How We Check Every Crypto Exchange In Pakistan
Most "best exchange in Pakistan" pages are affiliate links with numbers copied from each other. This is the whole method, so you can audit ours. If a claim here has no source you can open, treat it as wrong and email us.
PVARA Standing
The heaviest input, because it decides whether an exchange can legally keep serving you. A No Objection Certificate confirmed by PVARA scores 90. A license application reported by credible press but absent from any published register scores 60 to 65. No known filing scores 20. Nothing scores 100, because no exchange holds a full PVARA license yet and we will not hand out a top mark for paperwork in progress.
PKR Funding
Can you get rupees in and out without leaving the exchange? A working peer-to-peer market with Pakistani payment methods and visible depth scores high. A venue you can only reach by bridging stablecoins in from somewhere else scores low, because that hop costs money and adds a failure point. Where we could not confirm a route ourselves, the cell reads unverified.
Cost
Standard non-VIP spot maker and taker fees from the exchange's own fee page or help center, before token discounts. We note the token discount separately, because it means holding an asset that can fall. This is the least important criterion here: the gap between the cheapest and the dearest venue is about 0.10 percent, and one bad P2P fill or one frozen withdrawal wipes out a year of that difference.
User Signal
Trustpilot score and review count, plus the one-star share and the themes inside it. Trustpilot is a complaint channel, not a representative survey, so scores across this category are grim. What matters is the comparison between exchanges and the pattern in the complaints. "Support was slow" is noise. "Withdrawals blocked under unexplained risk control", repeated hundreds of times, is a signal. Two flags count as serious on their own: a rating withheld for a guidelines breach, which follows fake-review removal, and an unclaimed company profile.
Sources We Read
- PVARA's own site and the text of the law first, then national press with a named reporter and a date: Dawn, Business Recorder, Profit, ProPakistani, TechJuice. Wire coverage from CoinDesk or Decrypt for confirmation.
- Fees from the exchange's published fee schedule or help center article. Nothing else.
- Payment rails from State Bank of Pakistan publications.
- User signal from Trustpilot company pages, read directly, with the count and distribution recorded rather than summarized by someone else.
Sources We Throw Out
- Other comparison sites. They are the origin of most wrong numbers in this niche, including the "15 percent crypto tax under the Finance Act 2025" line we could not trace to any primary source.
- Exchange-owned "learn" and "news" pages writing about competitors. That is marketing with a byline.
- Invented testing. We have not run a timed P2P order on every exchange, so we do not write "our test order cleared in seven minutes".
- User quotes we cannot attribute to a specific review with a date. Aggregates and distributions only.
Why you see dashes. A dash means we looked and could not confirm it. Right now that covers HTX's fee schedule and PKR route, Gate's PKR route, and P2P spreads, minimum ticket sizes, and payment-method lists across the board. Those render in JavaScript, change hourly, and cannot be read reliably without an account and a schedule. An empty cell is information. A made-up one is a liability, and in this market that kind of liability costs a reader their savings.
Why we print only the year. Every figure carries the year it was checked and nothing more precise, because a timestamp on a page nobody re-verifies is theater. When a figure is re-checked its year moves, and when the market moves the figure does.
Where the money comes from. Some outbound links pay us a commission. The whole of our policy: the order comes from the four scores, and exchanges that pay us nothing sit in the same table as exchanges that do. Binance leads this ranking while carrying the worst complaint volume on the page, and we say so in its own review. If commercial pressure set the order, that sentence would not be there.
