deriv

Deriv is a market maker that offers CFD trading through MetaTrader 5, a web platform and a mobile app, with a $5 minimum deposit and maximum leverage of 1:1000. It operates through six legal entities. Five hold offshore licences and one, Deriv Middle East Ltd, holds licences from the UAE Capital Market Authority. Which of those companies holds your account decides how much regulatory protection you have. That matters more than any single spread figure.

Who operates Deriv

Deriv is a group of companies trading under one brand at deriv.com, not a single firm. The group’s registered region is Malaysia, and it was founded in 2009. The brand grew out of Binary.com, an older online trading business best known for fixed-payout options, which explains why many traders still connect Deriv with binary-style products.

The contracting entity named in this review is Deriv (Mauritius) Ltd, authorized by the Financial Services Commission of Mauritius, with its address in the Ebene Square Business Hub, Ebene, Republic of Mauritius. For EU visitors, the site instead names Deriv Investments (Europe) Limited (Company No. C 70156), which is licensed and regulated by the Malta Financial Services Authority. The other group entities are:

The Malaysian link and the Mauritius contracting entity are not a contradiction. Labuan is Malaysia’s federal offshore financial centre, supervised by the Labuan Financial Services Authority. That authority is separate from the Securities Commission Malaysia, which regulates the domestic capital market. A Labuan licence does not make Deriv a domestically licensed Malaysian broker.

Regulation: what the six licences mean

The licence list is broad but unevenly weighted. Mauritius, Labuan, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Vanuatu are offshore jurisdictions. Offshore regulators generally allow higher leverage and lighter conduct rules than top-tier regulators such as the UK FCA or Australia’s ASIC, and investor compensation schemes may be limited or absent. That is how a broker can offer 1:1000 leverage at all, since top-tier regimes cap retail leverage far lower.

The UAE Capital Market Authority licence is the one classed as Tier-2. Deriv Middle East Ltd holds two licence numbers: 20200000243 and 20200000199. Deriv’s regulatory page does publish company or registration numbers for several other entities, including 1841206 for Deriv (BVI) Limited, 406695 for Deriv Investments (Cayman) Limited and 209524 for Deriv (Mauritius) Ltd. These are company numbers rather than licence numbers.

In 2026-10, Deriv updated its regulatory disclosures. The update covered the FSC Mauritius authorization of Deriv (Mauritius) Ltd, the two UAE CMA licences, and its current Labuan, BVI, Cayman, Mauritius and Vanuatu entities.

Which entity you sign with

A multi-entity broker usually assigns clients by country of residence and sometimes by product, so your account agreement, not the brand name, tells you which company you are dealing with. Before depositing, find the entity name in the client agreement and on the account opening screens. Then confirm that the same company and licence appear on the relevant regulator’s public register. This check matters most for the five entities without published licence numbers. A client of Deriv Middle East Ltd is under UAE supervision. A client of Deriv (V) Ltd is under Vanuatu’s rules, and dispute options, segregation requirements and any compensation depend on that jurisdiction.

Is Deriv legit?

Deriv is a real, long-operating group with disclosed licensed entities, a published registered address and public legal documents. It is not an anonymous or unregistered platform. Being legitimate does not mean top-tier protection, though. Disputes over withdrawals or trade execution are handled under the rules of whichever offshore or UAE entity holds your account.

Account types and trading costs

Deriv offers two MetaTrader 5 accounts. Both have a $5 minimum deposit, maximum leverage of 1:1000, the same three platforms and the same instrument classes: forex, indices, commodities, shares, crypto and ETFs. The difference is cost structure.

What a 0.6-pip spread costs

“Spread from” is the lowest quoted spread, and live spreads can be wider, especially around news or in thin market hours. The 0.6-pip figure applies to EUR/USD on the MT5 Standard account.

Here is a worked example. On EUR/USD with a USD account, one standard lot (100,000 units) moves about $10 per pip. At 0.6 pips, crossing the spread costs about $6 per standard lot per round trip. You pay the spread once, on entry against the bid/ask difference, not once on entry and again on exit. This assumes the minimum spread is in force and no separate commission is charged.

Standard vs Swap-free: the break-even

The Swap-free account trades a higher spread for the removal of overnight financing. The gap between the two minimum spreads is 1.6 pips, about $16 per standard lot on EUR/USD under the same assumptions.

Here is a hypothetical example. If a position would pay $3 per night in swap on the Standard account, the Swap-free account’s extra spread is roughly paid back after about five nights held. Intraday traders who close before the daily rollover pay no swap anyway, so for them the Standard account’s lower spread is plainly cheaper. Actual swap rates vary by instrument and direction and change over time. The current rates are in the MT5 symbol specifications.

Swap-free accounts are often chosen for religious reasons (Islamic accounts). They can also suit anyone holding positions for days, provided the wider spread is understood as a cost.

Leverage up to 1:1000

At 1:1000, the margin required is 0.1% of the position’s notional value. Here is a hypothetical example with EUR/USD at 1.1000:

• One standard lot = 100,000 EUR ≈ $110,000 notional
• Margin at 1:1000 ≈ $110
• A 1% move in EUR/USD ≈ $1,100 gain or loss

The leverage changes how little capital is locked as margin. It does not change how much a pip is worth. A trader with $200 in the account could open that full lot. A move of about 1.6% against them would erase more than the entire balance in theory, and the broker’s stop-out level would close the position well before that. “Up to 1:1000” is also a ceiling: brokers commonly apply lower leverage to some instruments, larger positions or certain account entities, so check the margin requirement on each symbol.

Sizing trades by risk rather than by available margin is the practical defence. A position size calculator converts a stop-loss distance and a risk percentage into a lot size, and for an account allowing 1:1000 this is the step that keeps margin from becoming the effective position limit.

How the market maker model affects you

Deriv is a market maker. A market maker quotes its own bid and ask prices and can take the other side of client trades rather than passing every order to external liquidity. This is a common and legal model for retail CFD brokers, and it allows fixed or tight quoted spreads and very small minimum trade sizes.

The trade-off is a potential conflict of interest: when the broker is the counterparty, a client’s loss can be the broker’s gain. Regulators address this with conduct rules on pricing, execution and conflict management, and the strength of those rules varies by jurisdiction. That is why the offshore weighting of Deriv’s licences matters more for a market maker than for a broker that routes all orders to outside liquidity providers.

Markets and platforms

Is Deriv binary or forex?

Both are part of its history. The MT5 Standard and Swap-free accounts are CFD accounts covering forex, indices, commodities, shares, crypto and ETFs. Deriv’s site also has a dedicated options section, which reflects its Binary.com heritage. Options and CFDs carry different risks. With fixed-payout options, the outcome is largely all-or-nothing on the stake. With leveraged CFDs, losses scale with the price move and the position size.

Platforms

Deriv’s platforms are MetaTrader 5, its web platform and its mobile app. MetaTrader 5 supports multiple order types, charting with built-in indicators such as the Relative Strength Index, and automated trading through Expert Advisors. MT4 is not offered, so traders running MT4-only tools would need MT5 versions.

Deriv also publishes business partner terms, so it runs an affiliate or introducing-broker program. If someone referred you to Deriv, they may be paid for that referral.

Country questions: India, Kenya, Malaysia and others

India. Indian residents are restricted under the Foreign Exchange Management Act. The Reserve Bank of India has stated that residents may trade forex only with authorized persons, on recognized Indian exchanges, and in permitted currency pairs. It also maintains a public Alert List of unauthorized forex trading platforms. None of Deriv’s licences is Indian. An Indian resident trading leveraged forex CFDs with an offshore broker falls outside that permitted framework, regardless of the broker’s own licences. Check the RBI Alert List for the current position.

Kenya. Deriv’s “CMA” licence comes from the UAE Capital Market Authority, the regulator of Deriv Middle East Ltd. It is not Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority, and the two regulators should not be confused when checking a licence.

United States. Deriv does not accept US clients.

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

• Very low entry: a $5 minimum deposit on both accounts.
• A EUR/USD spread from 0.6 pips on the MT5 Standard account.
• A Swap-free account for traders who cannot or prefer not to pay overnight interest.
• Six disclosed legal entities, including UAE licences with published licence numbers.
• A long operating history (15 to 20 years) and broad CFD coverage across six asset classes.

Trade-offs

• Five of six licences are offshore. Client protection depends on which entity holds your account and may be limited.
• Market maker execution, with the conflict of interest that model carries.
• Leverage up to 1:1000 lets a small balance control large positions, so losses can reach the account balance quickly.
• The Swap-free account’s minimum spread is more than three times the Standard account’s.
• MT5 only among the MetaTrader platforms.

How we checked deriv

We visited deriv.com on 13 November 2026, connecting from Tallinn, Estonia. The home page sent us straight to the EU version of the site. In the footer we found the risk warning that 75% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. The footer also states that Deriv Investments (Europe) Limited (Company No. C 70156), with its registered address in Birkirkara, Malta, is licensed and regulated by the Malta Financial Services Authority. We then clicked “Regulatory information.” That page lists other group companies with their numbers, among them Deriv (BVI) Limited (Company No. 1841206), Deriv Investments (Cayman) Limited (Registration No 406695) and Deriv (Mauritius) Ltd (Company No. 209524).

The EU pages set terms that differ from the offshore figures elsewhere in this review. The forex page states a minimum deposit of 5 USD and leverage of up to 1:30, and it advertises negative balance protection. The MT5 page promises zero commission trading on all assets. On the payment methods page, Visa and Skrill both show limits of EUR 10 to 500. Withdrawals are listed as taking from instant to 1 working day. We opened the sign-up page but stopped there. We did not create an account, deposit or trade.

Next, the registers. We searched the FSC Mauritius Register of Licensees for “Deriv,” and it returned Deriv (Mauritius) Ltd, licensed 14/06/2024 as an SEC-2.1B Investment Dealer (Full Service Dealer excluding Underwriting). That matches the entity the site names. The record we saw did not show a company number, so the match rests on the name.

We read Trustpilot on 13 November 2026. The deriv.com profile scored 4.3/5 from 73,696 reviews, and the company had replied to all 8 of the newest. The Wayback Machine’s first capture of the domain is dated 1996-12-21. That may predate the current brand. We did not check the Malta, BVI, Cayman or UAE registers, so for now those licence claims rest only on Deriv’s own pages.

Who Deriv may suit

Deriv’s terms fit a trader who wants to start with a very small deposit, uses MT5, and understands they are dealing with an offshore-regulated market maker. The Standard account’s spread suits short-term EUR/USD trading. The Swap-free account suits those who need interest-free holding and accept the wider spread.

It is a weaker fit for anyone who wants top-tier regulatory protection, an independent compensation scheme behind their balance, or MT4. Residents of the US cannot open an account, and Indian residents face FEMA restrictions on overseas forex trading.