Bybit vs BlackBull Markets — which broker is better?

Pros

• USDT perpetual contracts at 0.0200% maker and 0.0550% taker, with a deep book that makes Bybit the strongest derivatives alternative to Binance
• Spot at 0.1000% maker and taker for non-VIP accounts — three to four times cheaper than Bitstamp's entry tier and well under Kraken's
• MiCA Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorisation from the Austrian FMA since 28 May 2025, passported across the EEA, plus an Austrian e-money licence from 4 August 2026 giving EEA clients dedicated IBANs
• Absorbed the largest theft in crypto history — about USD 1.46 billion in February 2025 — without passing a cent of it to customers, restoring 1:1 reserves within roughly 72 hours and publishing a third-party audit five days later
• A unified v5 API covering spot, margin, perpetuals and options under one account model, with a public testnet and broad third-party bot support
• One of the largest copy-trading marketplaces in crypto, with verified lead-trader histories and published drawdown statistics rather than cherry-picked returns
• TradFi perpetuals since April 2026 give leveraged exposure to US stocks, global ETFs, gold, silver and crude oil from the same collateral pool as crypto

Cons

• EEA residents get spot and spot margin only. Perpetuals, options and TradFi contracts require the global platform, which Bybit EU customers may not use, because those products need a MiFID II licence Bybit has applied for but not obtained
• The February 2025 breach was the largest crypto theft on record and stemmed from a compromised multisig signing interface — the response was exemplary, the underlying control failure was not
• Bybit Fintech Limited is registered in the British Virgin Islands, is not publicly traded and publishes no audited financial statements; transparency rests on third-party proof-of-reserves attestations
• A pattern of entering markets before securing permission: a EUR 2,250,000 fine from the Dutch central bank in 2024, formal warnings and then a full exit in Japan, and a penalty from India's financial intelligence unit
• No compensation scheme applies to crypto assets at Bybit anywhere, including under the Austrian MiCA authorisation
• Support is chat and ticket only, with no published retail phone line, and the product surface — perpetuals, options, Earn, Copy Trading, Card, launch products, tokenised IPOs — is large enough that risk disclosures are easy to skim past

Pros

• No minimum deposit at all — every account tier including Prime opens from USD 0
• Prime pricing of USD 3.00 per lot per side with EUR/USD averaging 0.16 pips — about USD 7.60 all-in on a standard-lot round turn
• Platform range beats brokers many times its size: MT4, MT5, cTrader, native TradingView, in-house CopyTrader, ZuluTrade and Myfxbook
• LMAX ECN liquidity into Equinix-hosted servers with sub-100ms average execution — genuine institutional plumbing rather than marketing language
• 24/7 support across phone, email, live chat and dedicated English and Spanish WhatsApp lines, consistently praised in recent public feedback
• No inactivity fee, no custody fee, no account fee, and nine base currencies including NZD, SGD and ZAR
• Milford Asset Management, a NZ$34bn manager, holds a minority stake — an outside investor with reputational skin in the game
• BlackBull Invest adds real ownership of 26,000+ shares, options, ETFs and bonds alongside the leveraged accounts

Cons

• No investor compensation scheme under either entity — New Zealand has none and the Seychelles has none, so segregation is the only protection if the firm fails
• USD 5 charged on every withdrawal, in the account base currency, which almost no direct competitor does; small or frequent withdrawals get expensive fast
• The commission-free ECN Standard tier is not the cheap option it looks like — EUR/USD averaged 1.16 pips over the twelve months to October 2025, about USD 11.60 per standard-lot round turn against USD 7.60 on Prime
• Not available to EU, UK or Indian residents by BlackBull's own disclosure, which rules it out for German and Austrian readers entirely
• BlackBull does not publish which countries are onboarded to which legal entity, so you may not know which regulator covers you until you read the agreement
• Research is thin — a hub of daily snapshots and a podcast, with no screener depth or serious analytical tooling
• Privately held with no banking licence and no exchange listing — audited accounts surface once a year on the New Zealand register and not in between; the credit ratings quoted on its compliance page are those of custodian banks, not of BlackBull