Bybit vs Binance: which one can you actually use in Europe?

What a European address actually gets you in August 2026

MiCA, the EU rulebook for crypto firms, ran a transitional period that ended on 30 June 2026. From 1 July a firm needs an authorisation from an EU national regulator to serve people in the bloc. There is no partial status and no grace period.

Binance did not get one. It had applied in Greece, withdrew that application on 24 June 2026, and emailed users across the bloc two days later. From 1 July it suspended new spot orders, new deposits, new sign-ups and its Earn and staking products for EU residents. Withdrawals stay open so people can wind down. Binance says it will reapply through another member state, reportedly France, and expects a licence within months. As of mid-August 2026 it does not have one.

Bybit took the other route and split itself in two. Bybit EU GmbH, based in Vienna, was authorised as a crypto-asset service provider by Austria's Financial Market Authority on 28 May 2025, and that authorisation passports across 29 EU and EEA states. Malta is the exception: Bybit says its EU licences are not currently passported there and that it does not actively offer products or services to Maltese residents, so if you live in Malta neither platform is aimed at you. The bybit.eu platform launched in July 2025 and Bybit has been moving EEA customers onto it ever since. On 29 June 2026 it told those customers that access to certain services on the global platform would be progressively limited, with the timelines for managing existing and new positions communicated separately and custodied assets remaining accessible throughout. Note the wording, because several write-ups have reported it as a single hard cutover: Bybit's own notice describes a phased restriction rather than a switch thrown on 1 July. The destination is not in doubt either way. EEA residents belong on the EU entity, and the EU entity is not licensed to sell them perpetuals.

Here is the part almost nobody writes down. A MiCA authorisation does not cover derivatives. Crypto derivatives sit under MiFID II, a different rulebook entirely, and Bybit EU GmbH's licence covers custody, exchanging crypto for funds, exchanging crypto for crypto, placing, and transfers. Perpetual futures are not on that list. A separate Austrian entity, Bybit X GmbH, applied for a MiFID II licence on 5 September 2025. As of August 2026 it has not been granted, and there are no perpetuals on bybit.eu.

Fees: identical on the global books, not on the one an EU reader can use

This is where the received wisdom breaks down, and where almost every comparison quotes the wrong schedule. On the two global platforms, at the entry tier, both charge 0.10% maker and 0.10% taker on spot. Not similar. Identical. But bybit.com is not the platform a European trades on, and bybit.eu publishes a schedule of its own.

On Bybit EU, checked against its own fee page on 16 August 2026, a VIP 0 account pays 0.10% as a maker and 0.25% as a taker on crypto pairs. On fiat pairs such as USDC/EUR it is 0.15% maker and 0.25% taker. The maker side matches the global rate. The taker side is two and a half times it. Taker does not fall to 0.10% until VIP 1, which requires a €100,000 balance or €1,000,000 of trading in 30 days, so for anyone this post is written for the number is 0.25%. Bybit EU has also published a change: from 5 October 2026 at 11:00 UTC it moves to a single unified rate per VIP level, and at VIP 0 that rate is 0.25% charged to makers and takers alike. For an EU beginner the maker fee is about to rise from 0.10% to 0.25%.

Both firms run a token discount, and neither of them reaches an EU account. Binance takes 25% off spot fees if you hold BNB and pay fees in it, giving 0.075%. Bybit has done the same with MNT since 23 September 2025, also 25% off spot, also landing at 0.075%. That MNT program is documented on bybit.com only: Bybit EU's fee page does not mention it, and neither does any of the 200 articles in the bybit.eu help centre. If you are trading on bybit.eu, treat 0.075% as unavailable to you. On the global platform the MNT discount is also closed to API users, market makers, institutional and Pro accounts, which matters if you trade programmatically.

On perpetual futures the gap is real but small. Binance charges a regular user 0.02% maker and 0.05% taker on USD-M contracts. Bybit charges 0.02% maker and 0.055% taker on USDT perpetuals. Both knock 10% off if you pay in their token, giving 0.045% against 0.0495%.

Put that in money. A $10,000 taker order on a perpetual costs $5.00 on Binance and $5.50 on Bybit. Pay in the exchange token and it is $4.50 against $4.95. Binance is cheaper, by about ten percent of a very small number. If you turn over $500,000 a month as a taker, the difference is roughly $25.

Which of those numbers applies to you depends on where you live, and that is the whole point. Outside the EU, comparing the two global books, the gap is half a basis point on perpetuals and nothing at all on spot, so where you can open an account, how deep the market is when you need out, and how the venue behaves in a crisis all matter more than the fee. Inside the EU the comparison is not really on offer, because Binance will not take your spot order at any price. The useful question there is how Bybit EU's 0.25% taker compares with the other MiCA-licensed venues you can actually reach. Compare it against those, not against a Binance schedule you cannot trade on.

Withdrawal fees are the one place a hard figure is not worth printing. Both charge a fixed fee per coin and per chain that moves with network conditions, and both show it in the withdrawal window before you confirm. Bybit's own help centre puts it as ranging from nothing on some networks to several euros on others, fixed regardless of the amount you send. Choosing a cheaper chain, TRON rather than Ethereum for a stablecoin, saves far more than choosing a different exchange.

• Spot, base tier, global platforms: 0.10% maker and 0.10% taker on both, 0.075% paying in BNB or MNT
• Spot, base tier, Bybit EU: 0.10% maker and 0.25% taker on crypto pairs, no token discount, moving to a flat 0.25% on 5 October 2026
• Perpetual taker, base tier: 0.05% Binance, 0.055% Bybit, neither reachable from an EU account
• $10,000 perpetual taker order: $5.00 Binance, $5.50 Bybit
• Same order with the token discount: $4.50 Binance, $4.95 Bybit

Liquidity: Binance has the flow, and flow is what you feel in size

Headline fees are what you pay on paper. Slippage is what you actually pay, and it is set by how much money is moving through a market. On that measure the two are not close, and both exchanges publish the numbers, so it need not be taken on trust.

Pulled from both public APIs within the same three minutes on 15 August 2026, Binance's USD-M futures turned over $13.40 billion in 24 hours across 737 tradeable contracts. Bybit's linear book turned over $3.31 billion across 826. Four times the flow, on fewer listed contracts.

The pattern holds pair by pair. On the BTC perpetual it was $1.65 billion against $644 million. On ETH, $1.20 billion against $377 million. SOL, $395 million against $144 million. XRP, $185 million against $73 million. DOGE, $98 million against $26 million. On spot the gap is wider still: across USDT-quoted pairs, $2.08 billion against $407 million, roughly five to one. One snapshot is one snapshot and volumes swing with the news cycle, but the direction was the same on every pair tested and the ratio stayed between about two and a half and five to one.

What it means in practice is unglamorous and important. Deeper flow means a large market order eats less of the book, a stop gets filled closer to where you put it, and the venue is less likely to jam during a violent move. If you trade a few hundred euro at a time you will never notice. If you are moving six figures, or you need to exit when everyone else is trying to exit, this is the line in the table that matters most.

Two things do not follow from it. Bybit is not a thin market: three billion dollars a day in derivatives is a serious venue by any standard other than Binance's. And funding rates, the other running cost of holding a perpetual, are not set by the exchange. Both settle on a fixed schedule, every eight hours on the majors including BTC and ETH, but every four hours on most of the rest of the book, which is six payments a day rather than three. Checked on 16 August 2026, 444 of Binance's USD-M contracts fund every four hours against 308 every eight; on Bybit it is 409 against 371. Both rates are driven by the gap between the contract and the spot index, so on major pairs they track each other closely and diverge mainly on smaller tokens. Both also cap the rate, and Binance caps harder: its published BTC perpetual funding cap is 0.30% per interval against Bybit's 0.5%. Neither venue lets you pick a cheaper funding regime the way you can pick a cheaper fee tier.

Regulation: two different bets, and how they turned out

Both firms faced the same deadline and made opposite decisions, which makes this a useful natural experiment.

Bybit built a ring-fenced European entity early, took the Austrian licence in May 2025, launched bybit.eu that July, and spent a year migrating EEA customers onto it. It also stacked further licences around it: Bybit Payments GmbH was granted an electronic money institution licence by the Austrian regulator, announced on 4 August 2026, which is what lets it handle euro balances and payments itself rather than through a partner. Bybit's chief executive said publicly in April 2026 that MiCA alone is not enough to run a profitable European business and that a firm needs MiFID and EMI permissions too. The company is acting on that view.

Binance chose a jurisdiction, applied late, and pulled the application rather than be refused. That is not a one-off. The Dutch central bank fined it €3.3 million in 2022 for serving Dutch residents without registration, and it left the Netherlands in 2023. The Belgian regulator ordered it to stop offering services from outside the European Economic Area in June 2023. The UK's FCA barred its local entity from regulated activity in June 2021. In November 2023 it settled with US authorities for $4.3 billion over anti-money-laundering and sanctions failures, and its founder pleaded guilty, stepped down and served a short sentence before being pardoned in October 2025. None of that is an allegation that Binance lost customer money, because it did not. It is a record of a company operating ahead of its permissions and retreating when a regulator pushed back, and MiCA removed the room to keep doing that.

What a licence buys you is narrow but real. With Bybit EU you deal with a named Austrian company, supervised by a named regulator, obliged to keep your crypto and money separate from its own, with a complaints procedure you can escalate. It buys you nothing against the price falling, and there is no EU deposit guarantee scheme for crypto. The obligation under MiCA falls on the firm, not on you as an individual, but use an unauthorised venue anyway and there is no EU entity behind your account and no regulator with jurisdiction over your complaint.

Security: the biggest hack on record, and the one that set the template

Both of these exchanges have been robbed. The interesting question is not whether it happened but what happened next, and on that both come out better than most of the industry.

On 21 February 2025 Bybit lost roughly 401,347 ETH and staked variants of it, worth between $1.4 billion and $1.5 billion depending on the price used. It is the largest exchange hack by value ever recorded. The mechanism deserves precision because it is routinely described wrongly. This was not a hot wallet drained through a leaked key. It was a multi-signature cold wallet, and the attackers got in through Safe, the third-party wallet infrastructure Bybit used: malicious code masked the signing interface so the people approving the transfer saw the correct destination address while the underlying contract logic had been altered. Investigators attributed it to North Korea's Lazarus Group.

Bybit's response is the reason it still exists. It kept withdrawals open rather than freezing the platform, and processed more than 350,000 withdrawal requests through the panic. It closed the hole in its balance sheet within days using bridge loans, large deposits and outright purchases, taking in around 446,870 ETH according to on-chain analysts, with Galaxy Digital, FalconX and Wintermute among the counterparties. An ad hoc proof-of-reserves check by Hacken on 23 February 2025 confirmed reserves above 100%, and Bybit was back to backing customer balances one for one within roughly 72 hours. No customer lost money. It also posted a bounty of 10% of anything recovered, up to $140 million.

Binance's incident is smaller and older but it is the template everyone else copied. On 7 May 2019 attackers used phished API keys and two-factor codes to take 7,000 BTC, worth about $40 million at the time, from a hot wallet holding roughly 2% of its assets. Binance covered the whole loss from its Secure Asset Fund for Users, suspended deposits and withdrawals for about a week while it rebuilt, and no customer lost money.

Compared factually: Binance's loss was a fraction of one percent of its holdings and was absorbed by a fund set aside in advance. Bybit's was an order of magnitude larger in dollars, was not absorbed by a pre-funded reserve, and was covered by borrowing at speed against the firm's own credit. Both ended with customers whole, but those are different kinds of resilience, and the second one depends on counterparties being willing to lend into a crisis. It worked in February 2025. That is not a guarantee it works next time.

Proof of reserves, SAFU and insurance funds: three different things

These three get mixed together constantly, including by the exchanges. They protect against different failures and only one of them is verified by an outsider.

Proof of reserves is a point-in-time check that the exchange holds what customers are owed. Bybit's is run by Hacken, an independent third party, roughly monthly, using a Merkle tree that lets you verify your own balance was included and comparing it against a liabilities report. Reports through 2026 have shown in-scope ratios above 100%. Hacken is explicit that this is an attestation at a moment in time, not a full audit of the company's finances.

Binance publishes the same idea with better cryptography and no external checker. Its August 2026 snapshot showed BTC and ETH at 100.25%, USDT at 103.62% and USDC at 107.64%, verified with Merkle trees plus zk-SNARKs, covering major assets rather than the whole book. Zero-knowledge proofs are mathematically elegant, but a self-published proof still asks you to trust that the inputs were complete, which is precisely the thing an external accountant exists to check. On this axis Bybit's is the stronger arrangement, and it is one of the few places where the smaller venue wins outright.

SAFU is Binance-only and different again: an emergency fund built from 10% of trading fees since 2018, meant to cover users after a hack. In February 2026 Binance converted the whole $1 billion into Bitcoin, finishing at 15,000 BTC, and committed to topping it back up if the value falls below $800 million. Worth noticing what that means: a backstop denominated in Bitcoin loses value in exactly the conditions where it is most likely to be needed, so the rebalancing promise is doing real work.

Futures insurance funds are the third thing, and they exist for a narrower purpose: to absorb the shortfall when a liquidated position is closed below its bankruptcy price, so that profitable traders on the other side do not get clipped. Pulled from both public endpoints on 15 August 2026, Binance's USD-M insurance holdings came to roughly $2.33 billion across 123 contract pools, with about $1.25 billion of that behind the BTC, ETH and BNB group alone. Bybit's came to roughly $996 million across 76 pools. Binance's is more than twice the size, which makes it less likely that a cascade ends in auto-deleveraging. Neither fund pays you back for being wrong about the market.

Derivatives, leverage and how a position actually ends

Set the EU restriction aside for a moment, because the product comparison does not go the way most articles claim, in either direction. Bybit does list more perpetual contracts than Binance, but only just, and the wide gap usually quoted is an artefact of counting the two books on different bases. Binance's 737 tradeable USD-M symbols break down into 570 crypto perpetuals, 163 perpetuals on traditional assets and 4 dated futures. Count the traditional-asset perpetuals in, as you have to if you are counting Bybit's, and it is 733 Binance perpetuals against Bybit's 781, across 689 Binance base assets against 713 on Bybit. Bybit adds 40 dated futures. Of the two linear books, 604 symbols overlap, 217 exist only on Bybit and 133 only on Binance. Binance adds 30 coin-margined contracts; Bybit has 26 inverse ones.

Some of that breadth is not crypto at all on either side, and this is where the usual story is simply backwards. Bybit's linear book includes perpetuals on individual equities such as NVDA and TSLA at up to 50x, on gold and silver at up to 100x, on crude oil at up to 100x, and on a US equity index at up to 50x. All real, none of it a Bybit exclusive. Binance lists 163 traditional-asset perpetuals of its own, most of Bybit's sit on underlyings Binance also carries, and Binance uniquely lists platinum, palladium, copper and natural gas, none of which Bybit has. Any comparison crediting that whole category to Bybit alone has simply not looked at Binance's contract list. Whether you regard the category as useful range or as an invitation to trade instruments you do not understand is your call. Neither venue offers it to an EU account.

Headline leverage: Binance goes to 125x on its BTC perpetual, Bybit to 100x on its USDT one, with exactly one Bybit contract reaching 125x, the USDC-settled BTCPERP. Binance caps new futures accounts at 20x for the first 60 days, which is a sensible piece of friction and worth knowing before you assume the top number applies to you.

Now the part that belongs in the body rather than a disclaimer at the bottom. Leverage does not improve your odds, it compresses the distance between you and a forced exit. At 100x, a move of about one percent against you wipes out the margin behind the position. Liquidation is not a warning, it is the venue closing your trade at whatever price it can get, and you pay a fee on top of the loss. On Bybit's EU spot margin product the liquidation fee is 2% of the liquidated assets. If the market gaps through your bankruptcy price the insurance fund absorbs the difference, and if that is not enough, auto-deleveraging reaches across and closes somebody else's winning trade.

With isolated margin your loss is capped at the margin you assigned to that position. With cross margin it is not: a single bad trade under cross margin can consume the entire balance of that account, not just the margin you mentally assigned to the position. Be precise about what that does and does not mean, because the loose version of this warning is everywhere. Both venues run insurance funds and, behind them, auto-deleveraging, specifically so that a retail balance is not driven negative, so the realistic worst case is the account going to zero rather than you walking away owing a debt. Zero is quite bad enough. That is not a reason nobody should use these products, but it is the reason they belong to people who have already decided how much they are willing to lose and have sized accordingly.

Euro rails, copy trading and day-to-day tooling

For a European this section is short on the Binance side, because euro funding is one of the things that stopped on 1 July 2026. New deposits are suspended for EU residents, which makes the euro comparison academic.

Bybit EU is built for euro from the ground up, which is what the Austrian licence and the new payments entity are for. Bybit EU charges no exchange fee of its own on fiat deposits, and on-chain crypto deposits and internal transfers between Bybit EU accounts are free. What it does not do is publish a fiat withdrawal fee schedule. Its help centre says only that fees vary by currency and payment method and are shown on the withdrawal page, so read the figure in the withdrawal window before you confirm rather than trusting a rate quoted in any article, this one included. External payment providers can also charge on top of whatever Bybit EU does or does not take.

Two published restrictions are worth knowing before you plan around the euro rails, because both are easy to discover the hard way. SEPA is supported only for users in certain EU countries, and Bybit EU warns you may see an IP-restricted message if yours is not one of them. ZEN.COM, the faster alternative rail, is unavailable in Germany, France, Portugal and the Netherlands, four of the largest markets in the bloc, and BLIK is unavailable in the first three of those. As of August 2026 ten European fiat currencies have buy pages on bybit.eu, the euro, Swiss franc, Czech koruna, Danish krone, Hungarian forint, Icelandic krona, Norwegian krone, Polish zloty, Romanian leu and Swedish krona, with dedicated fiat deposit pages for only the euro, the zloty and the krona.

Think twice about the card. Bybit EU's published card transaction fee is 1.10% on both Visa and Mastercard, and third-party providers can add their own charges on top, so the number at checkout may be higher than that. The feature is also unavailable to Austrian nationals, residents and tax residents. On a €500 purchase, 1.10% is €5.50 before you have traded anything, against about €1.25 if you fund by bank transfer and buy on the spot book at the 0.25% taker rate. That is not the 3% disaster some comparisons describe, but it is still more than four times the cost of doing the same thing properly, and the gap widens with the size of the order.

Copy trading is a real strength of Bybit's global platform, where you can mirror a lead trader's positions with position sizing and risk caps of your own. It is built mainly around futures, though, and the published product list for Bybit EU covers spot, spot margin, Earn and the Bybit Card without mentioning it. Checked on 16 August 2026, the bybit.eu help centre carries no copy-trading article at all, and no futures or derivatives articles either, which is consistent with a spot-only platform. That is inference rather than an announcement, so check whether it is available to you before you fund an account. Binance runs copy trading globally too, with the advantage of its much larger market coverage, and none of it is available to EU residents right now.

On tooling for active traders the two are more alike than different: the same order types, TradingView charts, mature REST and WebSocket APIs with sub-accounts, and unified margin accounts on both. Bybit has a long-standing reputation for a cleaner derivatives interface and for handling high message rates well, which is why bot traders like it, while Binance's surface is larger and busier with launchpads, savings products and an NFT section competing for attention. Neither is a reason to pick one over the other. Licensing and liquidity are.

So which should you actually pick?

Bybit vs Binance is no longer one question with one answer, because these two stopped competing for the same customer. Sort it by what you are optimising for.

If you live in the EU or EEA and you want an account that works, it is Bybit, and this is not really a contest. Bybit EU is authorised, takes euro deposits without charging an exchange fee of its own, and there is a regulator in Vienna with jurisdiction over your complaint, though check that SEPA and your preferred payment rail actually reach your country first. Binance holds no EU authorisation and has suspended new sign-ups, deposits and spot orders for EU residents, leaving existing accounts able to close positions and withdraw. Reporting through July 2026 noted the site remained technically reachable from the bloc, but reaching a website is not the same as having an account that means anything: trade there and no EU entity stands behind your balance and no regulator has jurisdiction over your complaint. Accept that Bybit EU gives you spot and spot margin, not perpetuals.

If you live in the EU and perpetual futures are the whole point, the truthful answer is that neither of these gives you that legitimately today. Bybit's MiFID II application through Bybit X GmbH is the thing to watch, since it would bring regulated futures and options to EEA clients, but it has been pending since September 2025 and no date is promised. In the meantime the honest options are to trade spot, to use a venue that already holds an EU derivatives permission, or to sit out. Treat any article that tells you how to get around the restriction as a warning about that article.

If you are outside the EU and cost is the priority, Binance is cheaper on perpetuals, though by a hair rather than a margin: 0.05% against 0.055% at base tier as a taker, identical on spot. Enable the token fee discount on whichever you use and prefer limit orders where the trade allows it. If you are outside the EU and you trade size, Binance again, on flow. Around four times the derivatives turnover and five times the spot turnover on USDT pairs is the single biggest practical difference between these platforms, and it shows up as better fills exactly when markets are moving fast.

On the remaining axes it splits. Bybit for breadth of perpetuals, but narrowly, 781 against 733 once Binance's traditional-asset contracts are counted on the same basis, and Binance carries traditional-asset perpetuals Bybit does not, which is the reverse of the usual claim; Binance for breadth of spot markets, 1,371 symbols against 556. Bybit for verified reserves, since an independent firm checks them against a liabilities report while Binance checks its own; Binance for the size of the backstop when a liquidation cascade goes wrong.

One thing should not decide it. A referral bonus is a one-off payment of a fixed size. Fees, liquidity, licensing and euro handling affect every transaction you make for as long as you hold the account, and none of them, bonus included, reduces the risk of the trade. Bybit's sign-up offer is worth claiming once you have chosen on the things that matter, and it is not a reason to open a leveraged position, to trade bigger than you planned, or to buy an asset you would otherwise have left alone.

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