BTCC Review 2026: Is It Safe? From BTC China, Monthly Reserve Ratios, the Hong Kong SFC Warning, Futures Fees and Sign-up

I have no experience using BTCC. This article is what I found on October 31, 2026 by checking BTCC’s website, its official help documents, regulators’ registers and notices, and CoinGecko data. Where I could not find or verify something, I say so.

The short version: BTCC’s brand has a long history, its futures fees are low among comparable exchanges once the rebate is applied, and it publishes its reserves every month. But it publishes only ratios, not amounts; I could not find a formal license; since 2023, regulators in the UK, Spain, Quebec in Canada and Hong Kong have issued warnings one after another; and India’s Financial Intelligence Unit has issued it a non-compliance notice. Its 0.3% spot taker fee is three times that of most large international exchanges, which makes it a poor deal for people who mainly buy and sell spot.

What kind of exchange is BTCC

The founding date and user count come from About BTCC, the operating company from BTCC’s terms of service, the CEO from BTCC’s official news of May 21, 2025, and the size figures from CoinGecko on the same day.

The Trust Score CoinGecko gives BTCC is far out of line with the order book depth CoinGecko itself measures. Data from the same day shows BTCC’s BTC/USDT averaging about US$16.85 million in orders within 2% of the price, and ETH/USDT about US$7.23 million. That depth ranks 6th among the 16 exchanges this site rates, yet the Trust Score is only 3/10. CoinGecko’s Trust Score also looks at traffic, security, licensing and other factors, and it does not publish BTCC’s score for each one, so I cannot tell which factor pulled the score down.

BTCC’s products center on perpetual futures. This article covers only safety, fees, deposits and withdrawals, and earn products. It does not discuss futures trading strategies, leverage or copy trading.

From BTC China to today’s BTCC

BTCC’s website calls it “the longest-running crypto exchange”. The brand has indeed continued from 2011 to today, but the company has gone through several major turns:

• 2013: BTC China set up a company in Shanghai, with Bobby Lee as CEO. In November that year it was briefly the world’s largest bitcoin exchange by trading volume (Forbes). In December, after the People’s Bank of China barred financial institutions from bitcoin business, it stopped renminbi deposits, then resumed them in January 2014 (Reuters).
• September 2015: renamed BTCC (TechCrunch).
• 2017: in February it followed Huobi and OKCoin in suspending bitcoin withdrawals to upgrade its anti-money-laundering systems (Cointelegraph). After China banned ICOs in September, BTCC stopped all trading in mainland China on September 30, while its international site and mining pool kept running (CoinDesk).
• January 2018: acquired by a Hong Kong blockchain investment fund that was not named publicly (Business Insider archive).

Today’s BTCC and the pre-2017 BTC China share a brand, but the operators and corporate structure are different. Under this site’s rating methodology, “years in operation” counts from 2011, when the brand began operating, so BTCC gets full marks on that item. The scoring rules do not reflect that the buyer’s identity was never disclosed; readers need to weigh that themselves.

Is BTCC safe

Proof of reserves: published monthly, but only as ratios

A proof of reserves is an exchange publishing how many assets its wallets hold and comparing that with all user balances. A ratio of 100% or more means that at the moment of the snapshot, the exchange held enough coins to cover every user’s balance.

BTCC’s proof of reserves page is updated monthly, and every snapshot is dated the 15th. The snapshot of October 15, 2026:

After logging in, users can get the hash of their own Merkle tree leaf node under “View my report” and paste it back into the page to check whether their balance is included (official guide).

Using the public data behind the page, I went back through the snapshots taken on the 15th of each month. The earliest is April 15, 2025, giving 19 snapshots up to October 2026. A few things stand out:

• Ratios only, no amounts. The page does not say how much BTC or USDT the platform holds, nor the total of user assets or any wallet addresses, so outsiders cannot use on-chain data to check how the ratios were calculated. Exchanges such as XT.COM and Ourbit, which also lack third-party verification, at least publish asset amounts.
• All 114 ratios, across 19 snapshots and 6 assets, fall between 110% and 170%, and every one is a whole number.
• Large jumps from month to month: BTC jumped from 112% in October 2025 to 162% in November; USDT dropped from 165% in September 2026 to 115% in October. BTCC has not explained why.
• No third-party verifier is named. The trust center on its website lists CertiK for penetration testing, but that is a security test, not reserve verification.
• The Merkle root shown on the page is only 16 characters long, while a full SHA-256 hash is 64 characters. It may be truncated for display; BTCC has not said.

A proof of reserves is a snapshot at one point in time. It is not a financial audit and does not show that the exchange has no other liabilities. For how different exchanges do it, see “How to check proof of reserves”.

A 25.5 million USDT risk reserve fund: it covers negative balances and system failures

According to BTCC’s risk reserve fund explanation, the fund stood at 25.5 million USDT as of July 2026 and is financed by BTCC itself: it started with 1 million USDT, and 5% of the platform’s fee income has been added on an ongoing basis since.

The explanation is specific about what the fund is for: when a futures account loses more than its balance in extreme market conditions (a negative balance), the fund makes up the difference; when a system failure occurs during trading, the fund pays “a reasonable amount” of compensation. It does not say what happens if the exchange is hacked, and BTCC reserves the right to change the rules at any time. It is not third-party insurance.

Hack record: no reports found

BTCC’s website says “0 security incidents” and “never lost funds to hackers”. In news and security incident reports, I found no record of BTCC’s custody wallets being hacked. The withdrawal suspension in February 2017 was, according to the exchange, to meet the People’s Bank of China’s anti-money-laundering requirements, not a hack; it also predates 2018, when this site’s ratings start counting incidents.

Not finding anything does not mean nothing happened, only that I found no public reports.

Account security settings

According to BTCC’s account security guide, you can link an email address, a phone number and Google Authenticator, and turn on “withdrawal verification”, which requires a verification code for every withdrawal. You can also set a fund password. The website also offers BTCC Verify, which checks whether an email address, URL or social media account is official.

According to an official announcement from September 2025, after you change or reset your login password or fund password, or change your phone number or email address, withdrawals are paused for 24 hours, and the pause cannot be lifted early by hand.

In BTCC’s official guides I found no passkeys or hardware security keys, no withdrawal address whitelist, no anti-phishing code and no public bug bounty program. For how exchanges compare on security settings, see “Exchange account security settings compared”.

Licenses, regulatory warnings and restricted regions

Only registrations can be found, no formal license

On October 31, 2026, these are the BTCC-related registrations I could verify in regulators’ registers. All three are anti-money-laundering registrations, not licenses to operate an exchange:

A few things to know:

• FinCEN notes on the register that being listed does not mean any government agency recommends or endorses the business, and that the register data is self-reported. Also, under BTCC’s terms of service, the US is already a prohibited region.
• Canada’s MSB registration deals with anti-money-laundering. Running a crypto trading platform in Canada also requires registering with the securities regulators. The terms of service also list Ontario and Quebec as prohibited regions.
• The Polish authority states on the register page that registration does not mean a firm may provide crypto-asset services in Poland or elsewhere; providing such services in the EU requires MiCA authorization. MiCA’s transitional period for previously registered firms ends on July 1, 2026 at the latest (MiCA Article 143).
• In the ESMA MiCA interim register updated on October 30, 2026, no BTCC company holds crypto-asset service provider (CASP) authorization.
• BTCC’s past press releases said it had obtained a Lithuanian registration, and the terms of service say BTCC Lithuania Limited UAB stopped taking on new clients and stopped providing crypto-asset services from December 31, 2025. The Lithuanian Registry Centre’s register blocked my queries, so I did not verify this registration.

Regulators’ warnings and actions

The table below lists the regulatory records I found that name BTCC:

• All of these records concern “serving local users without a local license or registration”. None of them mention misappropriation of user assets.
• The warnings name different companies: BTCC Global Limited in the UK, BTCC UK Limited in India, the Lithuanian company in Quebec and the Polish company in Hong Kong.
• The UK FCA and Quebec AMF websites blocked my direct access. The dates and details in the table come from the summaries of those two pages in search results and from summaries on pages that republish them at IOSCO and the Canadian Securities Administrators. The Spanish CNMV entry comes from a Europa Press report quoting the CNMV notice.
• I found no court rulings, fines or sanctions-related reports naming BTCC.

Lists I checked that do not include BTCC

Not being on a list does not mean holding a local license. I did not go through the lists of regulators in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and elsewhere one by one.

Regions where it cannot be used

Under Article 2.3 of BTCC’s terms of service, the “prohibited countries” are the United States and its territories, Ontario in Canada, Quebec in Canada, the UAE, and sanctioned countries. The terms also reserve the right to add more at any time.

The BTCC website also has a separate region block list (website data, updated October 29, 2026) with a different scope from the terms: it lists the 27 EU countries (including Poland, where the operating company is based), the UK, the UAE, Ontario and Hong Kong, but not the US or Quebec. The list was last updated a week after the SFC warning, but it does not record when each region was added, so I cannot confirm whether Hong Kong was added in that update.

A region missing from both lists does not mean local law allows you to use BTCC.

How to sign up for BTCC

BTCC is an international exchange. Create an account with an email address, phone number or Google account, enter the invitation code in the invitation code field, then complete identity verification (KYC). According to the official guide, without identity verification you cannot deposit fiat, and your daily withdrawal limit is restricted; reviews are usually completed within 5 minutes. Before signing up, make sure your region is not on either of the two lists above.

The fee rebate applies only to futures

According to the invitation code data synced on October 31, 2026, the BTCC fee rebate is futures 60%, spot 0%. In other words, signing up with an invitation code lowers only your futures fees; spot is charged at the official rate. A regular user who buys 1,000 USDT of BTC on spot pays 3 USDT in fees with a market order (0.3% taker) or 2 USDT with a limit order filled as a maker (0.2% maker), with or without an invitation code.

BTCC’s official guides do not say how this rebate is calculated: whether it is taken off the fee directly or refunded afterward, or how it combines with VIP tiers. The calculations below assume the rebate is applied directly to the rate at the time.

BTCC fees: 0.055% futures taker, 0.3% spot

According to BTCC’s official fees and VIP page (checked October 31, 2026), you move up a tier when any one of total account assets, 30-day futures volume or 30-day spot volume reaches the threshold:

• Cumulative deposits of 200 USDT move you to VIP 1 immediately (VIP rules, effective November 19, 2025). In other words, users who have deposited 200 USDT pay VIP 1 rates.
• Spot fees are the same at every VIP tier, so moving up a tier lowers only futures fees. VIP 1 and above also get a withdrawal fee discount starting at 10%.
• VIP tiers are updated daily at 17:00 (UTC). For the higher tiers, VIP 5 to VIP 7, see the official page.
• A maker places an order and waits for someone else to fill it; a taker fills an order already on the book. A limit order can also end up as a taker order; see “A limit order is not always a maker order”.

Spot only: fees are three times those of most exchanges

BTCC’s regular-user spot fees are 0.3% taker and 0.2% maker. In the spot market data on its website on October 31, 2026, all 349 USDT pairs and 6 USDC pairs listed had a 0.3% taker fee. Most large international exchanges charge regular users 0.1% on spot.

In money terms, buying and then selling 1,000 USDT of BTC on spot (both with market orders):

• BTCC: 1,000 × 0.3% × 2 = 6 USDT
• An exchange with 0.1% spot fees: 1,000 × 0.1% × 2 = 2 USDT

The invitation code’s spot rebate is 0%, and moving up a VIP tier does not lower spot fees either, so for people who only trade spot, BTCC’s market order fee will not go below 0.3%.

Futures fees compared with Bybit, Bitget and BingX

BTCC is more competitive on futures. The table below compares four futures-focused international exchanges: the regular-user (VIP 0) perpetual futures fees, and the fees after each exchange’s official fee rebate. BTCC’s fees were checked on October 31, 2026, the other three come from this site’s data of October 8, 2026, and the rebate rates are from the invitation code data synced on October 31, 2026:

In money terms, for one futures trade with a notional value (the total value of the position the contract represents) of 10,000 USDT, opened and closed with market orders:

What the two tables show:

• Without a rebate, BTCC’s futures fees are not low: its taker fee matches Bybit’s, and its 0.03% maker fee is half again as high as the 0.02% at the other three.
• With the 60% futures rebate, BTCC has the lowest taker fee of the four: opening and closing the same 10,000 USDT trade costs 1.1 USDT less than on BingX and 6.6 USDT less than on Bybit.
• For maker fills, BTCC after the rebate (0.012%) and BingX (0.011%) are about the same.
• If you deposit 200 USDT at BTCC to reach VIP 1 and the rebate still applies, the taker fee would be 0.05% × 40% = 0.02%. BTCC has not said whether the two can be combined, so this is only an assumption.

This compares trading fees only. Futures also have funding rates, whose rules and amounts differ between exchanges, and with slippage added, the real cost is higher than the tables show. For costs beyond fees, see “Are zero-fee exchanges really cheaper?”; for a full comparison of regular-user fees across exchanges, see “International crypto exchange fee comparison”.

USDT deposits and withdrawals: Solana is cheapest at 1 USDT

On BTCC’s deposit page, choose USDT and a network, copy the address, then withdraw from the sending platform. Both sides must use the same network, or you may not get the funds back.

Deposits are free. According to the deposit and withdrawal tab of the official fee page, the minimum deposit on every network is 1 USDT, and BTCC states that deposits below the minimum are forfeited and will not be credited, so take particular care with small test transfers. Withdrawal fees on the main networks:

The same data also lists Avalanche C-Chain and Optimism, with a withdrawal fee of 5 USDT each. BTCC does not support TON.

• Solana is cheapest at 1 USDT, and TRC20 costs 1.5 USDT; Arbitrum and Polygon cost 5 USDT, much more than at most exchanges. For a comparison of withdrawal networks and fees across exchanges, see “How to choose a USDT withdrawal network”.
• Check the withdrawal page for the minimum withdrawal amount; the official guides do not list a fixed figure.
• According to the withdrawal review guide, withdrawals usually pass the system review within 10 minutes; some are sent to manual review and you may be asked for more documents. After a fiat deposit, for example by credit card, the funds can usually be withdrawn only after 24 hours.
• The same guide (version of November 7, 2025) says fiat withdrawals are temporarily disabled for system maintenance, and BTCC has not said when they will resume.

BTCC earn products: BTCC Earn

BTCC launched BTCC Earn in February 2026, with flexible and fixed-term products. According to the official Earn FAQ:

• Flexible: open to all users, with interest settled hourly and redemption at any time; the principal returns to your wallet account immediately. No interest is paid for the hour you subscribe; it starts from the next hour.
• Fixed-term: open only to new users within 7 days of signing up; early redemption earns no interest.
• Limits: more than 10 subscriptions or redemptions within 24 hours triggers risk control limits; assets in Earn do not count toward your VIP tier.

The press release at launch gave flexible USDT an annual rate of “up to 20%”, and a short fixed-term product for new users only an annual rate of 300%. The earn page shows current rates only after you log in, and I do not have any dated rate data.

The earn page is labeled “principal and interest guaranteed”. That is BTCC’s own promise, not third-party insurance or deposit protection. The official guides also do not say where the yield comes from or how much the platform keeps. Idle funds do not earn interest automatically; you have to subscribe yourself.

For what extra risks idle USDT in an exchange’s earn product carries compared with short-term Treasury ETFs and lending on Aave, see “Where to park idle USD and USDT”. On an exchange with no formal license that I could find, the risk of the exchange itself deserves even more weight.

Pros and cons: who BTCC suits

For how we rate exchanges, see “Exchange rating methodology”. If you are still comparing exchanges, start with “How to choose a crypto exchange”, then compare the exchanges with similar futures fees: the “BingX review” and the “Bybit review”. More exchange reviews are on the crypto topic page.