How to choose an exchange

This sounds trivial and it is the most common expensive mistake. Every offshore exchange maintains a restricted-country list, and the restriction is enforced at identity verification rather than at registration. You can create an account, deposit funds, and trade for weeks before discovering the problem when you try to withdraw.

Using a VPN to work around this is not a clever solution. It breaches the terms of service, and the account will be frozen when verification documents show an address in a restricted jurisdiction. At that point your funds are held by an exchange you have admitted to lying to, in a country whose courts you have no access to.

Check the restriction list first. If an exchange does not accept your jurisdiction, its fee schedule is irrelevant.

A 0.03% difference in taker fee is worth arguing about. Slippage on a thin order book routinely costs several times that on a single trade, and nobody puts it in a comparison table because it depends on your order size.

The test is simple: open the order book for the pair you actually trade, at the size you actually trade, and look at how far down the book your order would eat. If your intended position is larger than the visible depth at the top few price levels, you will move the price against yourself getting in, and again getting out, which is the part people forget.

For small orders in major pairs, liquidity is adequate essentially everywhere and fees are the deciding factor. For large orders, or for anything outside the major pairs, liquidity dominates and the cheapest exchange on paper can easily be the most expensive in practice.

Every exchange in this comparison lets you deposit. They differ in how reliably you can get funds out, particularly during periods of stress, which is exactly when you want them out.

Look for a track record of processing withdrawals during volatile periods and regulatory events, rather than marketing claims about security. An exchange that has never paused withdrawals under pressure has told you something; one that has paused them has told you something too.

The related discipline is not keeping more on an exchange than you are actively trading. Balances you are not using belong in self-custody. Every exchange failure in the sector's history has been a lesson in this, and the lesson has not changed.

Once you have narrowed to exchanges that accept your jurisdiction, have adequate depth in your pairs, and have a withdrawal record you are comfortable with, fees become the deciding factor, and at that point they are worth optimising properly.

Compare the effective rate for your order mix, not the headline discount. Include the referral discount, since it applies from your first trade. Include the native-token discount if you are willing to hold the token, and exclude it if you are not. Holding BNB or KCS to save on fees is a position in that token whether you think of it that way or not.