Is Gate Safe? Gate Review: Fees, Referral Rebates, Reserves and Restricted Countries (2026)

Updated 2026-10-15・Rules checked 2026-10-13

In the record of Gate (formerly Gate.io), as of 2026-10-12, applying this site’s inclusion criteria, I found no major public incident of its platform wallets being hacked. The incidents on record are older or smaller: in January 2019, a 51% attack on Ethereum Classic (ETC) cost Gate about 40,000 ETC, which Gate said the platform would absorb; on 2025-04-23, an emergency upgrade of the futures system suspended futures and copy trading, and Gate pledged to compensate users for losses during the upgrade (excluding market factors).

On fees, regular users (VIP 0) pay 0.1% for both maker and taker on spot, or 0.09% with the 10% GT discount turned on; USDT perpetual futures are maker 0.02% and taker 0.05%. Gate’s list of restricted regions is the longest of the 13 exchanges this site covers, but it doesn’t include Taiwan; Gate is not on the anti-money-laundering registration list of Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC, 金融監督管理委員會), and although its C2C has a USDT/TWD market, there were no ads on the day we checked.

This review gives no star rating. It only compiles dated, sourced information: fees, referral rebates, proof of reserves, security and regulatory records, restricted regions and products, and ends with which kinds of traders Gate suits best.

Key points: as of 2026-10-12, there is no major public incident of Gate’s platform wallets being hacked, and I couldn’t find an officially published size for its protection fund either. The latest reserve report available in Gate’s announcements is the 2026-08-19 snapshot, with BTC at 122.79%, ETH 122.05% and stablecoins combined 111.63%; when checked on 2026-10-12, the PoR page showed no figures. Gate’s VIP 0 spot fees are 0.1% / 0.1% (0.09% with the GT discount), and USDT perpetual futures are maker 0.02% and taker 0.05%. The restricted list in Gate’s user agreement (2026-07-22 version) covers 13 of the 16 regions this site compares, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea, but not Taiwan. As of the list updated by the Securities and Futures Bureau on 2026-09-29, Gate is not on the FSC anti-money-laundering registration list.

The information below was checked against official pages on 2026-10-13 (the data check date) and is provided for reference. The original check date of each figure is given in the matching section.

What are Gate’s fees?

Market	Maker	Taker	With platform token discount	Notes
Spot	0.1%	0.1%	0.09% / 0.09%	Turning on the GT discount gives 10% off; if you don’t hold enough GT, it reverts to your VIP rate automatically
USDT perpetual futures	0.02%	0.05%	Not available	Charged on position value, plus funding rates
BTC perpetual futures (coin-margined)	0.015%	0.05%	Not available	Settled in BTC
USDT delivery futures	-0.015%	0.016%	Not available	Plus a 0.015% delivery fee; no funding fees

The rates come from the spot and futures tabs of the Gate fee page, and the delivery fee from Gate’s guide to futures fees, checked on 2026-10-11. The maker fee on delivery futures is negative: when your limit order fills, you pay nothing and receive a rebate instead.

Gate has one trap that’s easy to fall into: point cards. Point cards are fee credits you get from promotions, and 1 point equals 1 USD, but using point cards to pay spot fees costs a fixed 0.2%, twice the 0.1% you’d pay directly at VIP 0; and when your futures account holds point cards, taker orders use them first by default. If your account holds point cards, check the payment method before you place an order.

Futures fees are charged on position value. Open a 10x position with 1,000 USDT of margin and the position is 10,000 USDT; opening and closing as taker costs 10,000 × 0.05% × 2 = 10 USDT, or 1% of your margin, and doing both as maker costs 4 USDT. With leveraged trading, if the price moves against you, your position may be liquidated and you can lose your entire margin.

VIP levels look at assets, 14-day average GT holdings or 30-day trading volume, and meeting any one of them moves you up, but futures volume only counts at 40%. The lower VIP levels do almost nothing for futures: VIP 1 and VIP 2 have the same futures fees as VIP 0, VIP 3 is the first to cut the taker fee, to 0.048%, and VIP 5 is 0.045%. The GT route has a lower threshold: on 2026-10-11, GT was about 11.01 USDT, so the 2,000 GT needed for VIP 5 came to about 22,000 USDT, almost half the 40,000 USD asset threshold, but you take on GT’s price swings (Gate VIP page).

Here it is next to the other exchanges this site has compared, for a trader doing 200,000 USDT in futures and 20,000 USDT in spot each month, all as taker:

Exchange	Futures maker / taker	Spot maker / taker	Monthly fees	Source
Gate	0.02% / 0.05%	0.1% / 0.1%	120 USDT	Gate fee page
Binance	0.02% / 0.05%	0.1% / 0.1%	120 USDT	Binance spot fee page, Binance futures fee guide
OKX	0.02% / 0.05%	0.08% / 0.1%	120 USDT	OKX fee page
Bitget	0.02% / 0.06%	0.1% / 0.1%	140 USDT	Bitget fee page
MEXC	0% / 0.02%	0% / 0.05% (major coins)	50 USDT	MEXC fee overview

The formula is 200,000 × futures taker + 20,000 × spot taker, all at VIP 0 rates without platform token discounts (checked on 2026-10-11). Gate’s VIP 0 fees are in the same bracket as Binance and OKX, and higher than MEXC; only at VIP 11 does the USDT perpetual taker fee drop to 0.028%, which is still above the 0.02% regular users pay on MEXC. The full VIP table and GT rules are in Gate fees, and you can try your own position in the futures cost calculator.

How much is the Gate referral code rebate? Has it changed?

For Gate accounts registered with this site’s referral code, Gate currently refunds 20% of fees to your spot account automatically after each trade. Below are the changes to the rebate rate this site has recorded.

• 2026-10-07　20% (tracking started)

Rates sync with the exchange daily; every change is recorded automatically.

Gate’s official rebate rules (Gate referral rules, Gate referral FAQ, Gate announcement on invitee rebates):

• How it’s paid: since 2023-04-20 it has been a “post-trade rebate”: fees are charged at the normal rate when you trade, and the rebate is sent to your spot account automatically after the trade, sometimes with a delay of 1 to 2 hours.
• Duration: rebates from an affiliate’s referral code have no time limit for as long as the referral relationship lasts.
• Trades that earn no rebate: fiat trades; users at VIP 11 and above no longer generate referrer rebates, and since the invitee’s rebate is shared out of that, it stops too.
• Calculation base: calculated on trading fees; with the GT discount on, Gate doesn’t state whether it uses the amount before or after the discount.
• Revocation: if the referrer and invitee share the same IP, the referral is invalid; for violations, Gate can cancel eligibility and claw back rewards.
• Adding a code later: we found no official process for adding a code after registering, and each user can register through only one referral method. Claims online that “you can bind within 7 days” refer to the Gate wallet (Web3), not the exchange account.

The referral code and how to sign up are in the Gate referral code; the limits on switching referrers are in the Gate referral switch guide.

Does Gate have proof of reserves?

Yes, using a Merkle tree plus zk-SNARKs. Users can download the Merkle tree and configuration files and verify it themselves; a successful run shows “All proofs verify passed!!!”. The awkward part is how it’s updated: Gate doesn’t state an update frequency, and the figures this site saw on two separate checks were different.

Data	Snapshot or audit date	BTC	ETH	Stablecoins / USDT	Source and date viewed
Gate announcement	2026-08-19	122.79%	122.05%	Stablecoins combined 111.63%	Gate announcement (published 2026-08-24, calculated from official quantities)
PoR page	2026-09-13	120.31%	123.59%	USDT 114.25% (total reserve ratio 117%)	Gate PoR page, viewed 2026-10-11
PoR page	—	—	—	—	Viewed 2026-10-12: showed “Loading reserve data” with no figures

The quantities in the 2026-08-19 report were: users 22,436 BTC, platform 27,550 BTC, a surplus of 5,114 BTC. Gate’s announcement itself gives an “excess reserve ratio” of 22.79% for BTC and 22.05% for ETH, which means the same as the table above. As for third parties, Gate’s page links an implementation audit by Hacken dated 2024-01-03; coverage includes BTC, ETH, stablecoins, GT, XRP and others.

Two things to keep in mind when reading Gate’s figures. First, the announcement combines USDT with other stablecoins, and a combined figure above 100% doesn’t show whether USDT alone is fully covered; Pionex’s 2022 report is an example where stablecoins combined were 103.69% but USDT alone was only 90.02%. Second, the PoR only reflects the moment of the snapshot and doesn’t include the company’s own borrowing. As for a protection fund, I couldn’t find a current size officially published by Gate. The 13 exchanges are compared in exchange proof of reserves compared.

What security or withdrawal incidents has Gate had?

Under the inclusion criteria of this site’s exchange safety record, as of 2026-10-12 there is no major public incident of Gate’s platform wallets being hacked. Below are the other dated, sourced incidents and regulatory records:

• January 2019: the Ethereum Classic (ETC) blockchain suffered a 51% attack, and Gate lost about 40,000 ETC, then worth about 200,000 USD; Gate said the platform would absorb the loss (CoinDesk report, republished); on 2019-01-14, the attacker returned about 100,000 USD worth of ETC (CoinDesk). This was an attack on the chain itself, not a theft from Gate’s wallets.
• 2023-12-28: India’s Financial Intelligence Unit served notices of non-registration on 9 offshore platforms and asked for their URLs to be blocked; the list included Gate.io (The Statesman).
• 2024: Gate.HK withdrew its application for a Hong Kong virtual asset trading platform license, stopped trading on May 28, and asked users to withdraw their assets by August 28 (Fintech News Hong Kong).
• 2025-04-23: because of heavy traffic, Gate made an emergency upgrade to its futures system, suspending futures and copy trading; Gate pledged 100% compensation for user losses during the upgrade (excluding market factors) (The Block).
• May 2025: the official domain changed from gate.io to gate.com (Gate announcement on the new domain). For bookmarks to the old domain, search results and links you receive, check that they point to gate.com.

Under this site’s inclusion criteria, there is no record of Gate suspending withdrawals across the whole platform for a long period; what was suspended in 2025 was futures and copy trading. Also, I couldn’t find a current protection fund size officially published by Gate, unlike Binance, Bitget and MEXC, which publish figures.

Which countries can’t use Gate?

The “Restricted Locations” in section 2.5 of the Gate user agreement (updated 2026-07-22) is the longest list among the 13 exchanges: the United States, mainland China, Singapore, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Malta, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Crimea, Spain, Luhansk, Donetsk, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Myanmar, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Austria, India, Indonesia, Japan, Argentina, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, Pakistan, Vietnam, Russia and others. Taiwan is not on the list.

Of the 16 regions this site compares, Gate lists 13 as not served, leaving out only Mexico and Brazil, and in the EU it lists some member states. Among the 13 exchanges, Gate is the only one whose terms mention the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia. The agreement states that the list is not exhaustive and that Gate can change it without separate notice; section 4 adds that margin trading, lending and perpetual futures are not available in prohibited regions. If you travel, move, or spend long periods in Southeast Asia, pay particular attention to this. The 13 exchanges compared are in exchange restricted countries.

What products does Gate offer?

• Spot and futures: the Gate spot API, read on 2026-10-11, listed 2,196 tradable spot pairs. In the official API read on 2026-10-12, there were 1,038 USDT perpetual contracts: 622 settling every 8 hours, 412 every 4 hours (40%) and 4 every hour; BTC’s funding rate cap and floor were ±0.3%. When the rate hits the cap or floor, settlement automatically switches to every hour, and it switches back to 4 hours after 16 consecutive settlements with an absolute value below 0.025% (Gate funding rate guide). How it’s calculated is in what is the funding rate.
• Other derivatives: delivery futures, options, CFDs and stocks.
• Copy trading: futures copy trading; on 2026-10-11 the page showed 249,001 copiers (Gate futures copy trading); copy trading volume also counts toward VIP levels.
• Trading bots: spot grid, futures grid, infinite grid, martingale and recurring buy (Gate strategy bots).
• Earn: Gate’s flexible USDT savings (Simple Earn) work by matching lending; on 2026-10-13 the official API showed an estimated APR of 2.35%, with no tiers. Interest is matched and calculated hourly and reinvested automatically, and if you redeem before a full hour, you don’t get that hour’s interest (Gate official API). The comparison is in USDT flexible savings rates compared.
• Other: Launchpool, Gate Web3 wallet and Gate Card.

What sets its savings apart is the lack of tiers. At most exchanges the high rate only applies to the first few hundred USDT, such as 7.50% on the first 300 USDT at Bitget; Gate’s 2.35% is the same from the first dollar up to 50,000 USDT, so 10,000 USDT earns 2.35% overall (about 2.98% at Bitget for the same amount), and 50,000 USDT still earns 2.35% (about 2.87% at Bitget).

What should users in Taiwan watch out for on Gate?

• FSC registration: as of the list updated on 2026-09-29 in the Securities and Futures Bureau’s “virtual asset service providers” section, Gate is not on the FSC anti-money-laundering registration list. Offshore trading platforms aren’t covered by the dispute mechanisms of the Securities and Futures Investors Protection Center or the Financial Ombudsman Institution (FSC press release of 2022-11-23), so disputes can only be handled under Gate’s terms.
• TWD deposits and withdrawals: Gate C2C has a USDT/TWD market, but when viewed without logging in on 2026-10-11, it showed “No ads available” (Gate C2C TWD market). The more common route is to buy USDT with TWD on a registered local platform (such as MAX or BitoPro) and transfer it in, and to reverse the route to withdraw.
• Withdrawal fees: on the Gate fee page on 2026-10-12, USDT costs 0.04 USDT on Aptos, 0.05 USDT each on Arbitrum One and Polygon, 0.5 USDT on BEP20, 1 USDT on ERC20 and 1.5 USDT on TRC20. The cheapest way to transfer to MAX is Aptos (0.04 USDT), and to BitoPro it’s Polygon (0.05 USDT); if you’re used to TRC20, you pay about 1.46 USDT more each time. TON requires a memo. The full comparison is in the USDT withdrawal fee comparison.
• Identity verification: all users must complete identity verification, which is required before both deposits and withdrawals; review usually takes 10 minutes to 12 hours, and people under 18 can’t verify (Gate identity verification FAQ).
• Know the official channels: the official domain is gate.com; the developer on the Taiwan App Store is GATE GLOBAL UAB and on Google Play it’s Gate.com, and you can check contact channels with Gate official verification. Impersonation tactics are covered in crypto exchange scam types.
• Transfer rules: the FSC expects to extend the transfer rules (Travel Rule) to transfers between domestic and offshore providers by the end of 2027 (FSC press release of 2026-08-04), after which transfers will need to include information on both the sender and the recipient.

Who is Gate best for?

Based on its fees and products, Gate works better for these kinds of traders:

• People who want to trade many kinds of products from one account: besides spot and perpetual futures, there are delivery futures, options, CFDs and stocks.
• People who trade lesser-known spot coins: there are 2,196 tradable spot pairs, more than MEXC’s 1,801.
• People who want long-term rebates without worrying about expiry: rebates from an affiliate’s referral code have no time limit for as long as the referral relationship lasts, and arrive after every trade.
• People keeping a few thousand to tens of thousands of USDT in flexible savings who don’t want to deal with tiers: Gate’s savings have no tiers, so larger amounts don’t get diluted.

Where it fits less well: if you mainly trade futures and often use market orders, a 0.05% taker fee is the same as Binance and OKX but higher than MEXC’s 0.02%, and the lower VIP levels don’t help with futures; if you often travel or live in Southeast Asia, Japan or South Korea, Gate has the longest restricted list; and if reserve transparency matters to you, Gate doesn’t state an update frequency, and on the day we checked, the page showed no figures.

FAQ

Is Gate safe?

No exchange can guarantee safety; what you can look at is the record. As of 2026-10-12, there is no major public incident of Gate’s platform wallets being hacked; the platform absorbed the roughly 200,000 USD loss from the 2019 ETC 51% attack, and when the futures system upgrade caused a suspension on 2025-04-23, Gate pledged to compensate user losses. The latest reserve report in Gate’s announcements is the 2026-08-19 snapshot, with BTC at 122.79%; Gate is not on the FSC anti-money-laundering registration list.

Is Gate a scam?

Gate itself is not a scam; it is an exchange in actual operation: the official site is gate.com, the developer on the Taiwan App Store is GATE GLOBAL UAB, and you can download the Merkle tree from its reserve report to verify it yourself. What people online call a “Gate scam” is usually a fake website, fake app, fake customer support or fake investment group using Gate’s name. The usual demands are to add someone on LINE, to transfer USDT to a “platform” outside the exchange, or to pay an “unfreezing fee” or “security deposit” before you can withdraw. If you receive a suspicious URL, email or phone call, you can check it with Gate official verification. Not being a scam doesn’t mean there’s no risk: Gate is not on the FSC’s AML registration list, and any dispute can only be handled under the platform’s terms. Impersonation tactics are covered in crypto exchange scam types, and rebate-related scams in rebate scam warning signs.

Are Gate.io and Gate.com the same exchange?

Yes. In May 2025, Gate changed its official domain from gate.io to gate.com; the developer on the Taiwan App Store is GATE GLOBAL UAB, and Google Play shows Gate.com. If you now see a link or a “login guide” page starting with gate.io, type gate.com yourself to check rather than clicking it.

Could Gate go bankrupt?

No data can guarantee that an exchange won’t go under. Proof of reserves only shows how assets were backed at the moment of the snapshot; the latest in Gate’s announcements is from 2026-08-19, and when checked on 2026-10-12, the page showed no figures. Gate also hasn’t published a current protection fund size. If something happens to an offshore exchange, the process runs in the jurisdiction where the platform is based, and Taiwan’s Securities and Futures Investors Protection Center can’t help.

Can I withdraw from Gate to a bank in Taiwan?

Not directly to a Taiwanese bank account. Gate C2C has a USDT/TWD market, but there were no ads when we checked on 2026-10-11; the usual approach is to withdraw USDT to MAX or BitoPro, sell it for TWD, and then withdraw to your bank under that platform’s rules. Transferring from Gate to MAX on Aptos costs 0.04 USDT, and to BitoPro on Polygon 0.05 USDT.

Can I use Gate in Taiwan?

Taiwan isn’t on the restricted list in Gate’s user agreement (2026-07-22 version), the Gate app is available on the Taiwan App Store, and the website has a Traditional Chinese version. But Gate is not on the FSC anti-money-laundering registration list, and the agreement states that the list can change without separate notice, so check the latest version before using it.

Is Gate’s GT discount worth it?

It only discounts spot, and only by 10%. At VIP 0, spot goes from 0.1% to 0.09%, saving 10 USDT on 100,000 USDT of spot trades a month; GT can’t be used to pay futures fees. GT is more useful for moving up VIP levels: VIP 5 takes 2,000 GT, about 22,000 USDT on 2026-10-11, but you take on GT’s price swings.

Why does Gate restrict so many countries?

Gate’s agreement doesn’t explain the reasons one by one, but from what’s on the list there are roughly two kinds: sanctioned regions, and regions with licensing or registration regimes for trading platforms. Gate.HK withdrawing its Hong Kong license application and stopping trading in 2024 is an example of the second kind. The list covers 13 of the 16 regions this site compares, the longest among the 13 exchanges.

To open an account or confirm the referral code, see the Gate referral code; fee details are in Gate fees, and if you’ve already registered, see the Gate referral switch guide and how to check whether a referral code is bound. To compare with other exchanges, see MEXC vs Gate and lowest-fee crypto exchanges; two more exchange reviews are the Bitget review and the MEXC review.