KuCoin, Bybit, OKX, Bitstamp: Fees & Verification

Selection criteria

I picked these four because readers keep asking about them right after getting rejected or priced out of Binance and Coinbase. See What Binance Is: Fees, Limits and Verification if that's your starting point. For this roundup I compared:

• Base-tier spot maker and taker fees, not the promotional or VIP-tier numbers exchanges lead with.
• Instant buy / card purchase fees, since that's what most new users actually pay first.
• Withdrawal fees and daily withdrawal limits.
• Country restrictions and supported regions, because a cheap fee schedule is irrelevant if you can't open an account.
• Deposit methods, since bank transfer versus card versus PayPal changes the effective cost.

One-line takeaway: cheap headline fees mean nothing if your country isn't on the supported list.

The four platforms, one by one

KuCoin

KuCoin's base spot fees sit at 0.1% maker and 0.1% taker — flat, no asymmetry between the two sides at the entry tier. That matches Bybit almost exactly and beats neither.

The catch is the instant buy route. Card purchases run Approx. 1.5% - 3% (Often via third-party providers), and that range exists because KuCoin often routes card orders through third-party payment providers rather than pricing them in-house. You don't always know which provider you land on until the quote appears.

On deposits, the fact sheet KuCoin publishes doesn't give a fixed minimum figure — it just tells you, per To avoid asset loss, always deposit more than the minimum deposit amount required by KuCoin, as shown on the page., to always send more than whatever minimum is shown on the deposit page at that moment. That's not a number I can quote, because it isn't one. It's a warning to check the page every single time, since the floor can move.

Country support is described on KuCoin's own site as a list of "Supported countries/regions" without the underlying list attached to this fact. Translation: don't assume your country is on it. Check before you fund anything.

One-line takeaway: KuCoin's trading fees are ordinary; its card-purchase costs and deposit minimums are the parts worth double-checking.

Bybit

Bybit's base spot fees are 0.100% maker and 0.100% taker — functionally identical to KuCoin. If you're choosing between these two on trading fees alone, there's no real difference at the base tier.

Where Bybit separates itself is the instant buy fee, at roughly approximately 1%, cheaper than KuCoin's card route. Withdrawals are less clean: Bybit's own disclosure just says, per there is a charge of withdrawal fees depending on the cryptocurrencies you’re withdrawing., that the fee depends on which cryptocurrency you're withdrawing. No flat number, no benchmark coin quoted — you check the withdrawal screen for the coin you actually hold.

Daily withdrawal limits scale hard with verification: from 20K USDT daily (no KYC) to 4M USDT daily (Pro level). That's a two-hundred-fold spread between the no-KYC floor and the Pro ceiling, which tells you how much of Bybit's usefulness is locked behind verification tiers rather than the base account.

Country access is the bigger limiter. Bybit restricts United States, Canada, the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Singapore — that list includes some of the largest crypto-trading populations in the world, so check it before you build a workflow around this exchange.

One-line takeaway: Bybit's fees mirror KuCoin's, but withdrawal limits and country restrictions do the real gatekeeping.

OKX

OKX undercuts both of the above on trading fees: 0.08% maker, 0.10% taker. That's a real, if small, edge for anyone trading enough volume for basis points to matter.

Deposit methods are the widest of the four covered here — SEPA/SEPA Instant, Visa & Mastercard, PayPal — which means card and PayPal funding sit alongside bank transfer rather than being routed through opaque third parties. That's a genuine convenience difference versus KuCoin's card-fee situation.

The only withdrawal fee fact on record for OKX is 1 DOGE, which is a DOGE-denominated figure — not something you can extrapolate to BTC or ETH withdrawal costs. Don't assume it scales.

Supported countries lean heavily toward Latin America: El Salvador, Argentina, The Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay. If you're outside that region, this fact alone doesn't tell you whether you're covered — OKX supports plenty of other markets too, but they're not in this particular fact set, so I won't guess at them here.

One-line takeaway: OKX has the cheapest base fees and the widest deposit options of the four, but its confirmed country list here skews Latin American.

Bitstamp

Bitstamp is the odd one out in this comparison because the only fact available on it is a restriction, not a fee. It blocks United States; jurisdictions embargoed by the United States; jurisdictions where use would be illegal or would otherwise violate applicable law — the United States, US-embargoed jurisdictions, and anywhere else where use would violate applicable law.

I'm not going to invent a fee schedule for Bitstamp. None was supplied, so none gets quoted. If you're comparing it against KuCoin, Bybit or OKX on cost, you'll need to pull its current fee page yourself — I won't repeat a number I can't source.

What the restriction fact does tell you: Bitstamp's exclusion list is narrower and more explicitly legal-compliance-driven than Bybit's, which names specific large markets outright.

One-line takeaway: Bitstamp's restriction list is short and law-driven; its fee schedule isn't covered by the facts here, so verify separately.

How to decide between them

Work through these in order:

1. Check the restriction list first. If you're in the United States, Bybit and Bitstamp are both out, per United States, Canada, the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Singapore and United States; jurisdictions embargoed by the United States; jurisdictions where use would be illegal or would otherwise violate applicable law. This step eliminates more options than any fee comparison will.
2. If trading fees are your priority, OKX's 0.08% maker fee is the lowest of the three quoted here, ahead of KuCoin's 0.1% and Bybit's 0.100%.
3. If you're funding by card, compare Bybit's roughly approximately 1% instant buy fee against KuCoin's Approx. 1.5% - 3% (Often via third-party providers) range before assuming either is cheap.
4. If you plan to withdraw large amounts often, Bybit's tiered limits — from 20K USDT daily (no KYC) to 4M USDT daily (Pro level) — mean your effective ceiling depends entirely on verification level, not just the account you opened.
5. If none of these four fit, the comparisons in Buy Crypto: Binance vs Coinbase vs Kraken Fees Compared cover a different set of platforms, and Centralized vs Decentralized Exchanges Compared is worth reading before you assume a centralized exchange is even the right category for what you're doing.

One-line takeaway: eliminate by country restriction first, then compare fees only among what's left.