The LSE Directory / CFD and forex brokers
Bybit is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange offering spot trading, perpetual and futures derivatives, USDC options, leveraged tokens, a copy-trading marketplace and yield ("Earn") products. It reports more than 78 million registered users across 241 countries and regions and average daily trading volume above 20 billion dollars, a scale that has kept it widely cited as the world's second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume behind Binance. Its point of difference from pure-crypto rivals is TradFi, an MT5-integrated product launched on June 16, 2025 that layers traditional-market CFDs onto the same account and app used for crypto trading: forex pairs at leverage up to 500x, plus gold, major indices, commodities and around 78 large-cap stocks (including Apple, Amazon and Tesla), all margined in USDT rather than requiring a separate fiat account or standalone MT5 install. That lets an existing crypto user trade conventional CFD instruments without leaving the Bybit ecosystem, which is why the product puts Bybit into comparisons with firms whose core business is retail FX and CFDs rather than crypto. The exchange was founded in 2018 by Ben Zhou, a Singapore-raised entrepreneur who remains CEO; the company relocated its headquarters from Singapore to Dubai in 2022. On February 21, 2025, attackers that investigators attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group exploited Bybit's Safe{Wallet} multisignature infrastructure and stole roughly 400,000 ETH, worth an estimated 1.4 to 1.5 billion dollars, the largest cryptocurrency exchange theft on record; Bybit says it replenished the stolen reserves within 72 hours using bridge financing from Galaxy Digital, FalconX and Wintermute. In October 2024 Bybit settled a clawback lawsuit brought by the FTX bankruptcy estate, which had originally sought close to 1 billion dollars, for 228 million dollars. The exchange has also run high-profile sports sponsorships, including a Formula One deal with the Red Bull Racing team from 2022 to 2024 and a shirt-sponsorship arrangement with the Argentina national football team. Bybit's regulatory footprint shifted fast through 2026. Austria's Financial Market Authority authorized Bybit as a crypto-asset service provider under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation in May 2025, yet on June 29, 2026 the exchange announced it would fully suspend spot and derivatives trading for European Economic Area users as part of a MiCA-driven restructuring. Separately, Singapore's Monetary Authority placed Bybit on its Investor Alert List on June 17, 2026 as an unlicensed platform, and Bybit has voluntarily paused new account registrations in Japan under pressure from that country's Financial Services Agency, while re-entering the UK market in December 2025 through a partnership with the regulated broker Archax. It remains blocked from operating in the United States, mainland China and Canada.
