This is the continuation of a series of posts I've been making on the Terms of Service (ToS) of exchanges. See the TL;DR for MEXC and Gate.io, but also for Binance, Kraken, Coinbase, Crypto.com and OKX, at the end.

After a judge has ruled that customer's assets do not belong to them based on the bankrupt-firm's ToS, I decided to check how deep we could go were one of the exchanges in the title to fail. I was looking specifically for insurance and/or ownership of the assets.

MEXC

There's no mention of insurance or ownership whatsoever. In fact, their ToS are literally a one-pager, which surprised me a lot! They do, however, protect themselves from basically everything:

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9.Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless MEXC, our future affiliates and their respective members, managers, shareholders, officers, directors, employees, agents, vendors, customers, indemnitees, representatives, successors, licensees and assignees, and each of them, from and against any and all claims, actions demands, damages, losses, costs and expenses, including reasonable attorney’s fees and disbursements, charges, penalties, judgments, and interest sustained or which any of them may sustain arising out of, resulting from or relating to any material breach or alleged breach of any representation, warranty, obligation, or agreement made by you in this Agreement including, without limitation, any breach or alleged breach by your with respect to third party intellectual property, third party privacy, interference with third party or other User data, and non-permitted uses.

10.Limitation of Liability

Neither you nor we will be liable to each other for any indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages or loss, including but not limited to loss of profits, loss of use, or loss of data, whether caused by breach of contract, negligence, or otherwise.

1. Miscellaneous(g) No Representative Actions - All disputes between you and us will be resolved on an individual basis and you agree not to bring or participate in any consolidated or representative actions against us, including our future affiliates.(h) Arbitration - You agree that any controversy, claim, or dispute arising out of or relating to this Agreement shall be referred to and be resolved by arbitration administered by the Singapore International Arbitration Centre in accordance with the Arbitration Rules of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre for the time being in force, which rules are deemed to be incorporated by reference in this Section. The seat of the arbitration shall be Singapore. The Tribunal shall consist of one (1) arbitrator. The language of the arbitration shall be English. Notwithstanding the foregoing, any disputes arising out of Intellectual Property or Privacy issues may be submitted to a court of law.

If you're in e.g. the U.S. and are an average person, good luck hiring an attorney to work for you in Singapore.

Gate.io

No mention of ownership or insurance whatsoever. I found an interesting part, though:

5.7. Gate.io may seize your abandoned property. If you have not logged into your account on the site for an uninterrupted period of two years, Gate.io reserves the right to deem any and all property that you hold on the site, including blockchain assets, to be abandoned, without notice to you. If your property is abandoned, it will be immediately forfeited to and seized by Gate.io and Gate.io may donate them to a nonprofit group.

Time to log in and take your MOONs and other coins out of there.

Other interesting aspects:

XIV Indemnity

14.1 Under any circumstance, our liability for your direct damage will not exceed the total cost incurred by your three months' use of services offered by this Website.

14.2 Shall you breach this Agreement or any applicable law or administrative regulation, you shall pay to us at least US$ Two million in compensation and bear all the expenses in connection with such breach (including attorney's fees, among others). If such compensation cannot cover the actual loss, you shall make up for the difference

So you better read these terms, because they can sue you for $2M if they think you broke the agreements. There's a long section on leveraging in their platform. If you do this with them, go there and read it.

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TL;DR

Once you move your MOONs from your Vault to any custodial wallet, they're not yours anymore.

• Neither provide insurance against bankruptcy (at least not that I could find)
• Neither acknowledge one's ownership of assets (at least not that I could find)

TL;DR (Binance, Kraken, Coinbase, OKX and Crypto.com)

• Kraken and Coinbase acknowledge that assets belong to users
• Binance does not say anything on ownership (at least not that I could find)
• I only found insurance information on Coinbase: all balance held in USD (fiat) is insured by default and up to $250,000, or up to $1M dollars for assets in fiat and crypto for Coinbase One users
• Crypto.com provides insurance up to $250,000 in the case of Unauthorized Transactions, subject to their opinion/take on whether it was really unauthorized or not
• OKX has a shady part where they reserve the right to deposit your money on their or a custodian's name. If they go bankrupt, you have no claim whatsoever. Now that you're here go and read the OKX part above.

Table TL;DR

??? = No explicit mention whatsoever

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I'm not sure to what extent the assets would still be considered users' property in the case of a bankruptcy filing, though.

Exchanges can change their ToS at anytime, so avoid leaving funds there for longer.

Use exchanges as exchanges. Buy a cold wallet and move your funds there.