Rating report

Bitstamp

Name: Bitstamp Review
Rating: 2.3

Grade C-, 2.3 out of 5

Bitstamp was the first crypto-asset service provider licensed under MiCA in Luxembourg and has been owned by Robinhood since June 2025; it custodies with BitGo but publishes neither proof of reserves nor an insurance figure, and lost about 19,000 BTC in a 2015 hot-wallet hack.

By Safety Desk. Facts checked against official sources on October 20, 2026.

Findings, check by check

Every KripZen grade comes from the same five weighted checks. Here is how Bitstamp scores on each.

Proof of reserves 30%
No proof-of-reserves programme was found. Bitstamp reports SOC 2 compliance and annual Big Four accounting audits, but those are not published reserve attestations a user can check.
What “Proof of reserves” means
Not disclosed
Custody 25%
Custodies with BitGo since 10 October 2019 and roughly 95% cold storage is reported by third-party reviewers, but Bitstamp publishes no cold/hot split we could confirm from a primary source.
What “Custody” means
Partial or unaudited
Regulation 20%
Bitstamp Europe S.A. was the first crypto-asset service provider granted a full MiCA licence in Luxembourg, by the CSSF on 16 May 2025 and passported across the EU/EEA, alongside a reported New York BitLicense; since 2 June 2025 it has been owned by Robinhood, an SEC-reporting public company.
What “Regulation” means
Disclosed
Insurance 15%
No insurance or safety fund is publicly disclosed. Custody sits with BitGo, whose own policy was not shown to extend to Bitstamp balances. That is a statement about what Bitstamp discloses, not a finding that it is uninsured — but an undisclosed fund is one a user cannot rely on.
Not disclosed
Incident history 10%
About 19,000 BTC stolen from hot wallets in January 2015; Bitstamp recovered and kept operating, and its current BitGo custody architecture postdates the hack by several years. One of our two sources could not re-verify the incident against a primary record.
Partial or unaudited

The weights are the same for every exchange. Read the full methodology

Licences and registrations

The 5 entries we could confirm for Bitstamp on a regulator’s register or the exchange’s own legal pages. A licence in one country does not mean the service is open to you.

Regulator	Licence or registration	Register number
CSSFLuxembourg	MiCA CASP authorisation (passported EU/EEA) + payment institution licence Bitstamp Europe S.A.	CASP N00000003; PI Z00000012; RCS B196856
FCAUnited Kingdom	Cryptoasset firm registration under MLRs 2017 Bitstamp UK Ltd	FRN 978690; Co. 14174243
NYDFSUnited States	BitLicense + state money transmitter licences; FinCEN MSB Bitstamp USA Inc.	NMLS 1905429
MASSingapore	Major payment institution Bitstamp Asia Pte Ltd	PS20200667
BVI FSCBritish Virgin Islands	Virtual Asset Service Provider registration / investment business licence Bitstamp Global Ltd	BVI no. 2086429

Fees, products and reach

Spot fees (base tier): 0.3% maker, 0.4% takerStandard pairs, 30-day volume < $10,000 (page 'valid from 15 October 2026'; update announced effective 21 Oct 2026). FX/stablecoin pairs lower (0.06/0.08; USDT 0.03/0.04). Basic Trading adds 1.8% spread.
Proof of reserves: Not found
Products: Spot, Futures, Staking, Card purchases

Base-tier fees from the exchange’s own fee page. Your real cost depends on order type, volume tier and spread; try your numbers in the Exchange Fee Calculator

Our Bitstamp review

Bitstamp was the first crypto-asset service provider in Europe to be granted a full MiCA licence, and it publishes less about its own reserves than almost any venue in this corpus. The C- is the arithmetic of one very strong factor against three weak ones.

What checks out

Bitstamp Europe S.A. received a full MiCA licence from Luxembourg's CSSF on 16 May 2025 — the first such grant anywhere — and passported it across the EU and EEA. A New York BitLicense is also reported. Since 2 June 2025 Bitstamp has been owned by Robinhood, an SEC-reporting public company, which adds a layer of external financial reporting that did not previously exist above it. Custody has sat with BitGo since 10 October 2019.

Where the evidence stops

There is no proof-of-reserves programme. Bitstamp reports SOC 2 compliance and annual Big Four accounting audits, but neither is a published reserve attestation you can check your own balance against. Third-party reviewers put roughly 95% of assets in cold storage; Bitstamp itself publishes no split we could confirm. No insurance or safety fund is disclosed, and while custody sits with BitGo, BitGo's own policy was not shown to extend to Bitstamp balances. About 19,000 BTC was stolen from hot wallets in January 2015 — one of our two sources could not re-verify that against a primary record, and the BitGo custody architecture postdates the hack by several years.

How to read the grade

A first-in-Europe licence is a real, dated, checkable thing, and it tells you who supervises Bitstamp rather than what Bitstamp holds. On the second question this venue is close to silent, and the grade says so.

Incidents on record

2015
Bitstamp
Hack, January 2015. ~19,000 BTC taken from hot wallets (publicly reported estimate)
In January 2015 roughly 19,000 BTC was taken from Bitstamp's hot wallets following a targeted attack on exchange staff. Bitstamp suspended trading, rebuilt its infrastructure, and afterwards moved to third-party institutional custody with the large majority of customer assets held offline.
The lesson: What changed Bitstamp's risk profile was the rebuilt custody model, not the apology. Judge an exchange by what it did after an incident, not by how quickly it published a statement.

Dates and figures are widely reported public estimates from coverage at the time, not KripZen's own audited data.

Sources

Every fact on this page comes from one of these official pages, checked on October 20, 2026.

Where to go next

Other exchanges we've graded

How to read these grades: each is derived from published, checkable disclosures — proof-of-reserves attestations, public regulatory registers, disclosed insurance funds and the documented incident record — using the weighted rubric below. Where an exchange does not disclose something, we mark it unverified rather than assume it. These are not audits and not investment advice; they reflect what was published as of our last review. Cryptocurrency investments carry risk, including loss of principal. Nothing on KripZen is financial advice — always do your own research before buying, trading or moving funds.