financial Conduct Authority (first published 23 Jan 2019) · read 26 Oct 2026
Technical detail

The FCA's firms page does not define these two kinds, and it does not name the exchanges people in the UK use. Country lists elsewhere are not copied here.

How these five were chosen

At 19:21:51 UK time on 26 Oct 2026 one list of 100 exchanges was saved. The five below had the largest 24-hour volume in bitcoin on that reading. The list's own order, a trust score, was not kept and is not used.

An exchange that was not on that list is not here. A shorter list, read a few minutes earlier, had different volumes and a different first five. Only the list of 100 is used. The order is the size. It is not a ranking by quality.

The five names stay that 26 Oct 2026 selection. Their 24-hour volumes below were read again at 12:11:15 UK time on 5 Nov 2026, ordered by volume on that reading.

  • Binance. 102,500.46 bitcoin in 24 hours. The page is Binance.
  • Pionex. 35,542.05 bitcoin in 24 hours. The page is Pionex.
  • Tapbit. 35,465.36 bitcoin in 24 hours. The page is Tapbit.
  • BloFin. 22,987.77 bitcoin in 24 hours. The page is BloFin.
  • LBank. 19,105.06 bitcoin in 24 hours. The page is LBank.

Each name opens the register search and what the firm's site returned.

Powered by CoinGecko (opens in a new tab)

Technical detail

The rows are sorted by trade_volume_24h_btc, largest first. A volume is shown to two decimal places. Half a unit rounds away from zero.

The API terms, latest version 5 Sep 2025, were read on 30 Oct 2026. They say storage of the data is not encouraged, and that a stored copy should be refreshed at least every 24 hours. This site's server asks CoinGecko's Demo API for these figures at most once every 24 hours, and shows a saved copy if CoinGecko cannot be read. These figures were read at 12:11:15 UK time on 5 Nov 2026. They are that reading, not a live price.

The terms require the message “Powered by CoinGecko”, in a legible font no smaller than size 10, beside the figures. They say the data is provided “as is” and “as available”, and that CoinGecko does not warrant that it is accurate, up to date, or free of omissions. Any reliance on it for a financial decision is at the reader's own risk.