Bitstamp Brand Guidelines: A 2011 Slovenian Exchange, Luxembourg Licences & Robinhood

Founded in 2011 as an alternative to Mt. Gox.

Bitstamp was founded in 2011 in Slovenia. English Wikipedia says Nejc Kodrič co-founded it in August 2011 with Damijan Merlak (Slovenian Wikipedia spells the name Damian), and that it was set up as a European-focused alternative to Mt. Gox, the bitcoin exchange that then dominated the market. SiliconANGLE, reporting in October 2018, placed its beginnings in a Slovenian garage, and Wired in April 2016 still described it as a Slovenian company.

The registration moved as the business grew. Bitstamp moved its registration to the UK in April 2013 and to Luxembourg in 2016, English Wikipedia says, and today its registered headquarters are in Luxembourg City, with an office in Ljubljana. It was backed by the US investment firm Pantera Capital, whose chief executive was also Bitstamp’s chairman in 2016, according to Wired.

The early years included two service interruptions. In February 2014 the company suspended withdrawals for several days during a distributed denial-of-service attack, and in January 2015 it suspended its service after a hack and reopened nearly a week later, English Wikipedia says. From September 2013 it began asking account holders to verify their identity with copies of their passports and official proof of their home address.

The United States became a market with its own conditions. In September 2018 the New York Attorney General’s office published a report on fourteen virtual currency platforms it had surveyed; Bitstamp was one of the ten that responded and one of seven that said they had sought approval from New York State’s Department of Financial Services to operate a virtual currency business there, English Wikipedia says. In August 2023 Bitstamp said it would stop offering Ether staking to US-based customers from 25 September 2023, citing the regulatory climate in the country, Finance Magnates reported on 24 August 2023.

Licences, from Luxembourg outward.

Bitstamp’s identity rests on regulation as much as on any mark. In April 2016 it announced a licence from Luxembourg’s Ministry of Finance to operate as a payment institution, which the company said applied across the European Union’s then 28 member states, Wired reported on 25 April 2016. The magazine said Bitstamp had worked on the licence for about two years, after it did not obtain similar approval in the UK.

Later licences built on that base. In autumn 2024 Bitstamp received a MiFID licence to operate a multilateral trading facility, which also allows trading in crypto derivatives, and by June 2025 it had authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider under the EU’s MiCA rules from Luxembourg’s financial supervisor, the CSSF, Börsen-Zeitung reported on 6 June 2025. The paper added that Bitstamp also holds an EU payment authorisation and operates mainly from Luxembourg and London. Robinhood said in June 2025 that Bitstamp held more than 50 active licences and registrations worldwide.

The product is an exchange for both retail and institutional customers. Robinhood describes Bitstamp’s core spot exchange and its services for institutions, among them crypto-as-a-service, institutional lending and staking, and gives its offices as Luxembourg, the UK, Slovenia, Singapore and the US. English Wikipedia notes that trading in Ether was added in August 2017. In November 2026 the trading-software company Trading Technologies announced that institutional clients could trade Bitstamp by Robinhood’s spot and derivatives markets, including perpetual futures, through its platform, alongside futures, fixed income and foreign exchange, according to a release dated 2 November 2026.

How exchanges present themselves.

Crypto exchanges sell access to something customers never hold in their hands, so their brands are carried by screens, numbers and paperwork. Across the category, wordmarks appear in black, yellow, blue and bright neon tones, and the app screens that exchanges publish in stores and on their own sites put price charts, order books and coin icons at the centre of the picture.

Listing pages form a second layer. Each coin or token an exchange supports gets a page of its own, with a ticker symbol, a chart and a short description, and new listings are announced as news. Alongside them sit proof-of-reserves pages, where an exchange publishes snapshots comparing the assets it holds with what it owes customers, and security pages that explain how funds are stored, for example in internet-connected hot wallets and offline cold storage. The Journal of Accountancy noted in November 2026 that such a proof is a self-prepared, point-in-time comparison rather than an audit.

Regulation shapes the look as much as marketing does. Footers and legal pages list licences and registrations country by country, and the same brand can offer different products, or none, depending on where a visitor lives. Under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets rules, exchanges name the national supervisor that authorised them, and a market exit reaches customers as a dated notice with deadlines for withdrawals.

Two more channels carry the names further. Sports sponsorships put exchange logos on football shirts, tournament boards and arena signs, far from any trading screen. Help centres do the quieter work: guides to identity checks, deposits, fees and withdrawals, written for people new to the product. The guides in this collection look at how individual exchanges put those parts together.

Two owners in seven years.

Bitstamp has changed hands twice. In October 2018 the Belgian investment firm NXMH bought it, SiliconANGLE reported on 29 October 2018; NXMH was a subsidiary of the South Korean company NXC, the owner of the Korbit exchange and the games company Nexon. NXMH took 80% and co-founder Nejc Kodrič kept 20%, and Bitstamp was to remain a standalone company run independently of Korbit, the report said.

Robinhood Markets agreed to buy Bitstamp in June 2024, English Wikipedia says, and on 2 June 2025 Robinhood announced that it had closed its acquisition of Bitstamp Ltd. The deal gave Robinhood its first institutional crypto business and customers across the EU, the UK, the US and Asia, the company said. In the same announcement Bitstamp’s chief executive called it the longest-running cryptocurrency exchange, a description English Wikipedia also uses. Independent coverage has put it more cautiously: SiliconANGLE called Bitstamp one of the oldest operating cryptocurrency exchanges in 2018, and Finance Magnates called it one of the industry’s oldest digital asset exchanges in 2023, and the Trading Technologies release of November 2026 introduced it as one of the longest-running crypto exchanges. Since the deal the exchange has traded as Bitstamp by Robinhood, according to English Wikipedia, which shows one logo used from 2013 to 2017 and a newer one dated 2024.

For a design guide, Bitstamp shows how a European exchange built its brand on licences and longevity before joining a US owner. Compare Bitpanda, another European crypto platform, and Coinbase. For this guide we use a deep green, near-black and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bitstamp’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.