The Radar Score
Eighteen categories, one rubric, five pillars with published weights. Sourced to public evidence, and nobody can buy a place in these tables.
Risk managers are not services you use, so they are not scored on the five pillars. Each firm starts at 10.0 and loses points for documented losses on markets it ran, winning part back for post-mortems and payouts — every entry with its primary source.
Kraken
StrongCentralised venues that hold your funds while you trade. Custody dominates the weighting because on a centralised exchange your balance is a claim on a company, not a coin in your pocket.
Uniswap
StrongSwap venues where you never hand over your keys. The custody risk moves from a balance sheet to a contract, so audits and code provenance carry the weight a licence would elsewhere.
GMX
SolidOn-chain leverage. Performance weighting is the highest of any category here, because a perp venue that degrades under volatility liquidates its users at exactly the wrong moment.
SideShift.ai
SolidNo-account swap services. They compete on convenience and are priced in the spread, so cost transparency is weighted heavier here than anywhere else on the site.
TradingView
StrongTerminals, bots, screeners and portfolio trackers. Most never touch your funds — but they do touch your API keys, which is its own custody question.
Trezor Safe 5
StrongDevices whose only job is to keep a key away from the internet. Custody carries 45% — the highest weighting on the site — because nothing else about a signing device matters if that fails.
Rabby
StrongSoftware wallets for everyday use. We weight access heavily alongside custody: a wallet that is secure but unusable pushes people back to an exchange, which is the worse outcome.
Kraken Staking
StrongServices that stake on your behalf. Cost matters more than it looks: a commission on rewards compounds against you for as long as you hold.
Lido
StrongStaking that hands you a tradable receipt token. That token's peg is the whole product, so peg behaviour under stress sits inside the performance pillar.
EtherFi
SolidYield stacked on yield, with the risks stacked the same way. We weight custody and performance hardest and treat short track records as the material fact they are.
Convex
SolidVaults that move capital between strategies for you. You are underwriting every protocol they touch, not just the one you deposited into.
Aave
StrongBorrow against your holdings, or lend them out. The category with the worst historical record on this site — the weighting reflects what actually went wrong, repeatedly.
Uniswap Protocol
StrongThe base layer everything else is built on. Judged on code provenance, governance capture risk and whether the thing has survived a real market break.
Chainlink CCIP
StrongHistorically the single most exploited class of infrastructure in crypto. Custody carries 45% here for the same reason it does on hardware wallets: this is where the money is stolen.
USDC
StrongA stablecoin is a promise about redemption. We rate the promise: what backs it, who verifies the backing, and who is legally obliged to honour it.
OpenSea
StrongWhere NFTs change hands. Cost is weighted equally with custody because marketplace fees and royalty handling decide most of what a seller actually keeps.
Nansen
StrongGeneration, analytics and automation tooling. Rarely custodial, frequently opaque about pricing and about what happens to what you upload.
Gnosis Pay
SolidSpend crypto at the till. These are regulated payment products wrapped around a crypto balance, so licensing and the real all-in conversion cost carry the weight.
Every score is calculated, not awarded. We record findings against five fixed pillars, apply the weighting published for that category, subtract the penalties listed in the rubric, and print whatever number comes out. Each finding rests on a public, dated source you can open yourself — audits, regulatory registers, on-chain data, fee schedules, terms of service. We do not claim to have used these services, and what that method cannot see is published alongside what it can. Nothing on this site is for sale: there are no affiliate links, no sponsored placements and no commercial relationship with anything we rate, so a rank cannot be bought here for the simple reason that we are not selling one.
How we score →