ZB Exchange Review

ZB is a Chinese-oriented exchange, catering almost exclusively to Chinese audiences and not investing much into making itself accessible to western audiences. Even though ZB Group, the exchange's operator claims it has been founded in 2012, all sources point to the exchange having been established late 2017. Since then, it has climbed volume rankings across the market - mostly in CoinMarketCap - exponentially. This is probably due to the very large amount of wash trading allegedly happening on the exchange - with or without their cooperation, we have no way of knowing. It is important to note that this review and analysis is conducted from a western perspective, since Cointelligence is set on delivering its mostly western audience the clearest picture we can, and so this is our perspective.

User-Experience wise, ZB comes right off the bat as a very buggy exchange: upon sing-up, the system asks for an email address to send a confirmation code to. Unfortunately, the code never arrived, even after multiple attempts, and we had to hope it will arrive sometime at a later date, and it finally did, after a prolonged period of time. When finally gaining access to the site, an English-only speaker is presented with a very confusing site, complete with unintelligible sections which come with no explanations or tutorials. Much of the text is in Chinese even when it should be translated. The one redeeming feature of the user experience at ZB is their customer support: upon submitting a ticket in English we have received a detailed answer within the hour. Note the online chat does not support English speakers.

Performance at ZB is poor; its platform is obviously an off-the-shelf product designed to be plug-and-play compatible with the most basic exchanges, and many of its trading interfaces are missing central components such as price charts. It also doesn't help that ZB's base fee is 0.2%, twice the industry's competitive standard of 0.1%

Features on the platform are seemingly plentiful on a first glance: they offer margin trading, a mobile app and C2C trading (supposedly customer-customer direct crypto buying and selling) although upon attempting to use these features we encountered interfaces incredibly hard to understand with lacking documentation. Again, since we believe most users of ZB originate from China, these users might feel more at home in ZB's environment rather than exchanges western audiences got used to, but to us those features were borderline unusable. Additionally, ZB lists 80 coins available to trade, which is not a small amount but demand for coin variation at these type of platforms is for a much higher number.

ZB's Team is hard to find, although a handful of member profiles are available on LinkedIn. These individuals appear professional with extensive career experience, and we were impressed with their accomplishments. Unfortunately, the number of team members is small, and we believe ZB does not do a good job of making the team's info available to its user base.

On the Social front ZB is actually doing surprisingly well: its Telegram channel has admins who help users and conversations are more value-bearing than most exchange channels, its twitter account is active although there is little to no community engagement with it and they have quite an impressive presence in their Asian-oriented outlets.

On matters of trust, we have a very hard time giving ours to ZB. Firstly, after direct contact with the exchange, we have confirmed they in fact do not keep user funds in cold storage at all - all wallets are connected to the internet at all times, posing significant risk to user funds. ZB was not yet hacked, probably due to minimal interest from hackers more than a robust security on the exchange's side - since hackers are aware that most of the volume reported by ZB is most likely fake and orchestrated. ZB also is missing some important security features such as address withdrawal whitelisting. Finally, the regulatory outlook of ZB seems a bit uncertain: some sources claim it is registered in Samoa and operated from Hong Kong, which poses some regulatory threat since regulations regarding cryptocurrency in these jurisdictions are not yet cemented and are in high risk of changing in the next few years.

To conclude, ZB has attracted the public attention after climbing volume rankings, allegedly wrongly, since many industry player s claim most if not all of their reported volume is fake, and the exchange is home to a mostly Chinese user base. Western users will encounter great difficulties using the exchange, and combined with low scores across the board, we would advise anyone to find an alternative and refrain from trusting the exchange with their funds.