Risk disclosure

Read this before you trade. Crypto assets are volatile, this exchange is unregulated, and you can lose everything you put in. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell anything. If you do not understand a risk described below, do not take it.

This exchange is not regulated

Spotex EQ holds no licence, registration or authorisation from any financial regulator, and no regulator supervises this exchange or the people running it.

That is not a technicality. It is the difference between this and a bank, and it means all of the following.

• Nobody checks that we hold what we say we hold. We do reconcile custody against what customers are owed, and we will say so when it does not match — because we choose to, not because anyone audits us or can compel us to.
• We are not required to hold capital or reserves against what we owe you. A licensed institution normally is, so that it can absorb a loss without passing it to customers. We cannot make that promise.
• There is no deposit guarantee and no investor compensation scheme. If your assets are lost — to theft, to a mistake of ours, to insolvency — no fund reimburses you. Not some of it. None of it.
• There is no ombudsman or financial complaints scheme. If we treat you unfairly your recourse is to sue us, at your own cost, in Fresno County, California.
• Nobody has vetted who runs this exchange, how it is built, or how it is secured. No regulator has examined the code, the custody arrangements or the finances.
• If this exchange stops operating, or the people behind it stop answering, no authority will step in to recover customer assets or to compensate you.

You are relying on us entirely, with nothing behind us. Size what you keep here accordingly, and keep the rest in a wallet whose keys you control.

You can lose all of it

The price of a crypto asset can move by a large amount in a short time, in either direction, and it can go to zero and stay there. An asset that has risen for a year can lose most of its value in a day. Past performance tells you nothing about what happens next.

Only commit money you can afford to lose entirely without it changing how you live.

We hold your assets

This is a custodial exchange. We hold the private keys, and your balance is our record of what we owe you — it is not crypto in your own wallet. That means:

• You are exposed to us. If we were hacked, became insolvent, or lost access to our own wallets, you could lose some or all of your balance.
• Your balance is not a bank deposit. No deposit guarantee scheme and no investor compensation scheme covers it.
• Nobody insures your balance against theft or loss unless we say otherwise in writing.

We hold customer assets separately from our own money, keep most of them in cold storage, and reconcile what we hold against what we owe. That reduces the risk. It does not remove it.

The alternative is to withdraw to a wallet whose keys you control. Then the risk is yours to manage, including the risk of losing the keys.

Blockchain transactions cannot be undone

Once a withdrawal is broadcast to a blockchain, neither we nor anyone else can recall, reverse or amend it.

• Send to the wrong address and the funds are gone. Nobody can retrieve them.
• Send an asset on the wrong network and they are usually unrecoverable.
• Blockchains can slow down, become congested, or charge high fees, and a transaction can take much longer than usual to confirm.
• A chain can reorganise, which can remove a transaction that already appeared to have confirmed. If that happens to a deposit we credited, we may reverse the credit.
• A chain can fork, or the rules can change, in ways that affect whether an asset can be moved or is worth anything.

Check the address and the network every time. Consider sending a small amount first.

The market may not be there when you need it

Liquidity is how much someone is willing to buy or sell at a given price. On a thin market there may be very little.

• A market order fills against whatever is on the book. In a thin or fast market the average price you get can be far worse than the last traded price, even with the slippage limit we apply.
• A large order can move the price against you as it fills.
• There may be no buyer at all when you want to sell. "Worth" and "sellable" are not the same thing.

Order types do not guarantee anything

• A stop order is not a guaranteed exit. It is sent to the market only once the price crosses your trigger, and it then fills at whatever the market offers. In a sharp move the price can jump straight past your trigger, and the fill can be far below it.
• A stop with a limit price may not fill at all if the market moves through your limit, leaving you holding the position you meant to exit.
• A limit order may never fill.

Trading is halted sometimes

We may halt a market automatically after a sharp price move, or suspend one for maintenance, or pause withdrawals where we believe it is necessary. While that lasts you may be unable to trade or to withdraw, including at a moment when you very much want to. Prices elsewhere may move while you are unable to act.

Systems fail

Software, networks, exchanges and providers all fail sometimes. An outage, a bug, a failure at a custody or data provider, a network attack or a mistake by us can prevent you from trading or withdrawing, or can produce an incorrect price or an incorrect order. We may cancel or reverse trades that resulted from a clear error or a malfunction.

Do not rely on being able to act at any specific moment.

Your account is a target

People who steal crypto are organised and patient, and the most common way in is not a broken server but a person.

• A message, email, phone call or website that imitates us is the usual method. Every email we send carries your anti-phishing code; one without it is not from us.
• We will never ask for your password, an authenticator code, a recovery code or an API secret, and we will never ask you to send funds anywhere.
• If someone contacts you offering to recover funds you have lost, they are stealing from you a second time.

Use an authenticator, keep your recovery codes offline, turn on the withdrawal address allowlist, and freeze your account from the Security page the moment something looks wrong.

The rules can change

Crypto regulation is unsettled and differs by country. A change in law or in how a regulator interprets it can affect the value of an asset, whether we can list it, whether we can serve your country at all, and what we are required to do with your data. We may have to restrict or end services for some customers at short notice.

Tax is yours

Buying, selling, swapping and sometimes holding crypto assets can create a tax liability where you live. Working out what you owe and paying it is your responsibility. We do not give tax advice.

Nobody is deciding for you

We provide a venue to trade. We do not give investment, legal, tax or financial advice, and nothing here — no price, chart, market listing, fee tier, promotion or piece of market data — is a recommendation. Whether an asset suits you depends on circumstances we know nothing about.

If you are unsure, take independent advice from someone qualified to give it before you trade.