Bitkub review.

Overview

Bitkub is Thailand’s biggest home grown crypto exchange, run by Bitkub Online Company Limited from the FYI Center on Rama IV Road in Bangkok. It has held a digital asset exchange licence since 4 January 2019, it takes Thai baht by bank transfer and QR code, and it quotes 366 coins against the baht. On 23 July 2026, six days before this review was written, the Thai SEC filed a criminal complaint against the company and two former directors, alleging that after a May 2021 cyberattack took roughly 1.7 billion baht of customers’ coins off the exchange, Bitkub’s daily reports to the regulator showed no material change in its asset balance for nearly six months.

That single fact reorganises the whole review. The licence is real, it is verifiable by domain on the regulator’s own register, and Thailand supervises this sector harder than most places supervise crypto at all. The question is not whether anyone is watching. It is what the watching found.

Overview Table

Facts List

• Legal entity on the register: BITKUB ONLINE COMPANY LIMITED, Thai company number 0105559117128, paid up capital 450,000,000 THB.
• Four licences under the Emergency Decree: exchange for crypto (310180020007) and for digital tokens (310280020004), both dated 4 January 2019, plus broker for crypto (210180170002) and for tokens (210280170009), both dated 15 May 2025 with business commencing 22 October 2025.
• No dealer licence. Under Thai law the dealer category is the one that covers trading digital assets for a firm’s own account outside the exchange.
• Trading fee is 0.25% for makers and 0.25% for takers with no volume ladder, on 351 of the 370 pairs in the site’s own symbol table. Eighteen pairs are at zero and one, MBX_THB, is at 0.15% and 0.2%.
• The site’s own symbol table marks 250 pairs as matched on the exchange and 120 as routed through the broker business, with minimum order sizes of 10 THB, 200 THB and 6 USDT respectively.
• Baht deposits are free. Baht withdrawals cost 20 THB up to 100,000 THB, then 75 THB, then 200 THB, depending on bank and amount.
• Customer coins are held with two third party custodians named by the firm: BitGo Trust Company, Inc. and Coinbase Custody Trust Company, LLC.
• The firm’s own disclosure states that deposits with a digital asset operator are not protected under the Deposit Protection Agency Act and that a customer “may not receive the full amount of assets back”.
• No proof of reserves attestation is published. The Thai substitute is a daily net capital report to the SEC, Form DA 1, which is the document the July 2026 criminal complaint says was false.
• Two civil settlements over wash trading on its own order book: 8,000,000 THB in November 2022 and 25,000,000 THB in January 2023.
• The user agreement is published, last updated 28 August 2024, but only over an API call the page makes; the /tos page the footer links renders no text, so the agreement cannot be archived or cited by clause.

Key Takeaways

• Bitkub Online Company Limited holds four Thai digital asset licences, and we matched them to bitkub.com on the SEC’s own register, which publishes each licensee’s website. That is a domain match, not a name match.
• It is licensed as an exchange and, since 22 October 2025, as a broker. It is not licensed as a dealer, which is the Thai category for trading against customers on the firm’s own account away from the exchange.
• On 23 July 2026 the SEC filed a criminal complaint with the Economic Crime Suppression Division against the company and two former directors over a May 2021 theft of 16 cryptocurrencies worth about 1.7 billion baht that its daily regulatory reports did not reflect between 10 May and 30 October 2021.
• The SEC says Bitkub procured replacement assets from 31 October 2021, and in September 2025 it inspected the exchange and found customers’ digital assets complete as at 8 September 2025.
• There is no compensation scheme. The firm says so itself: a deposit at a digital asset operator is not protected under the Deposit Protection Agency Act.
• Coins sit with BitGo Trust Company and Coinbase Custody Trust Company, both regulated trust companies in the United States, which is a stronger custody chain than most exchanges disclose.
• Fees are flat at 0.25% each side with no volume tiers, which is expensive for an active trader and simple for everyone else.
• The exchange listed KUB, a coin issued by a company in its own group, and in June 2022 the SEC ordered it to fix that listing decision after finding the scoring did not follow Bitkub’s own SEC approved listing rule.
• Baht rails are domestic only. A Thai bank account in your own name is effectively required, and identity verification runs through Thailand’s NDID scheme for Thai nationals.
• The sanctions are not only corporate. A free text search of the SEC enforcement database returns 16 records mentioning Bitkub, including personal fines on two directors in July 2025 and on a chief operating officer in September 2025.
• The user agreement exists and is public, but only through an API call. The /tos page every footer links renders a heading and nothing else, so the terms cannot be archived, linked to a clause, or read without JavaScript.
• The flat 0.25% is not universal. Bitkub’s own symbol table shows 18 pairs at zero maker and taker, including BTC_USDT and ETH_USDT, and MBX_THB at 0.15% maker and 0.2% taker, none of which the fee page mentions.

Licences & Custody

Thailand does not treat crypto as an anti money laundering registration exercise. The Emergency Decree on Digital Asset Businesses B.E. 2561 (2018) creates three separate licences, granted by the Minister of Finance on the recommendation of the SEC Board, and the SEC supervises holders with capital reporting, client asset rules, inspection powers and a section 35 power to order a firm to fix its systems or stop taking customers. Bitkub has been on the receiving end of all of it.

We verified the licences at market.sec.or.th/LicenseCheck/views/DABusiness, reached from the SEC’s own digital asset shortcut page, and then opened the company record the BITKUB row links to, CompanyDetail/0000028750. The register publishes each licensee’s website, so this is a match on bitkub.com itself rather than on a brand name that resembles one.

What is missing matters as much as what is there. The SEC’s own definitions page says a digital asset dealer is a firm providing services “with respect to the trading or exchange of digital assets for its own account in the normal course of business outside the digital asset exchange”. Bitkub Online does not appear on the dealer register, which at the time of checking listed CRYPTOPLAT, 1109 PROSPER, XSPRING DIGITAL and COINS TH. It also does not appear on the custodial wallet provider register, which listed only RAKKAR DIGITAL and ORBIX CUSTODIAN. A separate group company, BITKUB PORTAL COMPANY LIMITED, holds an ICO portal approval for bitkubportal.com; that is a different legal entity and it does not cover anything on bitkub.com.

The company record also shows no licence, approval or registration under the Securities and Exchange Act or the Derivatives Act, and no registered investment analysts or investment consultants. The SEC approved major shareholder above 10% is Bitkub Capital Group Holdings Company Limited.

Which entity you deal with, by where you are

The crypto industry’s usual answer to this question is a list of eighteen companies. Bitkub’s is short, and the shortness is a genuine strength.

Both vantages we did reach were served the same single Thai entity, the same schema.org organisation block naming Bitkub Online Co., Ltd., and the same footer. We found no sign of the entity switching that a multi jurisdiction group uses to move clients offshore. Plain curl from the United Kingdom and from a French server is refused by Cloudflare on this domain, from both, which is a fingerprint block rather than a geographic one.

Custody: who actually holds the coins

Bitkub publishes a custody disclosure in its help centre, last modified 9 July 2026, and it is better than most. It names two third party custodians, with their regulators:

The same document says what happens if the firm fails, in the firm’s own words: “Digital asset business operators are not financial institutions according to the Deposit Protection Agency Act. And depositing money and digital assets with a digital asset business operator is not a deposit that is protected according to the Deposit Protection Agency Act. In the case of damage to customer assets deposited with a digital asset business operator, the customer may not receive the full amount of assets back from the business operator immediately.” There is no investor compensation fund for Thai digital asset customers, and Bitkub does not claim one.

Thai rules do require the operator to keep client coins in cold storage except for the working proportion the SEC allows. Bitkub was fined 243,750 baht in July 2025 for breaching exactly that rule for four days in July 2024. So the custody standard is real, it is checked, and it has been broken.

Who else has been sanctioned

The five enforcement records against the company have companions naming people. A free text search of the SEC enforcement database for Bitkub returns 16 records. Mr Sakolkorn Sakavee and Mr Thaweesap Rawan appear alongside the company in the 23 July 2026 criminal complaint. Mr Nithiwat Mameesint and Mr Thaweesap Rawan were fined personally on 14 July 2025 over the cold wallet breach, and Mr Piyapong Kodchana, described on the record as chief operating officer, was fined personally on 22 September 2025 over the customer knowledge test failure. A person of that name, นายปิยพงษ์ โคตรชนะ, appears on the executive list of the company’s current register record. Mr Samret Wajanasathian, chief technology officer of the group’s Bitkub Blockchain Technology Company Limited, faced a civil sanction disclosed on 14 September 2022 over purchases of KUB coin.

If you want to run these checks yourself, and you should, the licence list is at market.sec.or.th/LicenseCheck/views/DABusiness and the enforcement database is at market.sec.or.th/public/idisc/en/Enforce, where the Name field takes “Bitkub” and the Keyword field returns more. The enforcement search is a form, so its results have no address of their own and we cite the records rather than linking each one; the SEC news releases behind them do have addresses, and they are in our source list. Several of these records exist only in Thai, including the 2021 order suspending new customer acceptance, the order lifting it, the 2022 order on the KUB listing and the September 2025 inspection statement. Where that is so we say it, rather than implying an English release exists.

One note on how we reached any of this, so nobody reads our difficulty as the regulator’s silence. The SEC’s own hosts return a 403 block page to a direct request from the United Kingdom and from France, and Bright Data refuses them outright because it classifies government sites as off limits. A real browser reaches them without trouble. The Thai SEC publishes a great deal, in public, for free, and the obstacle was at our end.

Trading & Execution

Bitkub runs a central limit order book, and you can see it without an account. The public endpoint api.bitkub.com/api/market/depth returns two sided depth: for THB_BTC on 29 July 2026 it returned asks starting at 2,745,235 THB and bids starting at 2,745,100 THB, a spread of 135 THB on a coin priced at 2.7 million. Orders match against other users’ orders, and the fee schedule is written in those terms: “Maker creates buy orders (Bids) or sell orders (Asks) on the trading platform” and “Taker creates buy or sell orders to match the bids or asks”.

Is the venue also your counterparty? Three pieces of evidence say no, and one adds a caveat. The SEC register shows an exchange licence and a broker licence and no dealer licence, and the dealer category is the Thai law’s own name for own account trading. Bitkub’s help centre answers the revenue question directly: “the sources of income of a digital asset Exchange come from trading fees, withdrawal fees, and listing fee only”. And the order book is a real one you can query.

Its own user agreement says the same thing in the language of the statute. The Company, it says, “provided services to the User as a legal Digital Assets Exchange under the law that is a center established for a purpose of trading or exchanging Digital Assets by matching orders and facilitating the User”, and it “does not involved and is not an authorized person, attorneys, principle, agent, consultants, brokers, representative, users or supporter” in transactions between users.

Which pairs are matched here, and which are routed abroad

The caveat is the broker licence, granted 15 May 2025 and operating from 22 October 2025, and the size of it is published in Bitkub’s own page data. Every pair in the symbol table the homepage ships carries a tradeSource field. On 29 July 2026, 250 pairs read exchange and 120 read broker. The broker set is all ten USDT pairs and 110 baht pairs, and it carries a different minimum order size, 200 THB or 6 USDT against 10 THB on the exchange set. So roughly a third of the market on this venue is not matched on Bitkub’s own book at all.

Where those orders go is disclosed in the custody document, under the heading “List of Source Exchanges”: Bybit Georgia Limited LLC, whose entry names the National Bank of Georgia and a virtual asset service provider registration, and Foris DAX Limited in the Cayman Islands, regulated by the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority and marked “Integration for service launch in progress”. If your pair is one of the 120, your fill comes from a book in Georgia or the Cayman Islands under those regulators, and the Thai licence covers Bitkub’s conduct as your agent rather than the venue you end up on. That distinction is not shown on the trading screen, and a customer would have to read the symbol table to know which of the two they are using.

The exchange’s own book has a documented history of manipulation. In two settlements the SEC established that Bitkub, acting through its then chief executive, had a market maker agreement with Mr Anurak Chueachai and financed him, and that he matched his own buy and sell orders in BTC, BCH, ETH and XRP during February 2019 and in a longer list of coins, given in the SEC’s English record as ABT, ADA, BSV, CVC, GNT, IOST, JFIN, KNC, LINK, LTC, MANA, OMG, SNT, USDT, WAN, XLM and ZIL, between 4 January and 5 September 2019, “which misled other persons regarding the purchase volume or sale volume of those cryptocurrencies”. Bitkub agreed to civil penalties of 8,000,000 THB on 22 November 2022 and 25,000,000 THB on 10 January 2023, plus investigation costs. The conduct is seven years old and the settlements are four, but volume on this book was demonstrably faked once, with the operator’s knowledge.

Order types, margin and forced closure

The trading screen offers limit, market and stop limit orders, with TradingView charts and a depth chart alongside. We found no margin, futures or perpetual product: no leverage figure anywhere on the site, no funding rate, no liquidation fee schedule, and no margin pairs in the public symbol list, which contains only spot pairs quoted in THB and USDT. On that evidence there is nothing here that can liquidate a position or leave you owing money, and no maintenance margin to breach. If Bitkub has since added a leveraged product we did not find it, and we have left the leverage field empty rather than guess at a number.

What can still close a position against your wishes is a delisting. The listing rule says trading in a delisted asset is suspended and removed, normally after a public announcement and an email asking you to withdraw, but “in urgent cases such as those required to protect customers or due to critical and unforeseen circumstances, the delisting may take effect immediately”.

Accounts & Fee Tiers

There is one account. Bitkub does not sell tiers, and the fee schedule has no volume ladder at all: the published rate is 0.25% as a maker and 0.25% as a taker on every matched order. That is unusual in 2026. Most large venues discount high volume, and a Thai trader doing serious size pays the same rate as somebody buying 500 baht of bitcoin.

The published rate is also not the whole rate card. The fee page says “All cryptocurrencies 0.25% / Transaction”, but the symbol table the site ships inside its own homepage sets a different fee on 19 of its 370 pairs. Eighteen carry zero maker and zero taker, being the ten USDT pairs, ADA_USDT, BCH_USDT, BTC_USDT, DOGE_USDT, ETH_USDT, NEAR_USDT, SOL_USDT, SUI_USDT, XAUT_USDT and XRP_USDT, plus eight baht pairs, BICO_THB, BMT_THB, EL_THB, KMNO_THB, LAYER_THB, ME_THB, PENDLE_THB and ZK_THB. One, MBX_THB, carries 0.15% maker and 0.2% taker. None of those carve outs appears on the fee page. They favour the customer in 18 cases out of 19, but a rate card that a firm’s own data contradicts is still a rate card you cannot rely on.

What varies is not the account type but the verification level, and what each level unlocks. Bitkub runs identity verification through Thailand’s National Digital ID scheme, and its own help article on the subject is titled “How to Complete the National Digital ID Verification (NDID for Thai Nationals Only)”. Baht withdrawal is to a Thai bank account, and the deposit instructions require the sending account to be in your own name, with TrueMoney, Paotang and other e-wallets excluded. Read together, those are the real account gates.

Minimum order size is set per pair in the same table: 10 THB on the 250 exchange matched pairs, 200 THB on the 110 baht pairs routed through the broker business, and 6 USDT on the ten USDT pairs. We could not retrieve the table of verification levels and their limits; the help centre article we wanted sat behind a Cloudflare interstitial for our browser on 29 July 2026, and the same support portal returns only the JavaScript shell to a proxy fetch.

Two things do soften the flat fee. The exchange issues fee credits as promotions, and its help centre explains that where a customer holds fee credits the trading fee is deducted from those instead. It also runs a referral programme, and a help centre announcement dated 23 April 2025 is titled “Official Announcement: Revision of Referral Program Following the SEC Regulations”, so the terms of that programme have been changed to fit a regulatory requirement rather than a marketing plan. There is also a separate corporate onboarding track, labelled Bitkub Enterprise (KYB) in the help centre.

For anyone comparing across the Thai market, the licence categories are the thing to compare rather than the branding. Seven firms hold a digital asset exchange licence, fourteen hold a broker licence, and four hold a dealer licence. Bitkub is on the first two lists.

Proof of Reserves

Bitkub publishes no proof of reserves. There is no Merkle tree attestation, no auditor’s letter on reserves, and no reserve page anywhere in the 1,305 URLs of its own sitemap. We searched the site, the help centre and the SEC record and found nothing of the kind, and the firm makes no claim to one.

In Thailand the substitute is not an attestation but a report. A licensed operator files Form DA 1, a daily net capital report, with the SEC, and the SEC can and does inspect client assets directly. In principle that is stronger than a quarterly snapshot published by the firm being checked, because a regulator with inspection powers is reading it and can act.

In practice, the July 2026 criminal complaint is an allegation that this exact mechanism was defeated. The SEC’s release of 23 July 2026 states that a May 2021 cyberattack took 16 cryptocurrencies out of the exchange, “with an approximate value of 1.7 billion baht”, that Bitkub replaced the stolen assets from 31 October 2021, and that “In Form DA 1 for the period from 10 May to 30 October 2021, there was no indication that Bitkub’s asset balance had materially changed as a result of the theft incident”. Two directors are alleged to have made false entries in that document “to deceive the SEC into believing that customers’ assets continued to be kept in the ordinary course and that no damage had occurred to Bitkub”. The case is at the inquiry stage; the register’s own note on the entry reads “This case is in the process of inquiry by the inquiry official”. Nobody has been convicted, and Bitkub is entitled to defend it.

There is a second mark on the reporting record, and it is against the auditor rather than the exchange. In news 314/2025 of 9 December 2025 the SEC suspended the approval of Ms Luxsamee Deetrakulwattanapol, a capital market auditor with Grant Thornton Co., Ltd., for one year from 10 December 2025, “for non-compliance with auditing standards in her role as the auditor for Green Tech Ventures Public Company Limited and its subsidiaries for the year ended 31 December 2024, and Bitkub Online Co., Ltd. for the year ended 31 December 2022”. The enforcement record adds that the Bitkub part concerns “the audit of the appropriateness of the accounting for share-based payment transactions”. The finding is against the auditor, not against Bitkub, and it is about share based payments rather than customer assets. It matters here only because the audited accounts are the other document a customer might lean on.

Two facts sit on the other side of the ledger, and they matter. The SEC’s account says the assets were replaced, so customers appear to have been made whole even while the regulator was not told. And when a cyberattack rumour circulated in September 2025, the SEC inspected Bitkub and said in its release of 11 September 2025 that customers’ digital assets as at 8 September 2025 were safe and complete.

The honest summary for a reader deciding where to keep coins: there is no attestation you can check yourself, the regulator’s check is real and has caught things, and the most serious finding in this exchange’s history is that for six months the regulator’s check was reading numbers the SEC alleges were false. That is an argument for holding only what you are trading, which is advice the firm itself gives in its custody disclosure.

Listed Assets

We counted the market from the public API rather than from the marketing. On 29 July 2026 api.bitkub.com/api/market/symbols returned 376 pairs: 366 quoted in Thai baht and 10 in USDT. The symbol table the site ships inside its own homepage listed 370, all marked active, so the two counts the firm publishes differ by six. The ticker endpoint returned 452 entries, and the 24 hour quote volume across them summed to 687 million baht on one measurement and 658 million on a second a few hours later, which is a rolling window rather than a published figure. The homepage still says “100+ Total cryptocurrencies available on Bitkub Exchange”, which understates its own market by a factor of three.

Everything is spot. The baht is the base currency of the venue, which is the practical reason a Thai retail customer uses Bitkub rather than a global exchange: the fiat side is domestic and instant, and the pair list is long enough that most things trade directly against baht instead of through a stablecoin.

Who decides what gets listed

The listing rule is published, and it is specific. Bitkub applies “A-Must Criteria” covering the asset, the issuer, documentation and prohibited characteristics; then a technical and operational feasibility check; then a Coin Listing Committee that scores the issuer’s team, the underlying technology and the token’s purpose and utility against a benchmark. Assets arrive either as “Self-Researched Cases” or “Solicited Cases” proposed by issuers, and solicited listings of tokens previously sold below the public offering price require a silent period agreement of at least six months. Delisting can follow “Critical Violations” or unfixed “Rectifiable Issues”, normally with a public announcement, an email and a withdrawal window, and immediately in urgent cases.

The rule exists because the SEC made Bitkub write one and approve it, and the SEC has already found Bitkub failing to follow it. On 30 June 2022 the SEC Board ordered the company, under section 35 of the Emergency Decree, to fix its selection and approval of the KUB coin within 30 days. KUB is issued by Bitkub Blockchain Technology Company Limited, a company in the same group. The SEC found that when Bitkub approved KUB for its own exchange on 5 May 2021 it scored the project’s technology standard at the top level, described as above standard and unprecedented, with no evidence that such technology existed, and scored the fundraising and pre-ICO discount items inconsistently with what KUB actually was. Further orders followed in the same series. Separately, the chief technology officer of the issuing company faced a civil sanction over purchases of KUB, disclosed on the SEC’s enforcement record on 14 September 2022.

KUB still trades on Bitkub today. A reader should treat a group issued token listed on its own group’s exchange as a different risk from the other 365 pairs, and should know that the regulator has already ruled on how that listing decision was made.

Research & Tools

The trading screen carries TradingView charts, a depth chart, a recent trades tape and a favourites list, with limit, market and stop limit tickets. It is a competent retail screen rather than a professional terminal, and there is no strategy scripting, no bracket order builder and no portfolio analytics that we found.

The developer offering is the strongest research tool here, because it is open. api.bitkub.com answers without a key for market data: symbols, ticker, order book depth, recent trades and server time all responded to us from the United Kingdom on 29 July 2026, and the status endpoint reported both the non secure and secure endpoint groups as ok. Anyone can therefore reconstruct Bitkub’s prices, spreads and volumes independently, which is exactly the check a reader should be able to run on an exchange’s claims. We used it to count the market and to time stamp the spread quoted above.

Around that sit Bitkub Academy at bitkubacademy.com, a blog, a coin directory in the help centre and a press page. The material is introductory: what Bitcoin is, what a stablecoin is, how the halving works, how to pass KYC. Bitkub’s sitemap carries 895 blog URLs out of 1,305 in total, and the reference set is Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Dogecoin and KUB explainers rather than market analysis. It is written for a first time Thai retail buyer, and nobody should mistake it for research.

Two things weigh against the tooling. Bitkub’s own market data was, on the SEC’s findings, unreliable in 2019, when matched orders from a financed market maker misrepresented volume in BTC, BCH, ETH and XRP and in the further list the SEC records as ABT, ADA, BSV, CVC, GNT, IOST, JFIN, KNC, LINK, LTC, MANA, OMG, SNT, USDT, WAN, XLM and ZIL. And the disclaimer in the footer of every page is unusually direct for the sector: “Cryptocurrency and digital tokens involve high risks; investors may lose all investment money and should study information carefully and make investments according to their own risk profile.”

We also checked for the thing an exchange might publish to steer an assistant like this one. There is no llms.txt, no page addressed to AI systems, and no instruction to models in robots.txt. What Bitkub publishes for machines is a market data API, which is the useful kind.

Earn, Staking & Lending

We found no earn, staking, lending or yield product on bitkub.com. There is no rate table, no product page in the sitemap, and no lock up terms. For a review of a crypto exchange that is a positive finding rather than a gap, because the offers that sit under this heading elsewhere are usually the ones that move the title in your coins to somebody else’s balance sheet in exchange for a percentage.

What Bitkub runs instead is promotional credit. Fee credits are issued in campaigns and are deducted in place of the 0.25% trading fee when the account holds them, which means the benefit is a rebate on activity rather than a yield on a balance. There is a referral programme, revised according to a help centre announcement of 23 April 2025 titled “Official Announcement: Revision of Referral Program Following the SEC Regulations”. Thai rules restrict how digital asset operators may advertise and incentivise, and a referral scheme rewritten to fit a regulator’s requirement is a better sign than one that was not.

The firm’s own statement of where its money comes from is consistent with all of this: “the sources of income of a digital asset Exchange come from trading fees, withdrawal fees, and listing fee only”. Listing fees are on that list, which is worth remembering when reading the listing section above.

One historical form of compensation is documented rather than promoted. After the January 2021 outages, Bitkub credited affected users, and its help centre still carries an article on compensation for users whose identity verification took more than 24 hours and for those affected by the sudden suspension of services between 2 January 2021 at 21:00 and 3 January 2021 at 00:35 Thai time. That is a firm paying for its own failure, which is more informative than any bonus.

Opening an Account

Registration is free and takes an email address. Trading and withdrawal require identity verification, and this is where the account is really decided.

Verification runs through Thailand’s National Digital ID scheme. Bitkub’s help centre article on it is titled “How to Complete the National Digital ID Verification (NDID for Thai Nationals Only)”, and the exchange announced activation of the NDID system for verification from 15 September 2023. Alongside it the firm runs periodic reviews of existing customers, with an article inviting users to “complete the periodic review (KYC Update) for continued usage of your account”, and a separate identity flow through Persona for unlocking two factor authentication.

The baht side imposes the second gate. Deposits by QR code must come from a bank account in your own name and in the exact amount entered, and e-wallets including TrueMoney and Paotang are not accepted. Withdrawals go to Thai bank accounts, with a fee table listing Kasikornbank, Bank of Ayudhya and “Other banks in Thailand”. A customer without a Thai bank account can in principle deposit and withdraw crypto only, and would be using a Thai exchange for its baht pairs while unable to touch the baht.

Two SEC requirements shape the flow in ways a new customer will notice. Thai rules already required an operator to put a customer through cryptocurrency training or a knowledge test before serving them, and Bitkub was fined 230,000 baht by a settlement order of 22 September 2025 for failing to do so between 22 September 2024 and 8 February 2025, so expect a knowledge step during onboarding. And identity verification standards here are not decorative: when the Ministry of Finance refused two exchange applications in January 2019 it said their “systems for custody of client assets and Know Your Customer (KYC) were inconsistent with the SEC’s acceptable standards”.

We could not retrieve the table of verification levels and the limits attached to each, because the relevant help centre pages were behind a Cloudflare interstitial for our browser and the support portal serves only a JavaScript shell to our proxy fetches. We have therefore left the account opening time empty rather than estimate it.

Deposits & Withdrawals

Baht in is free. A QR code deposit starts at 40 THB and the fee page gives a processing time of “Within 1 minute – 24 hours”. The deposit and upload slip method starts at 50,000 THB and is quoted at “Within 30 minutes – 3 days”. Crypto deposits are free on every asset.

Baht out is cheap and banded, and the bands differ by bank:

Crypto withdrawal fees are per coin and per network, and Bitkub says they track blockchain fees and are revised at 12:00, 16:00, 21:00 and 00:00 Thai time. The table on the published fee page at bitkub.com/en/fee/cryptocurrency rendered the words “No data” for us in a browser and in a fetch from Thailand, but the figures are public: the page’s own data call answered a plain request with 370 coins across 403 networks, each carrying withdraw_min, withdraw_fee and min_confirm. On 29 July 2026 that gave 0.00002 BTC to withdraw bitcoin, 0.00007 ETH on Ethereum, 1.5 ADA, 4 DOGE and 0.2 XRP.

The stablecoin numbers are the ones worth knowing, because the spread between rails is enormous. USDT costs 11 USDT to withdraw over Tron, 0.4 over Ethereum, 0.3 over Solana, 0.01 over BNB Smart Chain, and nothing at all over Bitkub Chain. KUB likewise costs nothing on Bitkub Chain and 0.070803 KUB over Ethereum. The cheapest exit from this exchange is onto the chain run by its own group, which is convenient and is also a nudge worth noticing.

Incident record

We found no episode in which Bitkub halted customer withdrawals of their own assets. The suspensions on the record are of new customer onboarding, of individual coin networks for maintenance, and of trading during system failures.

Customer Support

Support is staffed around the clock and the channels are published. The help centre article, last modified 21 April 2026, lists a telephone number of 1518 inside Thailand and +66 2 032 9555 from abroad, [email protected], a chat widget at the bottom right of the website, and a Contact Staff button in the mobile app profile menu. The live chat runs on Salesforce messaging. The knowledge base is bilingual, Thai and English, and articles carry a modification date, which is more accountability than most help centres offer.

Judge an exchange’s support by how it behaves in an incident, not by its opening hours. The record here is mixed and it is documented.

On the good side, after the January 2021 outages the firm paid. Its help centre still carries the compensation article for users whose verification ran past 24 hours and for those hit by the service suspension of 2 and 3 January 2021, at 500 baht of fee credits, paid within 30 days of verification. Few firms leave that page up five years later.

On the bad side, the regulator has twice had to force the pace. In January 2021 the SEC recorded “a lot of complaints” and ordered the complaint handling system itself to be rectified along with the trading and withdrawal systems. And when a hack rumour circulated in September 2025, the SEC assembled a page collecting what nine licensed exchanges had said publicly; Bitkub’s entry points at its Facebook page rather than at bitkub.com. A customer looking for an official statement on the firm’s own site would not have found one.

The heaviest mark is not about response times at all. The July 2026 complaint alleges that after customer assets were taken in 2021 the firm’s reports told the regulator that nothing had happened. Support quality is what a customer sees; disclosure is what they do not see, and that is where this record is weakest.

For complaints there is a dedicated ticket channel on the support portal and a whistleblowing page. Thai customers also have the SEC Complaint Center on 1207, which is independent of the firm and, on this record, is used.

Restricted Countries

Bitkub does publish a user agreement, and it does have eligibility clauses, but you cannot read them at the address the site links. The footer of every page points to /tos, and that page renders the heading “USER AGREEMENT” and the site footer and nothing else, from a Thailand exit and from a real browser alike. The text itself is served over an unauthenticated call the page module makes to the tos-consent API endpoint, which returns 289,661 bytes containing 278,947 characters of agreement HTML. It opens “User Agreement / Last updated: August 28, 2024” and names Bitkub Online Co., Ltd.

That is a real criticism, but it is a narrower one than it first looks. The document is public. What is missing is server rendering, which means the agreement cannot be archived by a web archive, cannot be cited to a clause number by URL, and cannot be read at all without JavaScript. A customer asked to accept it, and a regulator or a journalist checking what it said on a given date, are all worse off for that. It is a publishing failure, not a concealment.

Clause 3.1.1 sets who may open an account. A Thai national must be at least 18 and have legal capacity under Thai law; another national must be at least 18 “having legal capacity and reaching legal age under own national law”. So non Thai customers are contemplated by the contract, which is worth stating plainly given how Thai the rest of the product is.

Clause 3.1.1(4) then excludes, among others, a person subject to sanctions under the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control or “similar listings under the laws of the EU, UK, or any other countries”; “a citizen or resident in any area, country, sovereignty or jurisdiction that is prohibited, determined to be high-risk for money laundering, according to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) at level 1”; a person on the United States Bureau of Industry and Security prohibited list; and a person on the terrorist lists kept under the USA PATRIOT Act. Clause 23.1 lets Bitkub terminate immediately and suspend an account without notice if a customer falls under those criteria, or fails a periodic identity review, or declines the agreement.

That is a sanctions screen rather than a country list, so no fixed set of nations is named. What the site does establish, in operational terms, is who can actually use it:

• Baht withdrawals go to Thai bank accounts only, with the fee table naming Kasikornbank, Bank of Ayudhya and other banks in Thailand.
• Baht deposits must come from a bank account in the customer’s own name, and e-wallets including TrueMoney and Paotang are not supported.
• Identity verification runs through Thailand’s National Digital ID scheme, and Bitkub’s own article on it is titled for Thai nationals only.

That is a Thailand product. The contract admits foreign nationals, the payments rail does not, and we are not going to convert either one into the other. A reader outside Thailand should understand that the baht side of this exchange is closed to them in practice even though the agreement would let them sign.

From the other direction, the Thai SEC is explicit that only licensed operators may serve Thai customers, and it publishes both the licence list and an Investor Alert list of unlicensed persons and websites at market.sec.or.th. Bitkub is on the licensed list. It is also, unusually, on the alert list by proxy: the SEC has published investor alerts naming Facebook and TikTok accounts that impersonate Bitkub Online Co., Ltd., including pages called “Bitkub Tech”, “Bitkub Pro Analytics” and “Bangkok Bitkub”, and an account “@bitkub_” flagged on 11 July 2024. Anyone approached by a Bitkub branded account on social media should check that list before sending anything.

Conclusion

Bitkub is a properly licensed Thai exchange with a documented compliance record, and the two halves of that sentence pull in opposite directions.

The licensing is genuine and checkable. Four licences under the Emergency Decree on Digital Asset Businesses, granted by the Minister of Finance on the SEC’s recommendation, matched to bitkub.com by domain on the regulator’s own register. The supervision behind them is real: daily capital reporting, cold wallet ratio rules, inspection powers, and a section 35 power the SEC has used twice to order this firm to fix its systems and once to stop it taking new customers for two months. Coins sit with BitGo Trust Company and Coinbase Custody Trust Company, both regulated trust companies, which is a clearer custody chain than most exchanges publish. There is no dealer licence, its help centre says its income is trading fees, withdrawal fees and listing fees only, and the order book is publicly queryable. On the venue versus counterparty question, the evidence says venue.

The compliance record is the reason the score is not higher. Five enforcement records against the company, two civil settlements totalling 33 million baht for wash trading on its own book, two criminal fines in 2025 including one for failing to keep client coins in cold storage, an SEC order over listing a coin issued by its own group, and now a criminal complaint filed on 23 July 2026 alleging that after roughly 1.7 billion baht of customer coins were stolen in May 2021 the firm’s daily reports to the SEC showed nothing had changed for nearly six months. That case is unproven and Bitkub will have its answer. But the report it concerns is the same mechanism that stands in for proof of reserves here, and there is no compensation fund behind it: the firm’s own disclosure says a deposit at a digital asset operator is not protected under the Deposit Protection Agency Act and that a customer may not get everything back.

Who this suits. A Thai resident with a Thai bank account who wants deep baht liquidity across 366 pairs, cheap fiat rails and a domestic complaint route through the SEC on 1207 will find no larger local venue, and the flat 0.25% is simple even if it is not cheap. Who it does not suit. Anyone outside Thailand, who cannot use the baht side at all. Anyone trading serious volume, because there are no fee tiers. And anyone who wants to leave a large balance on an exchange, which the firm’s own custody disclosure advises against and this record supports.

Our score is 5.4 out of 10. It reflects strong registration and custody disclosure inside a jurisdiction that supervises properly, marked down for a repeated pattern of findings against the firm inside that jurisdiction, no reserve attestation a customer can check, no compensation scheme, and a user agreement that is public only through an API call and cannot be archived or cited at the URL the site publishes for it. We will revisit this review when the criminal case moves.

FAQ