Centralized Exchange (CEX)
A company-operated trading platform that custodies your funds — the easiest on-ramp, and a counterparty risk to manage.
A centralized exchange (CEX) is a business that matches buyers and sellers on an internal order book and holds customer funds in its own wallets. Familiar names include Binance, Coinbase, Kraken and OKX. CEXs offer the smoothest fiat on-ramps, deep liquidity and recourse when things go wrong — at the cost of trusting the operator.
That trust is the trade-off: exchange failures like FTX (2022) taught the market that deposited coins are an IOU. Modern hygiene: prefer platforms publishing proof of reserves, enable 2FA, and treat a CEX as a trading venue, not a vault — long-term holdings belong in cold storage.