Hoptrail's Crypto AML Leaderboards: 2025 Annual Review

Welcome to the second annual edition of Hoptrail’s AML Leaderboards

Publishing our inaugural AML ranking last year was a unique opportunity to assess the crypto sector's approach to combatting financial crime – both from an on-chain and off-chain perspective. 

This year’s review goes further, allowing us to showcase how well Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) are responding to financial crime issues - be they KYC procedures, regulatory issues, integrity concerns, or financial transparency.

By comparing this year's ranking of the sector's leading players against 2023, this report provides a unique and in-depth look at who’s improved, who hasn’t, and why.

In this edition, we've also expanded our review to assess exchange financial health, transparency and asset quality, providing users with the ability to assess solvency risk across the sector's biggest exchanges. 

‍Click here to download the Leaderboards 2025 Annual Review and find out who makes the Top 200

‍

Positive Risk Trends For 2024

In short, the findings are extremely encouraging.  Leaderboards 2025 shows a vastly improving sector from a risk perspective.  Average scores are higher on every core metric, demonstrating widespread improvements in AML controls and an overall decrease in regulatory action.  The four key trends we’ve highlighted for this year are:

1. Market-wide AML Improvements
2. Reduction in Integrity Issues
3. Greater Focus on Regulation
4. Growing Number of Global VASP Regimes

The average AML score for the Top 200 VASPs this year was 82.75. This is a marked improvement on last year’s 79.17 and a reflection of a generally improving picture for the crypto sector from an AML perspective.  

At the same time, the number of regulatory approvals hit an all-time high, at 547.  This is an increase of almost 40 percent on 2023 and a sign of the willingness of VASPs to engage with government and regulators. We are now drawing data from over 80 jurisdictions, up 30 percent from last year as regulators continue to put in place crypto-focused regimes.  

The sector's focus on AML is also helping to address regulatory concerns, a by-product of which has been increased adoption and a steady erosion of the perception of crypto as a high-risk asset class.  

This has had a direct impact on integrity scores across the board, with the issuance of penalty points against VASPs – applied for regulatory penalties, criminal litigation or security breaches – seeing a drop of almost 20 percent over the past 12 months.

This has contributed to a drop in theft from hacks and exploits in 2024 versus 2023, with the average value of notable hacks last year falling to $38.6 million.

Exchange Transparency & Financial Health

Our Solvency Transparency (ST) Index is back and better than ever.  The index examines and scores the financial health and transparency of cryptocurrency exchanges, drawing on data disclosed by exchanges and in Hoptrail's datasets on asset holdings and audit procedures.  

UAE-headquartered Deribit retains top spot in the ST index as the most transparent trading venue.  Indeed, average ST scores increased by around seven percent over the course of 2024.  

We’ve also expanded our review of VASP financial health this year to include 'Blue Chip Scoring', which analyses the quality of an exchange’s on-chain holdings.  

Our findings show that venues with their own token score poorly in asset quality – arguably mirroring some of the conditions which led to FTX’s collapse in 2022, namely a balance sheet dominated by a self-created asset.  Currently, exchanges with their own tokens make up the bottom four places in the Blue Chip Score index, and none make it into the Top 10. Those with holdings in highly liquid blue chip assets like Bitcoin, USDC and Ethereum dominate the top spots. The report provides Blue Chip Scores for 30 of the sector's largest exchanges.

Our Goal With Leaderboards

Crypto is fast-moving.  And it can be difficult to keep up with everything that happens.

Our goal with Leaderboards is to provide salient intelligence in a digestible format – both for crypto natives and those entering the space for the first time. By offering clear and robust findings from often complex crypto data, we are helping to improve and speed up due diligence and risk decision making for compliance professionals globally. 

We hope you enjoy reading this annual review.

‍

If you’d like to find out more about our analytics platform, visit our website for details on our pricing and products.