Almost everything sold as “crypto trading” at a regulated broker is not crypto. It is a contract for difference written on a crypto price. You never own the coin, you cannot send it to a wallet, you cannot stake it or spend it, and the position exists only as an entry in the broker’s ledger. If that broker fails, you are a creditor holding a contract, not a person holding an asset. That distinction is the single most consequential thing on this page, and it is the thing broker marketing works hardest to blur.
The second most consequential thing: if you are a UK retail client, you cannot legally buy any of it. The FCA banned the sale of crypto derivatives to retail consumers with effect from 6 January 2021, and every broker we have tested that holds a UK retail permission honours that ban. Our review of Capital.com records it plainly, and so does our review of Plus500. If you live in the UK and hold a retail classification, the entire crypto CFD section of this market is closed to you, and any firm offering it to you anyway is telling you something important about itself.
What follows is a comparison of the crypto offerings at twelve brokers we have funded, traded and withdrawn from. It is not a recommendation to trade crypto. Crypto is among the most volatile asset classes retail traders can access, leverage multiplies that volatility in both directions, and the majority of retail accounts lose money trading CFDs at every broker named below. This page assumes you have already decided, and it tries to tell you which brokers do the job competently and where each one falls down.
Every figure here comes from our own funded-account testing and from the individual reviews linked in each section. Where a broker’s crypto range or restriction changed after we tested, we say so and date the change. We take no payment for placement or ranking — our funding model is set out in how we make money, and the six weighted categories behind every score are explained in how we rate brokers. Nothing on this page is investment advice, and no broker on it can make a volatile asset safe.
What you are actually buying when you trade a crypto CFD
A contract for difference is an agreement between you and the broker to exchange the difference in an instrument’s price between the moment the contract opens and the moment it closes. Nothing is bought. Nothing is delivered. When you open a long BTC/USD CFD, no bitcoin moves anywhere in the world; the broker records an obligation and hedges it however it chooses. That is why a CFD can exist on an instrument the broker does not hold and never intends to hold.
Three practical consequences follow, and each one catches people out.
You cannot withdraw the coin. There is no coin. Our Plus500 review puts it in one line: trading is by CFD only, so you never hold the underlying coin and cannot move it to an external wallet. The same is true at Capital.com, Pepperstone, Eightcap, AvaTrade, Markets.com, XM, FBS and — for its crypto CFD product — eToro. If your intention is to accumulate bitcoin and self-custody it, a CFD broker is structurally the wrong venue and no amount of range or pricing changes that.
You take the broker’s credit risk as well as the market’s. Our Eightcap review states the position directly: these are CFDs, you never hold the underlying asset, and you are exposed to the broker as counterparty rather than owning coins in a wallet. Client-money segregation and compensation schemes mitigate this, but they cover broker failure, not trading losses, and — as our eToro review notes — crypto holdings in particular may fall outside those schemes entirely, which is commonly misunderstood. We cover what the protections actually do in fund safety and client money protection.
You pay to hold it. A spot coin sitting in a wallet costs nothing to keep. A leveraged CFD accrues overnight financing every night it stays open, and on crypto that charge is typically among the highest on a broker’s book because the funding rate reflects the cost of the leverage rather than the interest differential of a currency pair. A directionally correct crypto position held for two months can still close at a loss on financing alone.
Why UK retail clients cannot trade crypto derivatives
This is not a broker policy, a compliance quirk, or something you can work around by opening an account with a different firm. Since 6 January 2021 the FCA has prohibited the sale, marketing and distribution of derivatives referencing unregulated cryptoassets — CFDs, futures, options and exchange-traded notes — to retail consumers in the UK. The regulator’s stated reasoning was that retail consumers could not reliably value the products, that the underlying market had no reliable basis for valuation, and that the combination of extreme volatility and leverage produced consumer harm it could not otherwise contain.
The practical effect on the brokers reviewed here is uniform. Our Capital.com review records that UK clients cannot trade crypto CFDs at all, and identifies it explicitly as a regulatory restriction rather than a broker decision. Our Plus500 review records that crypto CFDs are restricted or unavailable in several jurisdictions, including for UK retail clients. Our Interactive Brokers review records that cryptocurrency access runs through some group entities but not the UK one. There is no broker on this page that can lawfully sell a UK retail client a crypto derivative, and the ones that hold UK permissions do not try.
Two routes around it exist and both carry a cost you should understand before you take them. The first is professional classification. Our Pepperstone review sets out the qualification test used across the FCA, CySEC and ASIC regimes: two of three criteria — relevant financial-sector experience, a portfolio above roughly EUR 500,000, or a substantial trading record over the previous twelve months. Reclassifying lifts the crypto leverage cap from 1:2 and, in the UK, removes the derivatives ban. It also, as our Pepperstone review notes, means giving up retail protections including in some jurisdictions negative balance protection and compensation scheme access. That is a poor trade for most people who would qualify on portfolio size alone.
The second route is to stop trying to trade a derivative and buy the spot asset from an FCA-registered cryptoasset firm instead. The ban covers derivatives, not the coins. That changes the product you are buying, the protections you have — cryptoasset firms registered for anti-money-laundering purposes are not covered by the compensation scheme for investment business — and the tax treatment. It is a different decision, not a workaround. What the FCA does and does not supervise is set out in our explainer on the Financial Conduct Authority.
How we chose the brokers on this page
Every broker below appears in our published review set, which means we opened an account with it, funded it, placed measured orders, requested a withdrawal and checked its licence numbers against the regulators’ own registers. Brokers that offer no crypto product at all are excluded regardless of how well they score elsewhere. Brokers whose crypto offering exists only under a lightly-supervised offshore entity are included where relevant but flagged, because the entity that holds your account determines every protection you have.
The ordering on this page is not our overall broker ranking, and the disagreement between the two is deliberate. Our highest-scoring broker overall, Interactive Brokers at 8.9, has one of the thinnest crypto offerings on the page. The broker with the widest crypto CFD range, Capital.com, scores 8.5. A broker at 6.5 offers five coins. If you are choosing a broker primarily to trade crypto, the overall score tells you how well the firm is run and how safe your money is; the crypto section tells you whether the product you want is actually there. You need both numbers and neither substitutes for the other.
One honest limitation. We have not measured BTC/USD spreads on a funded account at any broker on this page. Our cost testing was built around EUR/USD, gold and index CFDs, sampled across sessions, because those are the instruments where broker pricing is directly comparable. We therefore report each broker’s cost model — spread-only, spread-plus-commission, and what we measured on the instruments we did test — and we do not publish a crypto spread figure we did not observe. Any site quoting a precise BTC spread as a measured finding should be able to tell you the date, the session and the sample size. Ours would say the same, which is why the column is absent.
Crypto at a glance across the brokers we have tested
| Broker | Our score | Crypto CFDs | Spot crypto | Coins or pairs, as counted in our review | Cost model | Overnight funding | Availability restrictions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capital.com | 8.5 | Yes | No | 450+ | Spread only, no commission | 4% a year on a 360- or 365-day basis; removed on unleveraged crypto during 2025 | UK clients cannot trade crypto CFDs at all |
| Eightcap | 7.9 | Yes | No | 250+, including crypto indices | Raw account: spread plus $7 per lot round turn | Charged; triple financing applied on Wednesdays | Clients outside UK, EU and Australia go to one of four offshore entities |
| eToro | 7.8 | Yes | Yes, MiCA-licensed in the EEA | 80+ | Spread only on most instruments | Charged; swap-free substitute fee on crypto CFDs is variable after a 7-day grace period | Swap-free restricted to two non-EU entities since December 2025 |
| Swissquote | 7.9 | Yes, on CFD instruments | Yes, via the in-house SQX platform | 52 | Spread only; EUR/USD measured at 1.3 pips on the Premium tier | Swap rates within industry norms on the instruments we held | No ASIC entity; UK clients are not covered by the Swiss deposit guarantee |
| Pepperstone | 8.5 | Yes | No | 26 | Razor account: spread plus commission; EUR/USD measured at 0.09 pips before commission | Charged; triple rate on Wednesdays | Retail crypto leverage capped at 1:2 under FCA, CySEC and ASIC |
| Interactive Brokers | 8.9 | Through specific entities | Through specific entities | Limited: bitcoin, ethereum and others | Commission charged separately rather than buried in the price | Charged from interbank benchmarks plus a margin on CFDs; cannot be disabled | Not available through the UK entity |
| IG | 8.7 | Yes | Not at the time of our testing | 11+ | Spread only; EUR/USD measured at 0.6 pips | Charged; ran slightly above market average when we measured it | UK cryptoasset registration held by IG Digital Assets Limited since 30 September 2025 |
| Plus500 | 7.2 | Yes | No | 15+ | Spread only, no separate commission | Charged on positions held past 23:00 GMT | Restricted or unavailable in several jurisdictions including UK retail |
| AvaTrade | 7.6 | Yes | No | 16+ | Fixed spreads from 0.9 pips on EUR/USD | Charged; crypto is excluded from the swap-free account | No new UK retail accounts since at least May 2026 |
| Markets.com | 7.9 | Yes | No | 20+ | Spread only, no commission on any trade | Charged; swap-free available on request | Entity depends on residence across six licensed subsidiaries |
| XM | 8.3 | Entity-dependent | No | Varies by entity; BTC/USD and ETH/USD where permitted | Ultra Low: 0.6 pips, no commission. Zero: raw plus commission | Charged; swap-free carries no substitute administration fee | Does not onboard UK residents at all |
| FBS | 6.5 | Yes | No | 5 | Standard: spread only; measured 1.3 pips on EUR/USD | Charged; swap-free substitute fee appears from day three | No FCA authorisation; does not serve UK retail clients |
Two notes on reading that table. First, “coins” is not a quality measure. A broker offering 450 crypto CFDs is offering 440 instruments almost nobody should trade, on assets with thin underlying liquidity and correspondingly wide pricing. Range matters if you have a specific alternative coin in mind and is close to irrelevant otherwise. Second, the restrictions column is the column that decides whether you can open the account at all, and it changes more often than the pricing does.
Capital.com: the widest crypto CFD range we have counted
Capital.com lists more than 450 cryptocurrency CFDs, the largest count in our review set, spanning bitcoin, ethereum, solana and ripple alongside a very long tail of alternative coins. It scores 8.5 overall, and the reason it scores that highly has nothing to do with crypto: it is one of the few CFD brokers whose tier-one licences actually cover the account a retail client opens, rather than sitting in a group entity that takes no retail business. FCA 793714, CySEC 319/17 and ASIC AFSL 513393 all onboard retail clients directly.
On cost, our measured finding is 0.6 pips on EUR/USD with zero commission and gold at 0.30 points — among the tightest we have recorded. Crypto is priced on the same spread-only model, so there is no separate commission to add. The overnight funding structure is the more interesting detail for a crypto trader: our review records it as 4% annually divided by 360 or 365 days depending on currency, and notes that during 2025 it was removed entirely on unleveraged share and crypto positions. A 1:1 crypto position therefore costs nothing to carry, which materially changes the arithmetic for anyone holding a directional view over weeks rather than hours. That is unusual and it is the strongest single argument for the broker on this page.
The drawback is absolute for one large group of readers and structural for everyone else. UK clients cannot trade crypto CFDs here — not a reduced range, not a lower leverage cap, but no access. And everything at Capital.com is a contract for difference: you cannot buy a real share, a real ETF or a real coin, so nothing you hold here is an asset you own. Our review also records a 0.7% currency conversion charge on trades outside your account currency, which quietly applies to every dollar-denominated crypto trade made from a euro or sterling account.
Eightcap: 250-plus crypto CFDs and genuine crypto indices
Eightcap scores 7.9 and carries the most distinctive crypto proposition among the mid-tier brokers we have tested: over 250 cryptocurrency CFDs, covering the majors alongside a deep alternative-coin list and — unusually — crypto indices, which give basket exposure rather than single-coin exposure. Our review describes the instrument distribution as genuinely unusual, with exceptional crypto coverage sitting alongside a merely adequate 56-pair forex range. That is the inverse of almost every competitor.
The pricing behind it is real. On the Raw account we measured EUR/USD at 0.1 pips average during the London session with a $7 round-turn commission, and GBP/USD at 0.3 pips, in February 2026 testing. Execution averaged around 40 milliseconds across 50 live orders with no requotes at all and 10% of fills at a better price than requested. Overnight financing was mid-range when we measured it, with triple financing applied on Wednesdays to cover the weekend — standard practice, and worth building into any position you intend to hold across a Wednesday rollover.
Three drawbacks, and one of them is specifically a crypto problem. Live chat runs 24 hours Monday to Friday but not at weekends, so a problem arising on a Saturday waits until Monday — and crypto is precisely the asset class where a weekend problem is most likely to matter. The offshore stack has grown: Eightcap now publishes four lightly-supervised entities across the Bahamas, Seychelles, Mauritius and St Vincent, and clients outside the UK, EU and Australia are onboarded to one of them. Research and education are the weakest part of the offering. The broker’s crypto awards, which appear throughout its marketing, are worth little as evidence — awards of this kind are frequently pay-to-enter, and we mention them only because readers will encounter them.
eToro: 80-plus coins with a MiCA licence behind them
eToro scores 7.8 and is the only broker in our set whose crypto business sits under a purpose-built European crypto authorisation. In January 2025 it obtained a MiCA licence from CySEC for regulated crypto services across the EEA, and the group separately holds eToroX in Gibraltar under GFSC registration 1333B. Our review counts 80-plus crypto instruments. The firm has been NASDAQ-listed since May 2025 under ETOR, which brings mandatory audited SEC filings that anyone can read — a level of financial disclosure most CFD brokers do not offer at all.
The product split is the thing to understand here, and it mirrors how eToro handles shares. Buy without leverage and you own the underlying asset, receive dividends where applicable and pay no overnight financing; apply leverage or go short and it becomes a CFD with daily financing charges. Our review documents that distinction explicitly for shares. For crypto, the swap-free administration fee table records crypto CFDs at a seven-day grace period with a variable daily fee thereafter, which confirms a leveraged CFD product exists alongside the MiCA-licensed service. We did not test withdrawing a coin to an external wallet, so we do not claim it. What we can say is that the licence and the holdings are real, and that the CFD wrapper is real too — check which one you are opening before you fund. The relevant supervisor is covered in our explainer on CySEC.
The drawback is cost, and it is consistent. eToro’s spreads were wider than every comparison broker on every instrument we measured, with gold costing roughly four to five times what IC Markets or Pepperstone charge. EUR/USD sat at 1.0 pip in active hours and widened to 1.5 pips or more in thin liquidity — and thin liquidity is where crypto trades most of the time. There is a $5 flat withdrawal fee on USD accounts, waived only at Platinum tier and above, a currency conversion charge of up to 1.5%, and live chat is reserved for clients holding $5,000 or more. Our review also flags that crypto holdings may fall outside compensation schemes entirely, which is the most under-appreciated fact in this section.
Swissquote: crypto custody at a licensed Swiss bank
Swissquote scores 7.9 and offers something structurally different from everything else on this page: 52 cryptocurrencies through its in-house SQX platform, held by a licensed bank rather than an unregulated exchange. Our review calls this a materially different custody proposition, and the phrase is precise. Swissquote Bank Ltd holds a genuine FINMA banking licence, with a second banking licence in Luxembourg under the CSSF and the European Central Bank, and the group is listed on SIX with KPMG-audited accounts. If your objection to crypto exchanges is custody risk rather than volatility, this is the answer our review set contains.
Execution across our 50 test orders averaged about 9 milliseconds with 98% filled without requote, and a separate dealing desk operates from Sunday 23:00 to Friday 23:00 CET for placing forex, CFD or crypto orders by phone — genuinely useful if your platform fails while you hold a position. On the instruments we held across several days, swap rates sat within industry norms rather than at punitive levels, with current values published daily in the platform.
You pay for the bank. Spreads lagged all three comparison brokers on all seven instruments we sampled, with EUR/USD at 1.3 pips on the Premium tier against 0.6 at Saxo Bank. It takes $1,000 to open an account and competitive pricing is gated behind $10,000. Withdrawals are by bank transfer only, and ours took five business days against a same-day send claim. There is no ASIC entity, so Australian residents are served offshore without local recourse, and UK clients are not covered by the Swiss deposit guarantee — the UK entity is an FCA investment firm, not a bank, which is a distinction that matters precisely when it would matter most.
Pepperstone: 26 pairs, and the best execution behind them
Pepperstone scores 8.5 and lists 26 cryptocurrency pairs — a range our own review describes as adequate rather than generous. Nobody should choose this broker for crypto breadth. What it offers instead is the execution quality that matters most when a volatile instrument moves against you: a median fill around 30 milliseconds across 50 live orders, with 47 of the 50 filled at the requested price, and Razor pricing that genuinely starts at 0.0 pips with a measured EUR/USD average of 0.09 pips before commission.
Our Pepperstone review is also the clearest source in our set on crypto leverage caps. Retail clients under the FCA, CySEC and ASIC entities are capped at 1:2 on cryptocurrency — the tightest cap in the entire regulatory schedule, tighter than the 1:5 applied to individual shares and far tighter than the 1:30 on major currency pairs. Regulators set it there deliberately. Four tier-one licences sit behind the business: FCA 684312, ASIC 414530, CySEC 388/20 and DFSA F004356, all confirmed active on the registers in July 2026. Australian supervision is covered in our explainer on ASIC.
Three real drawbacks. Pepperstone withdrew from the Financial Commission on 27 February 2026, removing the external dispute-resolution route and EUR 20,000 compensation fund that previously covered Bahamas-entity clients — a genuine reduction in protection concentrated offshore, and we marked the fund-access score down for it. The swap-free account charges $100 per standard lot once a position passes day five, among the steepest substitute fees we have measured, which rules it out for anyone holding crypto over weeks. And there is no real share dealing and no spot crypto at all: every position here is a leveraged CFD, so nothing you open is an asset you own.
Interactive Brokers: our highest-scoring broker, and one of the thinnest crypto offerings
Interactive Brokers scores 8.9, the highest in our review set, and its crypto offering is recorded in our review as simply “limited” — bitcoin, ethereum and others, through specific entities only. This is the clearest illustration on the page of why an overall score is not a crypto score. IBKR gives you more than 160 markets across 34 countries from one account, tier-one regulation in every major jurisdiction, SIPC protection of $500,000 plus excess Lloyd’s cover on the US entity, and $0.005 per share on US equities. It does not give you a crypto product worth choosing it for.
The entity point is the operative one. Our review records that what you can trade depends on the entity you contract with and where you live, and names cryptocurrency specifically as an example: access runs through some entities but not the UK one. If you are onboarded to the UK entity, crypto is not on your instrument list at all. Anyone considering IBKR for digital assets needs to establish which entity will hold the account before assuming the product exists — that is a pre-funding question, not a post-funding discovery.
Beyond crypto, the drawbacks we recorded are real and worth weighing. Trader Workstation is genuinely hard — close to a week of daily use before we worked in it efficiently. There is no swap-free account of any kind and no way to disable overnight financing, so a carry-averse crypto position has no shelter here. Account opening takes a few hours to three business days, wire withdrawals cost $10 after the first free one each calendar month, and the US entity settled five separate FINRA disciplinary matters in 2025 — supervisory failures rather than misconduct against clients, but a pattern we recorded rather than smoothed over.
IG: eleven coins now, an exchange acquisition landing later
IG scores 8.7 on the strength of eight tier-one regulators, more than 17,000 instruments, five platforms and execution among the fastest we have tested. Crypto is the clear gap. Our review counts 11 or so coins and says plainly that this is well short of a dedicated venue: adequate if digital assets are a small allocation, wrong if crypto is your primary market.
Two developments postdate our testing and both are dated in our review. IG completed its acquisition of the Australian crypto exchange Independent Reserve on 30 January 2026 for approximately A$178 million, with a crypto proposition planned for Singapore, Australia and the UAE in late 2026. Separately, IG’s UK cryptoasset registration was granted on 30 September 2025 and is held by IG Digital Assets Limited — a correction our review makes to its own earlier edition, which had recorded February 2025. Neither of these changes what was available to trade when we tested, and we are not going to describe a 2026 roadmap as a current feature. If crypto breadth is your requirement, check what has actually launched before you fund.
On cost, IG is mid-table rather than market-leading: 0.6 pips on EUR/USD, which was also our measured London-session average, with overnight funding that ran slightly above market average when we measured it. That last point compounds directly against a leveraged crypto hold. There is no swap-free account and no workaround — our review calls it a structural gap, noting the Dubai facility was withdrawn and had not returned as at July 2026. Card deposits start at $250, and a $12 monthly inactivity fee applies after 24 months.
Plus500: simple crypto CFDs with every cost in the spread
Plus500 scores 7.2 and offers 15-plus cryptocurrency CFDs — bitcoin, ethereum, ripple and litecoin among them — inside a platform built for people who want to place a trade without learning a professional terminal. Five tier-one licences sit behind it, including FCA 509909, CySEC 250/14, ASIC AFSL 417727, MAS and New Zealand’s FMA, and the company is LSE-listed in the FTSE 250, which forces audited disclosure on a fixed timetable. For the year ended 31 December 2025 it reported revenue of $792.4 million and closed the year with about $0.8 billion in cash.
Our review is unusually direct about the crypto caveat and it is worth quoting in substance: trading is by CFD only, so you never hold the underlying coin and cannot move it to an external wallet, and crypto CFDs are restricted or unavailable in several jurisdictions including for UK retail clients. On overnight funding we have an actual measurement, though on a currency pair rather than a coin: a mini-lot EUR/USD buy opened at 1.0308 was charged -0.01079% for the night, about -$1.11, with the rate changing daily and visible from the information icon beside each instrument. Some instruments carry positive funding. That per-instrument information icon is the thing to check before you open a crypto position, because it is where the number you will actually pay is displayed.
The drawback is pricing. Plus500 advertises 0.8 pips on EUR/USD; we measured 1.1 pips average, against 0.8 at XM, with larger gaps on USD/JPY and gold. Everything sits in the spread with no separate commission, which is simple but not cheap, and on an instrument as volatile as crypto a wide spread is a meaningful handicap on entry. The swap-free account removes overnight interest but replaces it with a fixed administration charge beyond a grace period that varies by instrument, so it reduces one cost rather than eliminating costs.
AvaTrade: fixed spreads, and crypto excluded from swap-free
AvaTrade scores 7.6 and lists 16-plus cryptocurrency CFDs, which our review identifies as the weak spot in its instrument range — well short of specialists offering 30 to 50. What AvaTrade does offer that most rivals do not is fixed spreads that held near their advertised level through news events, when variable-spread competitors widened sharply. On an asset class that produces frequent violent moves, a spread that does not blow out is a genuine structural advantage, and it is the honest reason to consider this broker for crypto despite the thin range.
One detail matters more than any other here and it is easy to miss. AvaTrade’s swap-free account covers forex, commodities, indices and most shares — and explicitly excludes cryptocurrencies, alongside pairs involving ZAR, TRY, RUB and MXN. So the interest-free variant that makes AvaTrade attractive to a large group of traders does not extend to the asset class this page is about. Anyone opening a swap-free account here expecting it to cover a crypto hold will be charged. The account also stops being swap-free after five days in any case, when a fixed administration fee replaces the waived swap.
The other drawbacks are substantial. Execution averaged 660 milliseconds across 50 timed orders, against the 30 to 70 millisecond range we recorded for Pepperstone and Eightcap — an order of magnitude slower, and slippage risk on a fast-moving crypto instrument scales with that. There is a $50 inactivity fee after only three months without a trade, then a $100 administration charge at twelve months. And AVA Trade EU Limited sits on the FCA register under the Financial Services Contracts Regime in supervised run-off, reference 504072: it has not onboarded new UK retail clients since at least May 2026. For a British reader that is the whole story.
Markets.com: the thinnest crypto range among its direct rivals
Markets.com scores 7.9 with more than 2,200 instruments and 20-plus cryptocurrencies. Our review compares that range directly against three named rivals and reaches a blunt conclusion: 20-plus is the thinnest of the four, against eToro’s 80-plus and Capital.com’s 200-plus at the time of that comparison, and if crypto is central to what you trade you should look elsewhere. We are not going to soften that here.
What the broker does well is charge-free plumbing. There is no commission on any trade, the spread is the only trading charge, there are no deposit or withdrawal fees on any method we used, and the withdrawal minimum is $10 — among the lowest in the sector. A swap-free account is available on request with no religious documentation demanded, though the broker may apply a fixed administrative fee on positions held for extended periods, varying by instrument, size and duration. Licences come from four authorities, three of them tier one: FCA 481853 and CySEC 092/08 both verified against the regulators’ own registers, plus ASIC and South Africa’s FSCA. Finalto runs the brand through six licensed subsidiaries, so confirm which entity holds your account before funding.
Two drawbacks and one timing caveat. Spreads on major pairs ran above the cheapest brokers in our comparison set on the standard account, and a $10 monthly inactivity fee starts after only three months without a trade — unusually aggressive, and it will catch anyone who opens an account to hold a single long-term crypto position and then leaves it alone. There is also a 0.6% currency conversion charge on trades outside your account currency. The timing caveat: this review carries a verification date of 5 March 2026, earlier than the rest of the set, so treat the entity and range details as of that date and confirm them at signup.
XM: entity-dependent crypto, and a discrepancy in our own records
XM scores 8.3 and is a strong broker with a weak crypto story. Our XM review records the crypto range as entity-dependent — BTC/USD and ETH/USD where permitted — and states that the range is thin and availability depends entirely on which entity holds your account, so a digital-asset strategy will need a second platform alongside XM. That is the finding from the XM testing itself and it is the one we stand behind.
We should flag a discrepancy rather than paper over it. Two other reviews in our set cite XM’s crypto count in passing as part of their own comparison tables — one at 30-plus, one at 50-plus — and neither figure matches what the XM review itself records. Comparison figures written from a competitor’s perspective are weaker evidence than a broker’s own review, so we have used the XM review’s own finding here and we are flagging the inconsistency for correction rather than picking whichever number reads best. If crypto range is your deciding factor, verify the count for your specific entity at signup.
What XM does better than almost anyone is swap-free pricing: unlike most rivals it charges no administration fee in place of overnight swaps, which is the clearest single reason to choose it over a cheaper competitor. The awkward gap our review records is that swap-free is unavailable on the Zero and Standard accounts, so a high-volume trader who needs it has no ideal option. Two hard restrictions: XM does not onboard UK residents at all — registration redirects to sibling brand Trading.com — and whether XM is currently accepting new Australian retail clients under AFSL 443670 was not verified at the time of publication, with sources conflicting. Australian readers should confirm at signup before funding.
FBS: five coins, and why that is the wrong tool
FBS scores 6.5 and offers five cryptocurrency CFDs. Our review names that as the clear weak spot in the instrument range, and our verdict states directly that FBS is a poor choice for crypto traders. It is on this page because readers will encounter it and deserve the comparison, not because it competes.
There are things FBS does genuinely well, and they are worth stating fairly. Our $150 Skrill withdrawal cleared in three hours with no fee. Live chat answered in about two minutes at 11pm on a Friday, with 24/7 cover in 14 languages. There is no inactivity fee at all. Negative balance protection applies on every account type automatically, and the cent account opens from $1 in cent lots, so a losing position costs pennies rather than a meaningful part of a small balance — which is a legitimately sensible way for a beginner to learn what a leveraged position feels like without funding a real one.
The drawbacks compound against a crypto trader specifically. Standard-account spreads were the widest of the four brokers we measured at that price point: 1.3 pips average on EUR/USD against 1.0 at Exness and 0.5 at FXTM. Slippage appeared in 8 of our 50 measured orders, reaching 1.5 pips twice during data releases — and crypto produces those conditions far more often than currency majors do. Outside the EU and Australia, clients are onboarded under the Belize entity, which carries no investor compensation scheme. FBS holds no FCA authorisation and does not serve UK retail clients. Five coins, wide spreads and measurable slippage is the wrong combination for a volatile asset class.
CFD, spot and exchange: three different things people call “buying crypto”
These three products are routinely discussed as though they were interchangeable routes to the same exposure. They are not. They differ in what you own, who holds it, what happens if the provider fails, what you pay to hold it, and what you can do with it afterwards.
| Question | Crypto CFD at a broker | Spot crypto at a regulated broker or bank | Spot crypto at an exchange |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do you own the coin? | No. You hold a contract on its price | Yes, held in the provider’s custody | Yes, in the exchange’s custody until you move it |
| Can you withdraw to your own wallet? | No, structurally impossible | Depends on the provider; not tested by us at any broker here | Normally yes, which is the main reason people use one |
| Can you go short? | Yes, easily | No, not without a separate derivative | Only via margin or derivatives products |
| Is leverage available? | Yes, capped at 1:2 for retail clients under FCA, ESMA and ASIC rules | No, unleveraged by definition | Varies; often unavailable to retail clients in regulated markets |
| What does it cost to hold overnight? | Financing every night, charged on the full position value | Nothing, or a custody fee | Nothing, or a custody fee |
| Who supervises the provider? | A securities regulator such as the FCA, CySEC or ASIC | Varies: MiCA in the EEA, a banking licence, or a cryptoasset registration | Often a registration for anti-money-laundering purposes only |
| Are you covered if the provider fails? | Compensation schemes may apply to the broker relationship, but crypto holdings can fall outside them | Depends on the licence; a banking licence is not the same as investor compensation | Frequently no scheme at all |
The row that decides most people’s answer is the second one. If the point of the exercise is to hold bitcoin and control the keys, no CFD broker on this page can do it, and choosing between them on coin count is choosing between products that all fail your actual requirement. If the point is short-term directional trading — including short positions, which spot cannot express without borrowing — then the CFD is the instrument built for that job, and the brokers above are how you access it.
The middle column is thinly populated for a reason. Of the brokers we have reviewed, only Swissquote offers spot crypto with a named custody arrangement — 52 coins on SQX, held by a licensed bank — and only eToro holds a MiCA licence for crypto services in the EEA. Interactive Brokers offers crypto through specific entities only. Everyone else on this page sells the derivative and nothing else. Our full broker reviews index records the instrument range for each firm individually.
The crypto costs that are easy to miss
The headline spread is the cost people compare and it is rarely the cost that determines the outcome. Four others do more damage, and three of them are specific to crypto or hit hardest there.
Overnight financing, charged on the full position value
Financing is calculated on the notional value of the position, not on the margin you posted. A $20,000 crypto exposure opened with $10,000 of margin at 1:2 accrues financing on $20,000. At Capital.com the base is 4% a year divided by 360 or 365 days depending on currency; at IG our review recorded funding running slightly above market average; at Eightcap and Pepperstone, Wednesday is charged at triple rate to cover the weekend. Multiply your intended holding period by the nightly charge before you open, not after. On a position held for a month, financing routinely exceeds the spread by a wide margin.
Weekend gapping, and the mismatch between two markets
The underlying crypto market never closes. Broker CFD sessions do close, on schedules that vary by broker and by instrument, and a broker’s own support may close with them — our Eightcap review records live chat running 24 hours Monday to Friday but not at weekends, and our IG review records effectively 24/5 cover with no weekend support. When the underlying moves during a period your instrument is not quoted, your position reopens at the new price. Stop-loss orders do not protect you across a gap, because there is no price in between for them to execute at. A guaranteed stop does fix the exit price, for a premium charged only if triggered — our IG review notes it as meaningful protection specifically for positions carried over weekends or through volatility spikes. Check the crypto session hours in your broker’s contract specifications before you carry a position into a Friday close.
Currency conversion on every trade
Crypto CFDs are almost always denominated in US dollars. If your account is in sterling or euros, every trade crosses a conversion charge in both directions. Our reviews record 0.7% at Capital.com, 0.6% at Markets.com and up to 1.5% at eToro. On a round trip that is a cost applied twice, invisible in any spread comparison, and larger than the spread itself on several of these brokers. Opening a USD-denominated account where the broker permits it removes it entirely.
Inactivity fees on positions you intend to leave alone
This one catches long-horizon crypto holders specifically, because the whole point of the position is not to touch it. Markets.com charges $10 a month after only three months without a trade. AvaTrade charges $50 after three months, then a $100 administration charge at twelve. IG charges $12 monthly but not until 24 months. Capital.com abolished its inactivity fee outright, eToro removed its own in May 2026, and Pepperstone and FBS have never charged one. If your plan is to open a position and wait, the inactivity fee is a larger cost than the spread you spent an afternoon comparing.
Leverage caps on crypto, and what 1:2 actually means
Under the FCA, ESMA and ASIC retail regimes, cryptocurrency carries the tightest leverage cap of any asset class: 1:2. Our Pepperstone and Markets.com reviews both record the full schedule — 1:30 on major currency pairs, 1:20 on minors, gold and major indices, 1:10 on other commodities, 1:5 on shares and 1:2 on cryptocurrency. The cap exists because regulators concluded that anything looser produced account destruction at a rate they were unwilling to permit.
What 1:2 means in practice: $1,000 of margin controls $2,000 of exposure, and a 50% adverse move in the underlying wipes out the margin. That sounds like an unlikely event until you look at what crypto assets have historically done inside single quarters. The cap is not a guarantee against loss — it is a limit on how fast the loss can arrive.
Offshore entities offer far more. Our reviews record up to 1:500 at Eightcap’s offshore entities, 1:3000 under the FBS Belize entity, and professional classification at Pepperstone lifting caps to 1:500 on majors. Every one of those numbers comes attached to a reduction in protection: the FBS Belize entity carries no investor compensation scheme, Pepperstone’s offshore clients lost their external dispute-resolution route in February 2026, and professional classification means surrendering retail protections including, in some jurisdictions, negative balance protection. Higher leverage on the most volatile asset class you can access, with fewer protections behind it, is not a feature. What negative balance protection does and where it applies is set out in our explainer on negative balance protection.
The risks, stated plainly
Cryptoassets are unregulated in most jurisdictions, have no cash flows, no earnings and no intrinsic valuation anchor, and have repeatedly lost large fractions of their value in short periods. That is the asset. A leveraged derivative written on it inherits all of that volatility and multiplies it by the leverage factor, then adds the broker as a second point of failure.
The majority of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs. That figure is disclosed by every regulated broker on this page under its own regulator’s rules, it sits between roughly 65% and 85% across the sector, and it is measured across all instruments — not crypto specifically, where the dispersion of outcomes is wider still. Nobody should read this page believing they are in the minority before they have any evidence that they are.
Three failure modes are worth naming individually. Gap risk: a stop-loss is an instruction to execute at the next available price, not a guarantee of your chosen price, and crypto gaps are frequent and large. Financing drag: a position that is directionally correct can still close at a loss if it is held long enough at a high nightly rate. Counterparty risk: your CFD is a claim on the broker, and while segregation and compensation schemes reduce that risk, our eToro review records the specific point that crypto holdings may fall outside those schemes entirely. Before funding anything, read our guidance on how to check a broker is genuine, because the crypto space attracts a volume of impersonation that other asset classes do not.
Nothing on this page is investment advice, a recommendation to trade cryptocurrency, or a view on where any price is going. We assess brokers. We do not forecast markets, and any broker or website that offers to do both should be treated with suspicion.
How to check a broker’s crypto terms before you fund
Five checks, in order, all of which take less time than comparing spread tables and all of which matter more.
- Establish which entity will hold your account. This determines your compensation scheme, your leverage cap, your complaints route and whether crypto is on your instrument list at all. It is decided by your country of residence and it is rarely displayed prominently. Ask before you deposit.
- Confirm the licence number on the regulator’s own register. Type the regulator’s address yourself rather than following a link the broker supplied. Every broker on this page has had its brand impersonated by clone operations quoting genuine licence numbers — our reviews document FCA clone alerts naming eToro, Plus500, Swissquote, Interactive Brokers, Pepperstone and Eightcap, and a BCSC caution naming a typosquat domain using the AvaTrade name. The warnings are about criminals copying the broker, not about the broker. Our regulation section explains how to read a register entry.
- Open the contract specifications for the specific crypto instrument. Not the marketing page. The contract specifications carry the session hours, the minimum trade size, the margin requirement and the financing rate. At Plus500 that information sits behind the information icon beside each instrument.
- Get the swap-free position in writing if it applies to you. Crypto is excluded from AvaTrade’s swap-free account entirely. Pepperstone charges $100 per lot after day five. XM charges no substitute fee at all. Eightcap offers swap-free but does not document it anywhere on its site, so you have to know to ask. These terms differ enormously and “swap-free” means something different at every broker.
- Test a withdrawal early, with a small amount. Fund, trade once, withdraw. Our reviews record three hours at FBS, three business days at Eightcap and five business days at Swissquote and eToro. A withdrawal you have completed is worth more than any promise about withdrawals you have not.
Frequently asked questions
Can I withdraw crypto to my own wallet from a broker?
Not from a crypto CFD, ever. A CFD is a contract on a price and no coin exists to send anywhere — our Plus500 review states it directly, and the same applies at Capital.com, Pepperstone, Eightcap, AvaTrade, Markets.com, XM and FBS. Where a provider offers genuine spot crypto the answer depends on that provider’s custody arrangements. Our reviews record real crypto holdings at Swissquote, held by a licensed bank via the SQX platform, and a MiCA-licensed crypto service at eToro across the EEA, but we did not test withdrawing a coin to an external wallet at any broker on this page and we do not claim it works. If self-custody is your requirement, confirm it in writing with the provider before funding, and understand that it is a different product from the CFD sitting next to it in the same app.
Why can’t I trade crypto in the UK?
You can buy spot cryptoassets in the UK. What you cannot do, as a retail client, is trade crypto derivatives — CFDs, futures, options and exchange-traded notes referencing unregulated cryptoassets. The FCA prohibited their sale, marketing and distribution to UK retail consumers with effect from 6 January 2021, on the grounds that retail consumers could not reliably value them and that the combination of leverage and extreme volatility produced harm the regulator could not otherwise contain. It is a rule binding every firm with a UK retail permission, not a policy any individual broker chose. Our Capital.com review records the effect plainly: UK clients cannot trade crypto CFDs, a regulatory restriction rather than a broker decision.
Which broker in your review set offers the most cryptocurrencies?
Capital.com, at more than 450 crypto CFDs, followed by Eightcap at over 250 including crypto indices, then eToro at 80-plus and Swissquote at 52 spot coins. Range is the weakest reason to choose a broker, though. Beyond the twenty or so largest assets by market capitalisation, the underlying markets are thin, the CFD pricing reflects that thinness, and a long instrument list mostly documents what the broker is willing to quote rather than what anyone should trade. If you have one specific alternative coin in mind, check that it is on the list for your entity. Otherwise, weigh execution, financing and withdrawal reliability ahead of the headline count.
Is crypto CFD trading cheaper than using a crypto exchange?
Almost never for holding, and it depends for short-term trading. Broker crypto spreads are materially wider than spot exchange pricing on the same asset, because the broker is quoting a derivative with its own risk premium rather than matching orders in a live book. On top of that a leveraged CFD accrues financing every night, which a spot holding does not. Where a CFD can be cheaper in practice is if you want a short position or leverage, since expressing either on spot requires borrowing that carries its own cost and complexity. Compare the total cost of the full holding period, not the entry cost — that is the comparison that changes the answer.
What leverage can I use on crypto?
As a retail client under the FCA, ESMA or ASIC regimes, 1:2 — the tightest cap on the entire regulatory schedule, which also sets 1:30 on major currency pairs and 1:5 on shares. Our Pepperstone review records the full schedule. Offshore entities offer far more: our reviews record up to 1:500 at Eightcap’s offshore entities and 1:3000 under the FBS Belize entity. Every one of those higher figures comes with reduced protection — the Belize entity carries no investor compensation scheme, and professional classification, which also lifts the cap, means giving up retail protections including in some jurisdictions negative balance protection. On the most volatile asset class available to retail traders, higher leverage with less protection is a worse deal, not a better one.
What happens to my crypto position over the weekend?
The underlying crypto market trades continuously; your broker’s CFD sessions do not necessarily follow it, and the schedule varies by broker and instrument. Where the instrument is not quoted while the underlying moves, your position reopens at the new price and any stop-loss executes at the next available price rather than your chosen one, because no price existed in between. Financing also continues to accrue — several brokers, including Eightcap and Pepperstone, apply triple financing on Wednesdays specifically to cover the weekend. Check the session hours in the contract specifications for your instrument before you carry a position into a Friday close, and consider a guaranteed stop where the broker offers one.
Are crypto holdings covered by investor compensation schemes?
Often not, and this is one of the most commonly misunderstood points in the sector. Our eToro review records it explicitly: compensation schemes cover broker failure rather than trading losses, and crypto holdings may fall outside these schemes entirely. Statutory investor compensation covers regulated investment business, and unregulated cryptoassets frequently sit outside that perimeter even when the firm holding them is authorised for other activities. A banking licence is not the same thing as investor compensation either. Establish what actually covers your crypto position, at your entity, before you assume it is protected, and get the answer from the entity that will hold your account rather than from the group’s marketing material.
Should I choose a broker for crypto based on your overall score?
No, and this page is a good illustration of why. Our overall scores weight regulation at 25%, trading costs at 20% and withdrawals at 20% — they measure how well a firm is run and how safely it holds your money, across its whole business. They do not measure crypto range. Interactive Brokers scores highest in our entire review set at 8.9 and offers one of the thinnest crypto ranges here, restricted to specific entities. FBS scores 6.5 and offers five coins. Use the overall score to decide whether a broker is safe to hold your money, and use the crypto section of its review to decide whether the product you want exists there. The brokers hub lists every firm we have tested.
Reader reviews
Traded with this broker? Tell others what actually happened.