CEX.IO Earn: staking and savings, read against the documentation

CEX.IO has been running since 2013, which in this industry is close to geological time. It started life alongside GHash.io, the bitcoin mining pool that in mid-2014 briefly pushed past 51% of the network hashrate and caused the first serious public argument about mining centralisation. That episode is worth knowing because it tells you the company has been through a full cycle of scrutiny and is still here. It does not tell you anything about whether its CEX.IO Earn products are a sensible place to put money today, which is what this review is about.

CEX.IO is the partner that funds this site, and we have written this review the same way we write the other fifteen platform reviews: from the company's own published pages, with the gaps stated as gaps. There are real strengths here — a published per-asset rate table, no lock-up, daily accrual on savings, and a licence list longer than most competitors can produce. There are also four things CEX.IO does not publish that we think a reader is entitled to see before depositing, and one place where its marketing contradicts its own FAQ. All of it is below.

Everything on this page was checked on 16 September 2026. Advertised rates on CEX.IO are variable, are described by the company as set by each protocol rather than by CEX.IO, and have been revised downward before. Treat every percentage here as a snapshot.

What CEX.IO Earn actually is

There are only four engines that can produce a crypto yield: protocol staking rewards, lending to a borrower, a trading strategy, and a subsidy paid out of company funds. CEX.IO Earn runs two products and they sit in different places on that list.

Staking is straightforward. Thirteen proof-of-stake assets, pooled and staked by CEX.IO on your behalf, with the protocol reward passed through. CEX.IO is explicit that the rates "are set by each protocol and are not decided upon by CEX.IO" and that they may change. That framing is accurate and it is the right one — a staking rate is not a promise anyone makes to you, it is an output of the network's issuance schedule. The mechanics behind it are on ourcrypto staking guide.

Savings is the harder one. The list includes bitcoin at 0.25%, USDC and USDT at 4%, EURC at 2% and a long tail of twelve assets at 0.1%. None of bitcoin, USDC, USDT or EURC has a native staking mechanism, so the yield cannot be protocol rewards. CEX.IO does not say what it is. Neither the savings page nor its dedicated risk page explains how the return is generated or who ultimately pays it. Functionally it behaves like a lending or balance-sheet product, but we are describing it that way by elimination rather than from disclosure.

The rates, and what sits behind each one

CEX.IO publishes a complete per-asset table for both products, which is more than several larger exchanges manage. Binance and Bybit render their rate tables client-side or behind a login; Coinbase does not publish per-asset staking APYs on its public page at all. A reader can see CEX.IO's numbers before creating an account, and that is a genuine point in its favour.

The staking list is a high-issuance list. ATOM at 12%, ONT at 10% and ZIL at 7% are at the top because those chains issue tokens quickly, not because CEX.IO is doing anything clever. Three assets appear on both product lists, at different rates, which is worth knowing if you hold them.

Cardano is the interesting row. CEX.IO pays more on ADA in savings than in staking, which means the savings side is not simply a repackaged staking product — it is funded some other way, and that other way is currently paying better than the Cardano network is. Ourstaking rewards comparison puts the network-level numbers next to the exchange ones across thirteen assets.

The savings table is better understood grouped by rate than listed alphabetically, because the shape of it is the point: three assets carry the headline, five carry something meaningful, and more than half the list pays a tenth of a percent.

Two observations. First, bitcoin at 0.25% is an honest number rather than a disappointing one. Bitcoin has no staking, so every BTC yield in existence is credit risk in a wrapper, and the quarter-percent CEX.IO pays matches what Xapo Bank pays on the same asset. Rates several times higher exist elsewhere and they tell you something about the counterparty rather than about bitcoin. We work through why onearning bitcoin.

Second, the 0.1% tail is effectively a nominal rate. Twelve of the twenty-two savings assets pay a tenth of a percent, which on any realistic retail balance rounds to nothing after you account for the price volatility of the underlying token. European rates were revised at the same time Automated Staking was discontinued in April 2025, and most of the altcoin list has sat at 0.1% since. The headline "up to 4%" is accurate; it applies to three assets out of twenty-two.

Fees, commission and the parts of the schedule that do not exist

CEX.IO states that Savings is free to use and that it charges no fees on internal transfers. On staking, its own comparison page says it applies no commission and that network rewards are passed through to the user. If that is accurate it is a significant advantage: Coinbase keeps about 35% of staking rewards as standard, Kraken 30% on flexible staking, Binance 10% on ETH, and Binance.US takes 90% on its Soft-Staking product. A genuine zero would be the cheapest custodial staking in this comparison set apart from Revolut's stated pass-through.

We cannot corroborate it. There is no published fee schedule to check it against —cex.io/fee-schedule redirects to a limits page with no fee table — and the terms do not restate the claim. A commission of zero appearing only in marketing copy is a weaker fact than a commission of 35% appearing in a fee table, even though the number is better for you. We are reporting the claim, and reporting that it stands alone.

Lock-up, withdrawal and redemption

This is where CEX.IO is genuinely differentiated. Neither product has a lock-up. Staked coins can be withdrawn at any time, assets remain tradable while staked, and CEX.IO states that rewards continue to accrue even while an order is open. Savings has no minimum, no maximum, and no withdrawal penalty.

That is unusual, and it is worth understanding what it implies. Cosmos has a 21-day unbonding period and Polkadot has 28 days — those are protocol rules that CEX.IO cannot waive. Offering instant exit on assets with multi-week unbonding means CEX.IO is absorbing the timing mismatch on its own books, presumably by holding a liquidity buffer and rotating stake. It is a real service and it is also a balance-sheet position. In calm markets you will not notice it. It is the kind of arrangement that gets tested when everyone wants out at once, which is the general lesson of the CeFi lending collapses.

One redemption detail is easy to miss: on savings, redeeming on a given day forfeits that day's reward. With daily accrual that costs you a single day's interest, so it is minor, but it means frequent in-and-out movement quietly clips the effective rate.

Availability and who is excluded

CEX.IO lists around 250 countries and territories as supported for Earn, with identical lists for savings and staking, including all 27 EU member states, Australia and Brazil. That is a wide footprint by the standards of this sector.

The United States is excluded from Earn outright: "Savings Staking services are not currently available for customers in the U.S." This is stated both on the savings page and in the supported-countries article. Thirty territories are unsupported platform-wide, which necessarily excludes Earn — the list includes Canada, Japan, Singapore and Russia among others. The United Kingdom does not appear on the Earn supported list at all, which is odd given that CEX.IO holds a UK registration and serves UK spot customers; absence from a list is weaker evidence than an explicit exclusion, so we would check with support rather than state flatly that UK residents are barred.

There is one contradiction in CEX.IO's own sources: India appears on the platform-wide unsupported list and simultaneously on the Earn supported list. We could not resolve which is current. Our availability guide covers how these lists tend to differ from what an account can actually do.

Licensing: what CEX.IO holds, and what each licence covers

CEX.IO's licence list is one of the longest in this review set, and it is also one of the easiest to over-read. Each registration does a specific job.

United Kingdom. CEX.IO Markets UK Ltd (company number 15140258) holds an FCA cryptoasset registration under the Money Laundering Regulations, FRN 1007192, announced on 12 March 2026. CEX.IO quotes the FCA's own caveat on its page, and it is the important sentence: registration "relates to AML/CTF supervision and does not constitute authorisation, approval or endorsement by the Financial Conduct Authority". There is no Financial Ombudsman Service or Financial Services Compensation Scheme protection for cryptoasset complaints. The history behind this matters too — CEX.IO suspended UK onboarding in October 2023 under the FCA's financial promotions regime and resumed in September 2024 using a third-party approver, serving the UK from Lithuania, before obtaining its own registration in 2026.

United States. CEX.IO Corp holds a FinCEN MSB registration under NMLS ID 1804170 and roughly 40 state money transmitter licences, with numbers published per state — Texas 3223, Florida FT230000264, Pennsylvania 112703, Washington 550-MT-117925 and Michigan MT-0027368 among them. New York is not on the list and we found no BitLicense or limited purpose trust charter. None of this reaches Earn, which is unavailable in the US regardless.

Gibraltar. CEX.IO Limited has been authorised by the GFSC as a DLT provider covering exchange and custody, and holds a money lender licence granted on 26 November 2020 that enabled the CEX.IO LOAN product. We could not verify whether the DLT licence remains current in 2026 — CEX.IO's own legal page no longer links a Gibraltar page.

Certifications. PCI DSS certification is published, with the certificate available on CEX.IO's own static host. It is worth being precise about what that means: PCI DSS governs the handling of payment card data. It says nothing about solvency, custody of crypto assets, or the safety of an earn product.

Custody, insurance and proof of reserves

CEX.IO Earn is fully custodial. Assets sit in CEX.IO accounts and the terms note that the platform may use a third-party custodial service. The US entity's terms contain strong language — title to your digital assets "shall at all times remain with you", assets are "not property of CEX.IO, and are not subject to claims of our creditors", and they are not loaned to CEX.IO. That is exactly what you want to read.

The difficulty is that this wording is in the US terms, and Earn is not available in the US. Earn appears to be served by CEX.IO EUROPE, S.L. and CEX OVRS LLC, a St Kitts and Nevis entity. Whether the same title and segregation language applies to whichever entity actually books your earn balance could not be verified. For a yield product, the contracting entity is not a detail — it determines where your claim sits if anything goes wrong.

On the protections a reader would look for next, the answer is consistent and it is no. We found no proof of reserves page, attestation or Merkle-tree tool. No ISO 27001 and no SOC 2. No insurance is claimed anywhere on the homepage or the legal pages. CEX.IO's own risk warning says digital assets "may not be protected by any compensation scheme, insurance arrangement or other loss-protection mechanism", and that users may be unable to claim compensation if the relevant CEX.IO entity cannot meet its obligations. Security measures claimed on the homepage include two-factor authentication, DDoS mitigation, multi-signature wallets and cold storage, with no cold-storage percentage published; cex.io/securityreturns a 404.

For context on what stronger disclosure looks like, Ledn publishes monthly proof of reserves via Chainalysis and holds SOC 2 Type 2, andNexo publishes named custodians and an insurance arrangement even though the coverage amount is not stated. No loss of customer funds at CEX.IO was found in any search across its twelve-year history, which is a real data point — but absence of evidence is not the same as an audited reserve.

Risks specific to CEX.IO

Every custodial earn product carries counterparty risk, and that is covered in general terms on crypto earn risks. Four things are specific to this platform.

The undisclosed savings mechanism is the main one. A 4% return on USDT is not large, but you cannot judge whether it is sustainable or who defaults if it stops, because CEX.IO does not say who is paying it. That is the same opacity that preceded the 2022 failures, and it is the single item we would most want to see changed.

Rates are variable and have been cut unilaterally. The service update of1 April 2025 revised European APRs and discontinued Automated Staking, with final payouts in early April. Most of the altcoin savings list now sits at 0.1%. A rate on this platform is a current offer, not a term.

Product discontinuation has precedent. Automated Staking was retired outright. That is not misconduct — products get retired — but it is a reason not to build a plan around any single CEX.IO earn feature continuing to exist.

Rate confusion between CEX.IO's two staking products. The separate non-custodial service at validator.cex.io advertises 4.01% on ADA up to 23.58% on ONT across nine networks, against 1.5% and 10% for the same assets in Earn. Different custody model, different fee, undisclosed fee percentage. It is easy to arrive at the Earn page expecting the Validator numbers.

The record, stated plainly

A review of a partner has to include the awkward parts of the history, so here they are in order, with no interpretation added.

The rest of the shelf

Earn sits alongside spot trading across 300-plus markets, margin trading to 20x, card-based instant buying — CEX.IO was the first exchange to allow card crypto purchases, in 2014 — the CEX.IO LOAN crypto-backed lending product, a crypto card available in 30-plus European countries and Ukraine, and CEX.IO Pay for zero-fee transfers. Card issuer, network, fees and cashback are not disclosed in the support article we checked. The Reward Center is promotional rather than a yield product and its odds are not published; treat the wheel as marketing, in the same category as the schemes on earning free crypto.

How CEX.IO compares to Kraken and Coinbase

Against Kraken, the comparison is about commission and honesty of construction. Kraken publishes a per-asset table too, and publishes its commission — 30% on flexible staking, 25% down to 0% on bonded staking by balance tier. It also discloses that on flexible staking it will only stake a portion of your assets and pay rewards on up to 50% of what you commit, which effectively halves the advertised rate. CEX.IO has no such clause and claims no commission, but backs neither statement with a fee schedule. Kraken tells you precisely how it is worse; CEX.IO tells you it is better without showing the document.

Against Coinbase, the comparison is regulation against rates. Coinbase holds a MiCA CASP authorisation through its Luxembourg entity, granted by the CSSF on 20 June 2025, which is checkable in a public register. It also takes about 35% of your staking rewards as standard and does not publish per-asset staking APYs at all. CEX.IO publishes every rate and cannot demonstrate a European authorisation. Which of those you weigh more heavily is a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one, and it is the same trade-off that runs through choosing where to earn.

For a reader who wants no lock-up, small balances, published rates and daily savings accrual, and who is outside the US, CEX.IO Earn does the job it advertises. For a reader whose first question is "who is paying this yield and which regulator can I check", the answers here are currently incomplete, and that is a reasonable thing to weigh. Both readings follow from the same set of facts.