I run automated trading strategies and kept choosing exchanges based on vague "low latency" marketing claims. So I built a benchmark to actually measure it. Here is REST API latency to 9 exchanges, measured from a US-east datacenter, with the method and raw data open so you can reproduce or challenge any number.
Before latency even mattered, two of the largest exchanges refused to respond from US infrastructure:
If you are building on US-hosted infra, that constrains your options before you write a line of code. Latency in milliseconds, ranked by p95. Snapshot as of 2026-07-07; the live version re-runs every 2 hours.
| Exchange | US-legal? | p50 | p95 | p99 | mean |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Binance.US | yes | 11.5 | 12.3 | 14.3 | 11.6 |
| Bitfinex | no | 12.8 | 15.0 | 19.8 | 13.1 |
| Coinbase | yes | 13.6 | 16.7 | 19.1 | 13.9 |
| Kraken | yes | 15.0 | 36.8 | 61.1 | 17.8 |
| Gemini | yes | 25.5 | 118.1 | 1056.4 | 78.1 |
| Bitstamp | yes | 24.3 | 126.7 | 163.4 | 37.7 |
| KuCoin | no | 174.9 | 192.0 | 208.6 | 177.3 |
| Crypto.com | yes | 185.6 | 197.5 | 203.6 | 187.1 |
| OKX | yes | 239.6 | 262.7 | 264.8 | 241.2 |
Kraken's median is a healthy 15ms, but its p99 blows past 60ms. Gemini's median is 25ms, but its p99 crosses a full second. If you size your timeouts and retry logic off the median, you get burned in exactly the volatility you built the bot for. Rank on p95 and p99.
OKX (back in the US after its settlement) and Crypto.com both legally serve US customers, but they sit at 185 to 260ms from US-east. Their API endpoints are simply far away. Regulatory access and network proximity are two separate things, and only one of them shows up in a latency test.
Known limitations, because they matter:
The numbers auto-refresh every 2 hours from the same box, and the raw JSON plus the script are published so you can re-run it yourself. Live table and method: https://fillbench.com/exchange-api-latency
What would you want measured next: authenticated order round-trip, or websocket latency and stability?