Phemex review: can a mid-size futures exchange recover from a $73M hack?
Phemex advertises 150x leverage and 0.01% maker fees, but January 2025 brought a $73 million hot wallet breach. We opened an account, checked the proof-of-reserves dashboard, and weighed the fee schedule against what happened after the attack.
Our verdict
Phemex covered every dollar lost in the January 2025 hack and restored withdrawals within three days, which is a genuinely strong recovery by exchange-hack standards. That does not erase the fact that a hot wallet holding tens of millions was compromised in the first place, and Phemex remains unregulated with no deposit protection scheme behind it. The fees are competitive and the reserve dashboard is unusually transparent for its size, but this is a venue for traders who can absorb another incident, not a first futures account.
Best for: Experienced futures traders who already diversify custody across exchanges
On January 23, 2025, someone drained Phemex hot wallets across sixteen blockchains for roughly $73 million. We funded a test account four months later specifically to see what a mid-size derivatives exchange looks like on the other side of its own worst day.
Phemex has run since 2019 as a Singapore-based futures venue, pitched at traders who want leverage and low contract fees without the scale of Binance or the compliance overhead of Coinbase. That positioning was already a harder sell before January. It is a different conversation now.
The fee sheet that got us in the door
Phemex markets contract maker fees as low as 0.01%, with takers at 0.06% before VIP discounts. Spot trading sits at a flat 0.1% for both sides, standard for the category. VIP tiers push taker fees down toward 0.0325% and eliminate maker fees entirely, numbers that beat Kraken and sit close to Binance for anyone clearing serious volume.
The fee page itself shows dashes where your actual rate would appear, a detail worth knowing before you assume the headline number applies without logging in. Leverage runs up to 150x on select futures pairs, well past what a regulated broker would offer a retail account, and worth respecting rather than chasing. A liquidation at that multiple takes a fraction of a percent move against you, and Phemex's own risk documentation says as much in its margin calculator disclosures.
