Gate Review: A Huge Altcoin Menu and Published Reserves, Set Against a Chilean Court Dispute

Gate does one thing better than the exchanges most readers know: it gets new tokens onto a spot market early. It also does something unusual for a large exchange, which is to publish a cryptographic proof of reserves that you can run on your own computer. Those are the two reasons to open an account.

The reasons to hesitate sit in the same first screen of research. A Chilean court ordered Gate to return stolen funds and it did not, and in May 2026 Chile's financial regulator said Gate was operating there without authorisation. We would use Gate as a trading venue for small balances, and we would not treat it as a vault.

What the long list of coins really means

Third-party trackers count more than 5,300 assets on Gate, according to BitDegree. The company says it has served over 60 million users since 2013, a claim repeated on its CoinMarketCap profile, where it also lists its 2013 founding date.

Breadth cuts both ways. Early listings are where Gate wins, and its Startup and Launchpool programmes let holders stake mainstream coins or GT to receive new tokens. BitDegree counts more than 140 Launchpool projects. But a token on its first day is also a token with thin books and wide spreads, and the exchange lists it with no promise that the project is sound. Most of that menu is not for you unless you read a whitepaper before you click.

Fees: simple at the base, cheaper if you hold GT

A standard account pays 0.10% maker and 0.10% taker on spot. Paying fees in GT, Gate's own token, cuts both to 0.09%, and the discount continues through the VIP tiers up to VIP 9, according to summaries of the published schedule. That is a fraction of a basis point of saving for most people, and it requires you to hold a volatile exchange token. We would not buy GT for the discount alone.

Compared with the deepest exchanges the headline rate is average: Binance charges the same 0.10% before BNB, and our Binance review covers where it pulls ahead on liquidity. The extra cost on Gate usually arrives through spreads on small tokens, not the fee line. Check the quoted depth before you place a large market order on anything outside the top fifty.

Proof of reserves: better than most, with limits

Gate's reserve page says it uses a Merkle tree and zk-SNARKs. Your balance sits as a leaf in the tree, and the proof shows that all balances are non-negative and sum to the claimed liability. The page names HACKEN as the auditor of the method, dated January 3, 2024, and the GitHub repository lets a user run a local verifier command to confirm their own account is included.

That is more than many rivals offer. The numbers reported by CryptoAdventure put the ratio at 122% in March 2026, 115% in June and 117% at the July 27 snapshot. Our reading is cautious for three reasons:

1. The page we loaded showed "Loading reserve data" in place of its figures, so the live numbers were not visible to us.

2. A Merkle proof shows what customers are owed, not what else the company owes.

3. The repository we checked was archived in July 2026 with a pointer to a new one, so confirm which one is current.

A snapshot ratio above 100% is reassuring. It is not an audit of the business.

The Chile dispute and the licence map

Wikipedia's summary of the case says a 2023 cyberattack on Chile's Local Traders SpA was traced to wallets linked to Gate, that a Santiago court ordered restitution on February 27, 2025, and that Gate did not comply. On May 6, 2026, Chile's CMF listed Gate and 12 affiliated entities in an investor alert, and Apple later pulled the app from Chile's store.

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None of that touches a trader in Europe or Asia directly. On the licensing side Gate lists a Class 4 licence from Malta, a Dubai Multi Commodities Centre licence and registrations in Lithuania and Italy, plus a Hong Kong trust and company services licence. It is also not offered to U.S. residents on the global platform: the App Store lists a separate Gate US product from Gate Global UAB.

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Who should use it

Use Gate if you chase new listings, understand that small tokens are risky, and are comfortable moving winnings back to your own wallet. Its token data on DefiLlama is a handy place to watch the GT token.

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Skip it if you want one conservative exchange for savings, if you live in Chile or the United States, or if a regulator's warning is a dealbreaker. Nothing here is personal advice, and no price outlook is implied: it is about venue risk.

We give Gate a 6.9. The product is strong, but the risk record asks you to keep your coins elsewhere.