On the Current State of Crypto Exchange Apps

Setting the Stage

We’ve always had a soft spot for crypto exchanges. Not just because we believe in the freedom of money and the democratization of access to financial services, but also because we’ve had the great pleasure of collaborating with quite a few great teams building in this space.

Having spent years working with crypto exchanges in different parts of the world, we spent quite a bit of time researching how different companies and teams approach the very same challenges with the design of their mobile trading experiences. This article is the first in an ongoing series of deep dives in which we share our views and opinion on the current state of design in different product segments and categories.

Please keep in mind that digital products constantly evolve alongside the organizations that create them. The views and opinions shared here reflect our thinking at the time of publishing (May 2025) and will naturally change over time.

The Problem Space

Designing a crypto exchange is no easy task. It’s a multifaceted challenge that requires product and design teams to carefully account for a wide spectrum of user profiles. Each with vastly different expectations, needs, and levels of familiarity with trading concepts. From complete newcomers eager to complete their first crypto purchase, to professional traders who depend on real-time data and precision tools to manage complex portfolios. No matter who the customer, the design must serve them all.

The crypto exchange space is packed with companies offering trading services. Let’s look at how that competition is being reflected on their mobile apps.

Retail users new to the idea of trading on an exchange are often overwhelmed the first time they lay eyes upon a candlestick chart, try to decipher an order book, or learn to distinguish between different order types. To ease the onboarding experience, most exchanges have introduced simplified buying and selling options: quick, streamlined flows that allow users to acquire digital assets with just a few taps or clicks.
These simplifications can come at a cost. In stripping away complexity for the sake of clarity, platforms often sacrifice the depth and granularity that experienced users demand. This tension between accessibility and sophistication is one of the core design dilemmas in the exchange space.

Striking the right balance is easier said than done. It involves a series of trade-offs that are rarely clear-cut. There are many moving pieces to consider: the expanding range of products and features exchanges now offer, the industry’s overreliance on exchange terminology and jargon, and, most importantly, the overall UX and product architecture that ties everything together into a cohesive system.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how different exchanges are grappling with this challenge. Specifically, we’ll examine how their architectures are holding up under the weight of scale, and what that means for users.

The Shortlist

We’ve shortlisted 15 exchanges to take a closer look at in order to better understand the current state of mobile exchange UX. Our selection criteria included transaction volume, founding year, and origin. That said, a few platforms made the list not because of their market dominance, but because they offer compelling or unconventional approaches to the exchange experience.

You will notice that not all contenders listed are pure crypto exchanges in the classical sense. Some will only loosely fit the profile since they are more traditional fintechs or digital wallets. We do however believe that some of the additions make for interesting examples that we can draw valuable lessons from from a usability and product design perspective.

While we’d love to explore each of these exchanges in detail, doing so would quickly turn this article into a marathon read. Instead, we’ll break them down into groups, focusing on commonalities in design approach, functionality, and architecture. Along the way, we’ll also highlight standout examples that offer especially notable or unexpected insights.

The Eastern Cohort

Asia has long been at the forefront of global crypto adoption. Naturally, this makes the region fertile ground for crypto exchanges to emerge and flourish, with widespread interest in digital assets and a strong base of talented engineers, particularly across the greater Chinese area.

Notable names originating in the region include Binance, OKX, Bitget, Bybit, and Kucoin—amongst others. These companies have played a significant role in shaping our expectations around what a modern digital asset platform should look and feel like. They typically offer a suite of products, ranging from spot and margin trading to futures and options, often layered with generous leverage, staking and lending products, P2P functionality, and much more. The sheer abundance of features and tools available on these platforms can be both impressive and overwhelming, and this is clearly reflected in the way many of these apps are structured and designed.

Many exchanges from the East share similar, sometimes nearly identical, UX/UI patterns unique to the region. Differentiation often falls short.

The keen observer will notice that many of the exchanges in this group share similar design traits. Not just in terms of layout, but also in terms of how products are presented and categorized. One could argue that this is simply a regional design preference, but more likely, the direct competition between these platforms drives their product and design teams to constantly benchmark design changes and feature additions against each other.

The primary challenge lies in how these rich and often overlapping features are integrated into a coherent user experience. Users are often presented with several ways to do essentially the same thing: converting cash to crypto, buying crypto with a local payment method, trading cash for crypto on spot markets, exchanging cash for crypto peer-2-peer or via a trading desk. We do understand that every one of these options have a different purpose, pricing structure, and liquidity source, but to an average user, that distinction is mostly unclear and the learning curve becomes steeper.

Exchanges eventually responded with a workaround: the so-called Lite Mode. First introduced by Binance in 2020, it offered a simplified trading experience embedded within the same app, stripping away much of the complexity to enable easier buying, selling, and portfolio management. This approach caught on quickly, with many other exchanges following suit and introducing their own flavors of toggleable simplified modes.

However, most of the lite mode variations we’ve seen over the years feel like inconsequential afterthoughts. While they offer a cleaner alternative to the default experience, they often achieve this by removing core functionality entirely. Rather than reimagining how complex features could be presented in a more accessible way, the experience is stripped down to its bare minimum, leaving users with a shallow version of the product that fails to bridge the gap between beginners and pros.

Different modes within the same app have since become commonplace. Lite modes for simple buying and selling, Pro modes for centralized trading, Web3 modes for decentralized trading, Payment modes for, well, payments. And the list goes on. We believe that these modes are ultimately bandaid solutions to a much larger issue. Their very existence quietly acknowledges that the platforms they are built on have become overly complex. Instead of addressing deeper structural problems in architecture and UX, they provide quick, toggleable escape hatches. But rather than truly reducing complexity, they often add to it, becoming just another layer that users must navigate within an already cluttered and overwhelming interface. We can only speculate why these challenges persist, but our experience suggests they may stem from fragmented product management, aggressive release schedules, and inconsistent design processes. These factors often prevent teams from thinking deeply about the core problems and how to solve them at scale.

Like its regional competitors, OKX has introduced multiple modes, each geared toward different usage scenarios and feature sets.

The likes of Binance and OKX have played a crucial role in advancing financial literacy worldwide. We are often struck by how many people have developed a solid grasp of trading fundamentals, and we believe the crypto landscape would look very different today without the contributions of these platforms. That said, we see significant room for exchanges to improve the usability of individual features and products, especially in how they are integrated into the broader and more cohesive platform experience.

The Western Cohort

Our second cluster focuses on crypto exchanges that were either founded in the west or primarily focus on western markets. Names like Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and Crypto.com have been key players since the early 2010s and, in many respects, had an early advantage in helping bring crypto into the mainstream.

The most notable example is obviously Coinbase. A company long praised for offering a simple, intuitive onboarding and trading experience. It set what many believed to be the gold standard in terms of UX/UI, and likely served as a design reference for other platforms aiming to offer retail-friendly access to crypto.

While the exchanges in this group initially focused on providing clean, beginner-oriented experiences, nearly all of them have since expanded to offer more advanced tools and features such as spot, futures and options trading. These capabilities are typically introduced through entirely separate "pro" versions of their platforms, built to cater to experienced traders without compromising the simplicity of the default app. Coinbase Pro (formerly GDAX), Kraken Pro, and Gemini Active Trader are all examples of this approach. By separating advanced features into dedicated interfaces, these exchanges aim to preserve the simplicity of their default apps and offer a more welcoming experience for first-time users.

Coinbase, however, decided to break with the separate app model with the introduction of their Advanced Trading mode in 2022. Advanced Trading would allow users to toggle features like order types, order books, and crypto/crypto trading pairs on and off, offering a more sophisticated alternative to the app’s simple buy and sell interface. The introduction of the Advanced Trading toggle to Coinbase’s primary app effectively marked the end of Coinbase Pro—the app is no longer maintained since late 2023.

The evolution didn’t stop there though. The addition of derivatives to Advanced Trading appears to have prompted Coinbase’s product and design teams to take inspiration from platforms like Binance, and now mirror many of the same UX patterns found on Binance’s advanced trading experience, leading to increased complexity and problematic feature separation. Rather than offering simplified and advanced views of the same core products, users are now presented with different trading experiences that coexist within a single app. Different user groups are effectively being offered different trading features that adhere to different fee structures. The result is a somewhat fragmented feeling interface that echoes many of the same challenges we've already identified in exchange platforms originating in the East.

Complicating matters further, Coinbase has started integrating shortcuts to its decentralized product offering via its non-custodial Coinbase Wallet App. These shortcuts occasionally pop up when a feature isn’t available to the user due to, for example, their identity verification status. This pattern might be a hinting at plans to further integrate decentralized trading features into the main Coinbase app. Much like what we've seen with 'Web3 Mode' on the apps of some of Coinbase's eastern counterparts.

Kraken, on the other hand, has kept its product offerings for different user groups siloed across separate apps. The split is simple and intuitive: Kraken for easy buying, selling, portfolio management, and payments; Kraken Pro for spot trading and derivatives; and Kraken Wallet for all things decentralized. While this likely comes at the cost of maintaining multiple codebases and App Store listings, we believe the user experience benefits from the clarity and focus that this separation provides.

Kraken has stayed true to its approach, continuing to offer separate apps for different use cases.

Whether to consolidate everything into a single app or split offerings across multiple apps is a difficult decision to make, and we’re not advocating for either approach. Serving different users through separate apps can simplify things from a UX and UI standpoint but tends to be more demanding from a development perspective. On the other hand, consolidating everything into one app might ease code maintenance but significantly increases the complexity for product and design teams. Every feature must be thoughtfully designed and cohesively integrated, which remains an ongoing challenge that many companies continue to navigate.

The Outliers

Last but not least, we turn our attention to a few products that fall outside the conventional definition of a crypto exchange. Some are streamlined digital wallets that make it easy for users to buy and sell crypto, while others come from outside the crypto-native space and offer crypto exchange features as an add-on.

Notable examples in this category include Cash App and Strike. While it’s difficult to compare either directly to the full-fledged exchanges mentioned earlier, due to their limited feature sets and focus on Bitcoin on- and off-ramping. We believe both have done an excellent job of maintaining a consistently simple and user-friendly experience. Cash App, in particular, has continued to evolve over the years, adding stock trading and a range of payment-focused features without sacrificing clarity or structural and visual hierarchy.

Though not traditional exchanges, Cash App and Strike offer excellent examples of a simplified crypto (or Bitcoin) trading experience.

Strike, similar to Cash App, is a digital wallet app that allows users to easily buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin. Although the app is primarily built around its cross-border payments functionality, we were glad to see that Strike is one of the few simplified platforms that allows users to place limit orders without needing to navigate a traditional spot trading interface. The feature is called “Target Orders” and lets users set a specific price at which they want their order to execute. Perfect for the next dip-purchase! We hope the team continues building on this concept by introducing more advanced functionality in a similarly accessible and retail-friendly way.

Crypto has long gone mainstream. In recent years, many reputable neo-banks and brokerages around the world have added crypto trading services to their offerings. The US-based trading platform Robinhood added cryptocurrencies alongside its stock trading capabilities and has since become a household name, even beyond the regions it operates in. Much like its crypto-focused counterparts discussed earlier, the company has expanded into more advanced financial products, including options and futures contracts, both for crypto and traditional assets.

Robinhood stands out as a company thinking deeply about how to simplify the mobile trading experience.

However, unlike some of its competitors, Robinhood has managed this expansion in a balanced and thoughtful way. The team clearly gave careful thought to how crypto and stock trading can coexist alongside payment features and derivatives trading interfaces. All within the same app. Their well-executed Options Chain and Futures Ladder are excellent examples of this. It’s a testament to a team that has carefully considered the overall product and platform experience.

As crypto continues to gain traction, we’re excited to watch how UX-focused neobanks like Revolut will incorporate more sophisticated trading tools into their broader product suites. The launch of Revolut X, a standalone spot trading platform, is a strong indication of the company’s commitment to deepening its crypto offerings. For now, Revolut X remains a separate experience from the core app, but we suspect integration is only a matter of time. It will be fascinating to see how Revolut manages the user experience as it bridges the gap between accessibility and advanced functionality.

The Road Ahead

We’ve only scratched the surface of what makes a great crypto exchange experience and the many challenges involved in designing something that resonates with people at different stages of their crypto journey. Interfaces, architecture, and language all need to be thoughtfully considered when shaping any digital product experience, whether it’s a crypto exchange or something entirely different.

We have no horse in the race when it comes to how companies navigate the complexity that comes with an ever-expanding feature set. There is no right or wrong when deciding whether everything should be consolidated into one or broken out into separate app experiences. We firmly believe that these decisions need to be made holistically, with a clear and cohesive vision of what the overall user experience should look like across all features and products. The design of a platform should never be driven by organizational structure, or, even worse, internal politics (the phrase 'shipping the org chart' comes to mind). A well-designed product demands intentional alignment, not just across screens and interfaces, but across teams, departments, and leadership.

The perfect exchange experience hasn’t been found yet, but it will likely mix ingredients we’re already seeing among some of the top players.

The perfect recipe for the ideal trading app experience hasn’t been created yet, and that is part of what makes this space so exciting. If it were up to us, we would love to see a platform that combines the incredible feature richness of Binance, the clever UX of Robinhood, and the consistently elegant UI of Cash App, all seamlessly wrapped into one. But that’s ultimately very subjective and has unfortunately not been tried yet.

The crypto exchange landscape will continue to evolve alongside the broader digital assets ecosystem, bringing new technologies, new user expectations, and new design challenges. We are genuinely excited to see what companies will create as they work to onboard the next generation of users into the crypto world, whether through refined mobile experiences, innovative features, or entirely new service models. As the industry matures, the opportunity to rethink how people interact with digital assets will only grow. We will keep tracking the latest developments and look forward to helping you explore what the road ahead might look like for your company, your product, and your brand.