Every decision we make returns to one principle. We will build the best possible experience for you. So we’re proud to announce it Silkworm ranked Kraken as the No. 1 global crypto exchange in 2025 – This is the first-ever top finish, and has steadily risen from third place in the first quarter of 2025 to #2 in the second quarter of 2025.

This perception is more than where we stand now. That’s about how we got here. Listen to our clients, strengthen our infrastructure and drive the industry forward with transparency and trust.

First of all, who is the silkworm?

Kaiko is one of the world’s leading providers of digital asset market data. Quarterly Exchange Ranking Methodology evaluates global trading venues across a wide range of criteria, including governance, security, technology, liquidity, business and data quality. The rankings are widely held institutions, regulators and market participants, making them a meaningful benchmark for exchange quality and reliability.

Climb #1: What the rankings reveal

Kaiko’s top position in the third quarter 2025 rankings highlights the categories that Kraken continues to lead.

safety

Kraken won 100. This is a 6 points higher than any other exchange with the highest possible security score. This reflects an uncompromising approach to asset protection, robust custody regimes and industry-leading safeguards. Our clients trust us with their financial freedom and we take that responsibility seriously.

Data Quality

Accuracy, timeliness and transparency are essential to a client’s confidence. We regularly publish proofs of bookings, and real-time data feeds give traders and institutions unparalleled clarity.

Fluidity

Deep purchase orders and tough spreads will make your execution smoother at the price you want. Our liquidity ensures that clients, from everyday traders to global institutions, can trade with efficiency and confidence.

The strength of business

From product range to executive leadership, our business fundamentals continue to be strong. This reflects both our innovative spirit and our strong foundation, allowing us to continue offering for our clients.

Together, these pillars strengthen what is most important. Build a major platform that clients can rely on every day.

Based on all client-first philosophy

That’s because all high marks lead to simple truth: client Deserves A platform they can rely on.

• Security means peace of mind
• Data quality means trust in every transaction
• Liquidity means fairness and efficiency
• Business strengths mean innovation in the long term

These are not abstract metrics. They are the living experiences of Kraken clients.

“Reaching #1 is a powerful milestone, but that’s just the beginning. A score of 100 in security shows that client protection is always our top non-negotiable priority.”

“When you combine it with deep fluidity, transparent data and relentless innovation, it builds more than exchange. It builds trust. That’s what Kraken represents, and that’s how it continues to accelerate the global adoption of crypto.”

#1 better build from spot

Our rapid rise from Kaiko’s rankings is evidence that prioritizing our clients will drive sustainable growth. It validates the vision of a transparent, resilient, and accessible cryptographic ecosystem.

We are proud to be leading the industry in 2025. But even more importantly, I’m excited about what’s coming next. It’s about raising the bar for the client experience, building new products and expanding global access to crypto.

In Kraken, #1 is not the finish line. It is the foundation of the future.

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure

According to a recent Kitco News interview, Salinas Ricardo Pliego, founder and chairman of Grupo Salinas and Mexico’s third‑richest man, has stepped up his Bitcoin buying.

Bitcoin trades at $104,900, down over 6% from its all‑time high of $112,000. Pliego isn’t fazed by the drop. He’s loading up while others hesitate.

Pliego Ups Bitcoin Exposure

He already holds about 70% of his portfolio in Bitcoin. Based on reports, he boosted that share again last week. He didn’t share exact figures, but called it a “considerable increment.” He isn’t waiting for the perfect price. He just wants more coins in his wallet before what’s next.

Market Dip Seen As Buying Chance

Bitcoin’s slide came after Middle East tensions rattled markets. Yet Pliego says his moves aren’t tied to war news. He sees every dip as a chance to buy. Other big players are doing the same. That trend leaves fewer coins moving between wallets and exchanges. On‑chain data shows wallet balances for the largest holders climbing even as prices slip.

Inflation Hedge Arguments

Pliego has warned that fiat currency loses value over time. He pointed out that the US dollar lost about 90% of its purchasing power over the past 40 years. He echoed Strategy’s Michael Saylor when he called Bitcoin a shield against money printing. Pliego even wrote a book, “The Bitcoin Enlightenment,” where he argued that the crypto marks the end of fiat.

Long‑Term Outlook Remains Strong

The tycoon admits Bitcoin can swing wildly when big economic news hits. He said holders should look past daily charts. “Focus on where this thing is going,” he told Kitco News.

He isn’t alone. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong thinks nations will hold more digital assets than gold down the road. That idea gives Pliego plenty of confidence.

Image: BCB Group

Betting Big On Crypto

Pliego has hinted he may go all in one day. That would put every peso he owns into crypto. It’s a bold plan. It’s also a risky one, given the crypto asset’s history of 5-10% moves in a day. Still, his voice carries weight. When a billionaire piles in, others pay attention.

Salinas Ricardo Pliego is betting big on Bitcoin’s future. He’s buying at $104,701, even after a 6% pullback. He sees Bitcoin as a way to dodge inflation and come out ahead.

For now, he’s stacking sats and urging everyone else to get on board. If his bet pays off, early buyers could reap huge gains. If not, they could face steep losses. Either way, Pliego’s moves show that confidence in Bitcoin remains strong among the richest investors.

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView

Editorial Process for bitcoinist is centered on delivering thoroughly researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We uphold strict sourcing standards, and each page undergoes diligent review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of our content for our readers.

Today was the last day of 3rd Rock Grid, one of the oldest grids in OpenSim.

The grid announced that it was closing back in March, and, since then, many of the former residents have found their way to other grids, with ZetaWorlds being a popular destination.

Start at Sirocco, which is slated to by the administrative hub of the new 3rd Rock Grid expat community once its done. There is already land available for rent, starting at $2.50 a month for a 10,000-prim Second Life-sized region.

Check out the 3rd Wind Community website for more information, including land prices, an events calendar, and a membership form.

The community rented a dedicated servers from ZetaWorlds and, as a non-profit, can offer very low land prices, said Alia Soulstar, a founder of the 3rd Wind Community.

There are also arts and education areas and other public lands, she told Hypergrid Business, with a total land area of more than 800 standard region equivalents.

“We had a month-long series of community meetings where we invited the owners of a handful of grids to come and talk,” Soulstar said. “Then we had a long discussion and choose this grid. A lot of the choice was based around the flexibility of having a dedicated server to design our own community around. The general feeling was that we wanted to stay together as a family, so we made the collective decision to move here.”

She recommends that people start on the Sirocco region of ZetaWorlds, where they can find out about land ownership and get other administrative information.

Teleport to hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Sirocco.

“We are still under construction so haven’t made a landmark map yet, but will have that up in a few days,” she said.

People also gather on the beach on the Peapod region and Risa on the Anubis region.

Teleport to hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Peapod.

But the most popular location is Infinity region’s Starfleet Infinity area, home to bars, dance places, space stations, and starships.

Teleport to hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Infinity.

Teleport to hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Anubis and hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Infinity.

There are also music venues on the Khamsin region, she said, with live performances four to five times per week.

Teleport to hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Khamsin.

For those who haven’t yet transfered their regions or avatar inventories, there is still time, said Soulstar. ” 3rd Rock Grid created OARs of all the regions there and will hold them in cloud storage for a year so they can be reclaimed, and a number of IARs for active users, too. And we are able to load OARs and IARs for recovery, so all is not lost if you find yourself locked out.”

ZetaWorlds will upload the OAR region export files and IAR inventory files for users, she said, and the 3rd Wind Community will help with the process.

The OARs will be “kept for the foreseable future,” 3rd Rock Grid board member Tara Dockery, also known as Thoria Millgrove in-world, said yesterday. “We will provide those OARs to the registered owners upon request.”

Her own region, Peapod, is already on ZetaWorlds, along with its events, Dockery told Hypergrid Business.

You can read more about the transition to ZetaWorlds at Thirza Ember’s Hypergrid Safari blog.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)

OpenSim active users are up by 1,039 this month, reaching a new all-time high of 48,234. The total land area also increased, by 489 standard region equivalents.

However, the total number of registered users on all the public OpenSim grids fell by more than 10,000 since May. The biggest reason for the drop? 3rd Rock Grid is now officially closed, with some of its communities moved to ZetaWorlds. Last month, 3rd Rock Grid reported 13,615 registered users, though it had only 250 actives. 3rd Rock was one of the oldest OpenSim grounds, founded back in 2008, and accumulated a lot of user registrations over the past decade and a half.

Several other grids did not report their stats this month, including CandM World, which was active this month but showed no stats on its stats page. The grid had over 500 actives in May.

We are now tracking a total of 2,663 public grids, of which 309 are active and 253 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 32,547 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,232 unique logins over the past 30 days.

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.

OpenSim is a free, open-source, virtual world platform, that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.

A list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

Top 25 grids by active users

When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is the busier the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience — you get the idea.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

1. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,232 active users
2. OSgrid: 5,186 active users
3. GBG World: 2,239 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,156 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,025 active users
6. Vida Dupla: 1,750 active users
7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,694 active users
8. WaterSplash: 1,650 active users
9. Neverworld: 1,101 active users
10. AviWorlds: 1,068 active users
11. Trianon World: 1,023 active users
12. Moonrose: 936 active users
13. AvatarLife: 930 active users
14. Littlefield: 899 active users
15. Party Destination Grid: 839 active users
16. Astralia: 836 active users
17. Craft World: 791 active users
18. Virtualife: 666 active users
19. Virtualife: 664 active users
20. Kitely: 627 active users
21. ZetaWorlds: 596 active users
22. Eureka World: 583 active users
23. Groovy Verse: 514 active users
24. Herederos Grid: 511 active users
25. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 507 active users

The biggest change on this list was the addition of Virtual Vista Metaverse, a new grid in our database, which had a strong launch.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,793 product listings in Kitely Market containing 40,862 product variations, 35,648 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 624 OpenSim grids to date.

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.

Kitely has recently doubled the performance of its regions while keeping prices the same.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Lady’s Dreamworld and Virtual Vista Metaverse.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 18 grids were marked as suspended this month: Admeja, Bernicia, BigOne, Bubble Grid, EducaSim, Eleutherias, Golden Palace Gaming, KittyBlue, Mystic Bermuda, Pleasant Retreat, Resurgence, Royal Grid, Starfleet, The Crying Grid, Tropicana Grid, Twilight, Uzuri Virtual, and VR Playground.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.

You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.

• OSgrid: 32,547 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,248 regions
• Kitely: 18,077 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 12,910 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,178 regions
• Groovy Verse: 7,837 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,544 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,253 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• GBG World: 956 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 915 regions
• AviWorlds: 842 regions
• Friends Grid: 816 regions
• ArtDestiny: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 669 regions
• Craft World: 642 regions
• AvatarLife: 603 regions
• Littlefield: 514 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Neverworld: 343 regions
• DreamNation: 314 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 186 regions
• Counter Earth: 186 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 182 regions
• Kater and Friends: 180 regions
• Adreans-World: 173 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 168 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 135 regions
• Logicamp: 129 regions
• Galactic Virtual: 127 regions
• Outworldz: 126 regions
• XTalent: 124 regions
• Utopia Skye: 116 regions

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)