WikiBit Exchange Collapse Risk Rankings #42: Bitstamp by Robinhood — “End-of-Life Care” for the World’s Oldest Exchange: Your Money Is in Luxembourg, but Your App Is at Robinhood
Introduction: An Old-School Exchange That Has Been “Adopted” In our first 41 installments, we investigated a series of exchanges, from HashKey to Bithumb. For Episode 42, were taking a look at one of the most unusual cases yet: Bitstamp by Robinhood. When it comes to industry experience, Bitstamp‘s résumé is arguably second to none in the crypto world: founded in 2011, it is one of the longest-operating cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. It holds a MiCA Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) license issued by Luxembourg’s CSSF, a Major Payment Institution license from Singapores MAS, dual VASP and SIBA registrations in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), more than 50 active licenses and registrations worldwide, 4–5 million users, 95% of assets held in cold storage with 1:1 custody, and annual audits by a Big Four accounting firm. Sounds like “the most compliant established exchange in crypto, bar none,” right？ But theres another side to the story. Bitstamp has a Trustpilot rating of just 1.3/5, with users describing their experiences as “Bad” and complaining about “accounts frozen for a year” and customer support that “simply doesnt exist.” In June 2025, the Grenoble Court of Appeal in France ruled that Bitstamp Europe was civilly liable to a user for operating in
