Every platform is scored across six weighted categories. Custody & Security carries the heaviest weight because it's the question most platforms don't want you to ask.
Key management architecture, single points of failure, custodian distribution, physical exposure risk, jurisdictional diversity
Onboarding experience, interface quality, documentation, time to first transaction
All-in cost to buy, hold, and withdraw Bitcoin including hidden spreads
IRA, lending, inheritance, dynasty trusts, DCA, Lightning, card rewards
Proof of reserves, financial disclosures, audit history, open source status
Response time, available channels, resolution quality, dedicated account management
Bitcoin's entire value proposition is the elimination of counterparty risk. When you hand your Bitcoin to a single custodian, you reintroduce exactly the risk Bitcoin was designed to remove.
A platform can have the best fees, the smoothest UX, and a 5-star support team — but if it stores your keys behind a single point of failure, one breach, one insider, or one regulatory seizure can wipe you out. FTX had great UX too.
That's why custody architecture is the single largest factor in our scoring. Platforms that distribute keys across multiple independent institutions, use collaborative multisig, and eliminate single points of failure score highest — regardless of brand name or marketing spend.
The July 2026 hardware wallet entropy failure exposed a gap in how the whole industry, including us, had been assessing distributed custody. Wallets holding several keys from one manufacturer were being counted as distributed. They were not. Every key shared one firmware and one entropy path, so a single defect reached the entire quorum at once.
We now assess key generation and vendor concentration explicitly inside the custody score, across four pillars: whether keys come from genuinely separate vendors, whether they were generated by independent entropy processes, whether any single party can move funds alone, and who sustains that separation over time.
The full criteria, including how a reader can apply them to their own setup, are published as the Custody Independence Standard. Platforms meeting all four pillars carry an Independence Verified badge on their review. The standard is architecture-neutral: self-managed, collaborative, and institutional arrangements are all eligible and are all assessed against the same questions.
This change is recorded in our changelog, and the incident that prompted it is documented in our incident registry.
The custody score is composed of 15 measurable factors. Each platform is evaluated against every criterion. Points are summed and normalized to a 0–100 scale.
Overall scores map to letter-grade tiers. These tiers provide a quick reference for comparing platforms at a glance.
Proof of Custody is built by the Onramp Bitcoin team. We include our own products in the scoring because transparency matters more than the appearance of neutrality.
Our methodology is public. Our scoring is standardized. Every platform — including Onramp — is held to the same criteria. No platform can pay for a higher score, and we accept no sponsorships or affiliate commissions.
We believe this is a better model than pretending we have no perspective. We do. Our perspective is that custody architecture is the most important factor in choosing a Bitcoin platform, and we built Onramp because we couldn't find a platform that met our own standards. The scoring reflects that conviction consistently across every entry.
Weekly automated scraping of platform features, fees, custody architecture, and public disclosures.
Flagged changes are reviewed by our editorial team. Significant shifts trigger a full re-evaluation.
Updated scores are published with change logs so you can track exactly what changed and why.