What is Crypto.com?

Crypto.com began life in 2016 as Monaco, rebranded in 2018, and grew under co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek into a retail giant that passed 100 million users in mid-2024, powered by its app, Visa card program, and sports sponsorships from the Lakers arena to Formula 1. The trading venue relevant here is the Crypto.com Exchange, a separate platform from the app where the derivatives book lives across several hundred listed assets and spot pairs feeding the perp indexes.

The company matters to perp traders as the clearest case of a retail brand running institutional-grade perps behind a consumer front door, and its derivatives ambitions now span both the offshore Exchange and a CFTC-licensed US arm, a split worth reading against the market sizing in our perpetual futures statistics report.

Crypto.com Perpetual Futures Fees

Crypto.com Exchange derivatives run on their own five-level fee table, separate from the spot schedule, starting at 0.017% maker and 0.034% taker for Level 1 accounts below $1 million in 30-day derivatives volume, per the official fee documentation. The ladder bottoms out at 0% maker and 0.026% taker at Level 5, which requires $50 million or more, and fee status refreshes daily at 04:00 UTC.

CRO lockups layer on top, unlocking discounted rates, 0% maker fees, and maker rebates depending on the amount locked on the Exchange. A separate VIP track measures accounts by their share of total exchange volume rather than absolute dollars, opening at 0.10% of spot or derivatives turnover, an unusual construction that ties elite pricing to the venue's own liquidity. The maker and taker split matters more here than on flat-fee venues, a distinction covered in our maker vs taker guide, because the derivatives table rewards resting orders at every level while the retail app schedule most reviews quote never applies to perps at all.

How Crypto.com Funding Rates Work

Crypto.com Exchange publishes and settles perpetual funding every hour, a cadence only a handful of centralized venues use, with payments applied as cash adjustments inside the account's margin balance rather than at 8-hour checkpoints. Positions open at each hourly mark exchange the payment, and session marks govern profit and loss between settlements.

The hourly rhythm changes carry math, since a displayed rate compounds 24 times daily against the three settlements standard elsewhere, so comparing prints across venues requires normalizing to a common period first. Funding here is a transfer between traders rather than a fee the exchange keeps, so persistent one-sided prints signal crowding rather than revenue. Per-contract caps apply and the backstop chain runs from the insurance fund to auto-deleveraging when margins fail, and live hourly prints for the second-largest market sit on our ETH perpetuals page.

Crypto.com Perpetual Contract Types & Leverage

Crypto.com Exchange lists USD-settled perpetuals alongside quarterly dated futures on BTC, ETH, and selected alts, plus warrant contracts, all governed by the same derivatives fee table. The difference between the expiring and perpetual products is unpacked in our perpetuals vs futures guide.

Margining runs through Smart Cross Margin, a unified model where maintenance margin sits at roughly half of initial margin and collateral works across positions rather than in isolated buckets. Product documentation cites leverage up to 50x on major perps, below the 100x ceiling older writeups still repeat, and regional builds cap it lower still. Spot margin trading tops out separately at 10x, offered in fixed steps of 3x, 5x, and 10x.

Crypto.com Licenses & Regulation

Crypto.com holds the first full MiCA license granted to a major global exchange, issued to its Malta entity by the MFSA in January 2025 per the company announcement, and it added a Limited Financial Institution licence from the same regulator in February 2026 to keep stablecoin services running under the EU's e-money rules. USDT was delisted for EEA accounts along the way under the bloc's e-money token rules. Elsewhere the stack covers a CFTC-licensed US derivatives arm holding exchange and clearing designations, an FCA registration in the UK, Singapore's MPI licence, Dubai's VARA, and AUSTRAC in Australia. The US arm opened talks with the CFTC in 2023, filed to amend its clearing order in June 2024, and won the change that permits margined derivatives, while separately self-certifying new event contracts, including a Bitcoin price event contract, with the regulator this spring.

The enforcement ledger is unusually clean for a platform this size, carrying no monetary settlements with major regulators, and the SEC's Wells notice episode dissolved without charges after the agency's posture shifted. The US arm now runs regulated event contracts in the territory pioneered by the venue in our Kalshi perpetuals review. Every jurisdiction call sits in our Crypto.com restricted countries list.

Where is Crypto.com Available?

Crypto.com splits eligibility by product line, and the derivatives list is far narrower than the app's reach. Exchange perpetuals are unavailable to US retail traders, and the restricted set extends across the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, South Africa, Hong Kong, and the entire EU and EEA, so the MiCA license covers spot and stablecoin services without opening perps to European retail.

American users get a different door, since the CFTC-licensed arm offers regulated UpDown and Strike options plus event contracts, and its amended clearing licence clears the way for margined US derivatives, a path competing directly with Coinbase Futures domestically. Australians blocked from Exchange perps can weigh the local field in our Australian futures platforms guide. Sanctions blocks cover Iran, North Korea, and allied lists, app access is denied in dozens of further locations, and even the consumer US business excludes New York.

Is Crypto.com Safe?

Crypto.com's one breach is fully documented. On January 17, 2022 attackers bypassed 2FA on 483 accounts and withdrew 4,836 ETH and 443 BTC plus small balances, roughly $34 million in total, as reported by CBS News. Withdrawals paused for about 14 hours, every affected user was reimbursed in full, all 2FA tokens were revoked platform-wide, and the fallout produced mandatory multi-factor authentication, a 24-hour delay on new whitelisted withdrawal addresses, and an Account Protection Program covering unauthorized access losses.

Reserves are published as 1:1 Proof of Reserves attestations, with auditors having rotated since the early Mazars engagements, and custody pairs 90%-plus cold storage with reported insurance coverage of $120 million on custodied assets, $100 million of it against cold storage risks. FDIC pass-through protection applies only to USD fiat balances at partner banks and never to crypto holdings. Certifications span ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, and PCI DSS Level 1. The reimbursement record is genuinely strong, and it still leaves the counterparty risk of any centralized venue sitting above zero, particularly where insurance terms stay discretionary.

How Does Crypto.com Compare to Other Perpetual Exchanges?

Crypto.com's closest rival in shape is Bybit, another retail-heavy brand pairing a consumer app with a serious perps book, and the head-to-head dynamics of that tier show up in our Binance vs Bybit comparison. Against Bybit, Crypto.com trades derivatives depth and altcoin count away for a regulatory footprint no offshore rival matches, holding MiCA, VARA, and a full CFTC stack simultaneously, and its hourly funding cadence gives short-horizon carry traders a faster signal than Bybit's 8-hour cycle.

Domestically its true peers become Kraken and Coinbase, the other US-regulated derivatives operators, where its options and event contract lineup, covered in our best options platforms guide, fills the gap left by absent US perps. Liquidation stress on its books remains visible on our ETH liquidation heatmap when leverage crowds one side.