How to choose a crypto trading app: ten questions to ask
A neutral checklist for comparing crypto trading apps, exchanges and self-custody wallets, and where Aretia fits and does not fit.
Updated · Aretia Finance
There is no single best crypto trading app. The right one depends on what you trade, how much you want to control yourself, and what you are prepared to read first. Here are ten questions that separate apps from each other. Ask them of Aretia as well as of anyone else.
1. Who holds your money?
A centralised exchange holds your assets for you: easy recovery, but you depend on the company and its solvency. A self-custody wallet holds your keys on your device: no one can freeze or lose your funds for you, and no one can recover them if you lose your recovery phrase. Neither is “safer” in every way; they fail differently.
2. Which networks and tokens can you reach?
Check the chains you actually use. Some apps list a few hundred assets; decentralised markets list hundreds of thousands, most of them worthless. Wide coverage is only useful with the tools to tell them apart.
3. What do you pay, in total?
Look for the trading fee, the network fee, the spread or price impact, and any fee to deposit or withdraw. A low headline fee can hide a wide spread. Prefer apps that show the total before you confirm.
4. Can you see how the numbers are produced?
Where does the price come from? Is volume measured or reported? Are tiny pools and suspicious tokens filtered, and is that filter explained? An app that shows a gap as a gap is more honest than one that fills it.
5. What happens when something goes wrong?
Read the support page, the status page and the terms. Look for a record of how the company has handled incidents, not only a promise that it won’t have any.
6. Is the code or the contract audited, and by whom?
Ask for the report, not the badge. An audit is a snapshot with a scope, and it can miss things. Unaudited code is not necessarily unsafe, but it should be labelled unaudited.
7. Where is it regulated, and does that apply to you?
Rules differ by country. Check whether the app serves your location and what protections, if any, apply to your assets there.
8. How is it funded?
Free apps are paid for by something: trading fees, spreads, listings, advertising, or selling order flow. Knowing which helps you judge where its incentives point.
9. Does it respect your privacy?
Look at what it asks for, whether it needs an account at all to browse, and what it keeps.
10. Does it tell you what it does not do?
Honest products have a visible list of limits. An app that claims to be the best, safest or fastest without saying how is selling, not informing.
Where Aretia fits, and where it does not
- Fits: you want live token markets across Solana, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Base, Polygon and Robinhood Chain on one page, with the gaps and the limits shown, no account to browse, and a self-custody wallet for the swaps the wallet supports. Aretia charges a fee on swaps and shows it before you confirm.
- Does not fit: you want a regulated brokerage with deposit insurance, fiat on-ramps as the main product, or a guarantee on any token. Aretia is not a bank, a broker or an adviser, and does not rate tokens as good or bad investments.
- Still being built, by our own account: the browser-extension wallet is in development and not yet in the Chrome Web Store; some contracts are unaudited and labelled so; market depth on some networks depends on the public nodes we can read.
For checks you can run on any token in any app, see how to check a token before you swap it.