Shift Markets vs. ChainUp: Which White-Label Crypto Exchange Platform Is Right for You?

Selecting the right white-label crypto exchange provider is one of the most important decisions for any business entering the digital asset market. The platform you choose determines how quickly you can launch, how efficiently you can operate, and how confidently you can scale in a regulated environment.

Shift Markets and ChainUp are two recognized providers in this space, each offering ready-to-deploy solutions for building exchanges. Both reduce time to market and simplify operations, but their approaches differ significantly, especially in compliance, liquidity control, and long-term flexibility.

This comparison breaks down their strengths, differences, and use cases to help you decide which platform best fits your business.

Why Compare Shift Markets and ChainUp?

Both Shift Markets and ChainUp provide turnkey infrastructure for launching a crypto exchange, helping operators avoid the cost, risk, and complexity of building from scratch.

But Shift Markets focuses on institutional-grade systems, regulatory readiness, and deep liquidity aggregation, while ChainUp emphasizes fast SaaS rollout, bundled services, and ease of setup.

Understanding these differences helps clarify which platform fits your growth stage, whether you’re entering emerging markets quickly or building a licensed, global exchange.

Feature-by-Feature Comparison: Shift Markets vs. ChainUp

Core Offering

Shift Markets provides an institutional-grade trading stack with unified spot and derivatives infrastructure, integrated liquidity, fiat rails, and advanced custody support. It’s built for long-term scalability, compliance alignment, and operational control.

ChainUp offers a bundled SaaS stack designed for quick market entry. Its “all-in-one” positioning (exchange, liquidity, custody, and KYT) delivers convenience but limits flexibility, especially for operators requiring region-specific compliance or third-party integrations.

Liquidity Solutions

Liquidity depth is one of the clearest differences between the two.

Shift Markets aggregates liquidity from multiple top-tier exchanges and market makers, ensuring tighter spreads, synthetic pairs, and configurable hedge logic, making it ideal for operators managing principal risk. Unlike closed systems that force you into a single liquidity source, Shift gives operators full control to choose, mix, and manage their own liquidity relationships, whether connecting to Shift’s network or integrating their own providers.

ChainUp relies on its BitWind liquidity pool, but as a single-source model. This means exchanges depend on ChainUp’s internal routing and markup, introducing potential exposure and outage risk compared to Shift’s multi-LP aggregation.

Derivatives and Futures

Shift Markets supports perpetual futures with cross-margin and leverage management. The system is designed around regulated CFD compatibility and includes a CFTC-aligned compliance roadmap.

ChainUp’s futures offering is newer, promoting leverage on CEX and DEX deployments, but lacks the licensed CFD component and mature risk engine Western clients expect.

Custody and Compliance

Shift Markets integrates with qualified custody providers like Fireblocks, Copper, and BitGo, letting operators choose the provider that fits their regulatory regime. It also supports flexible KYT and AML modules with vendor choice, keeping clients in control of their compliance stack.

ChainUp’s in-house MPC custody and Trustformer KYT simplify deployment but are not recognized as qualified custodians under Western regulations, a key drawback for exchanges targeting U.S. or EU jurisdictions.

Security and Infrastructure

Shift Markets runs on a multi-AZ AWS architecture with SOC II certification in progress, multi-sig wallets, and isolated environments for critical operations. Its enterprise-grade infrastructure is battle-tested across high-volume brokers and exchanges.

ChainUp offers standard security layers, including encryption and DDoS protection, but its bundled nature limits control for operators seeking custom security policies or external audits.

Partnerships and Ecosystem

Shift Markets partners and integrates with leading providers to deliver an institutional-grade stack. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• Fireblocks for custody
• Chainalysis for KYC and KYT
• Circuit for resilience and uptime automation
• Halborn for auditing and security
• Cryptio for digital asset accounting
• Notabene for compliance and Travel Rule support

Together, these partnerships form a full-stack ecosystem, from liquidity and custody to settlement and regulatory workflows.

Final Thoughts

ChainUp excels in speed and simplicity, making it attractive for startups and regional exchanges looking to go live quickly in lightly regulated markets, without customization. Shift Markets, however, is built for longevity, delivering licensed-grade infrastructure, liquidity depth, and operational flexibility that scales with your business. Ideal for regulated markets, it offers deep, aggregated liquidity, full Back Office control, custom APIs, transparent custody, scalable infrastructure, and predictable pricing for long-term operational independence.

Ready to build your exchange? Request a demo to see how Shift Markets can help you launch and scale a compliant, high-performance trading platform.