• Popular Opinion
• KuCoin Review: Key Information
• [lptw_table id=“5951” style=“default”]
• KuCoin Team Overview
• KuCoin Exchange Use Overview
• Receiving Dividends
• Summary

KuCoin Exchange Review

Back in 2011, the KuCoin exchange founders started researching blockchain tech and went further to build the technical architecture for KuCoin in 2013. 4 years later, the exchange launched with the ultimate goal of “becoming one of the top 10 worldwide hottest exchange platform[s]” by 2019. In this short time period, KuCoin managed to work its way up from an obscure exchange to a spot as the 18th largest exchange by 24-hour trading volume.

Based out of Hong Kong, this international cryptocurrency exchange currently supports the trading of a large number of digital assets. The CEO and one of the original founders, Michael Gam, is a former technical expert at Ant Financial, the most valuable fintech company in the world.

What’s interesting about this exchange is that it follows a profit-sharing system and distributes 50% of their daily overall trading fee revenue to users holding their exchange-based token, KuCoin Shares (KCS). In a similar fashion to Binance, KuCoin offers relatively low tradings fees and incentives for holding (or trading) its native cryptocurrency.

So what else is so special about KuCoin? In the following review, we will dive deep into the inner workings of the KuCoin trading platform.

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Popular Opinion

In order to gather public opinion, the writer looked to Reddit to see what the internet had to say about this exchange. Overall, KuCoin seems to garner good feedback from these anonymous sources.

The good: Positive reviews of KuCoin are its user-friendly interface, detailed trading graphs, two-factor authentication, KCS holder rewards, low trading/ withdrawal fees, and the ability to earn GAS while holding NEO on the exchange. As well, it offers its exchange to the international community by having it accessible in more than 10 languages.

The bad: You cannot purchase initial cryptocurrency on the exchange, and some users report lags in the system and slow customer service. There are also some who associate the exchange with the Confido scam, a fake ICO that ran off with investor money. Although most users recognize KuCoin exchange wasn’t associated with the scam, the negative event remains in the minds of users. However, they community seems to respect KuCoin for reimbursing those who invested in Confido.

KuCoin Review: Key Information

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KuCoin Team Overview

As stated on their official website which lists 12 core members, “Kucoin aims at providing users digital asset transaction and exchange services which are even more safe and convenient, integrating premium assets worldwide, and constructing state of the art transaction platform”.

CEO and founder, Michael Gam, is a former technical expert at Ant Financial, an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group. He was also a senior partner at Internet giants like MikeCRM and KF5.COM.

COO, Eric Don, is referred to as a “senior Internet researcher, systems architect, and Internet industry star”. He is also stated to be the CTO and senior partner of IT companies including YOULIN.COM, KITEME, and REINOT. However, it’s unclear if these websites actually exist as they did not show in a Google search or when entering the website domains.  According to his LinkedIn, he is currently CTO at Youlin Network Technologies, yet there is no mention of KITEME or REINOT.

The writer acknowledges there may be some limitations in researching the backgrounds of many of these founders/team members due to language barriers. However if the team members are who they say they are, they bring years of experience from renowned companies such as $18.4 billion dollar investment firm GF Securities and mobile payment solution and service provider iBoxPay.

KuCoin Exchange Use Overview

KuCoin delivers a fairly quick user activation process and took the writer less than 3 minutes to set up an account.

In order to get started, you need to:

1. Agree to the terms and conditions
2. Sign up with your email and password
3. Click on the activation link in your email email (which may be in your spam box),
4. You are signed in.
5. Deposit funds from another wallet and start trading!
   

To trade, simply type in the price and the amount you want to buy of a certain trading pair. For each trade, KuCoin requires you to enter your Google 2-FA (unless you wish to remove this feature under settings).

Let’s say you want to buy 1 KCS and exchange it for ETH, you would type in 1 in the amount section and the asking price you want to buy it for. If you want an instant transaction, it helps to type in the current “Ask” price, with is shown in the upper right-hand corner of the buying grid.

Key features of trading on the exchange are your ability to contact automated support 24/7, your ability to trade with numerous base trading pairs such as BTC, ETH, NEO, and KCS, and that the site shows you a USD or BTC amount that your portfolio is worth. It also allows users to click on the trading pair for more detailed trading insights (displayed below).

The fee for each trade is 0.1% of the asset you bought (minus any discount you may get from holding KCS). For every 1000 KCS you own, you get a 1% discount (capped at a 30%). At a value of roughly $5, you would need to be holding around $5000 dollars of KCS for a 1% discount and $50,000 of KCS (10,000 KCS) for a 10% discount. Clearly, substantial discounts on trading fees are not available to the average account holder.

Depositing and withdrawing are pretty straightforward. All you need to do is go over to the “Assets” section and type in the respective information.

Depositing is free, and withdrawing costs depend on the currency you wish to withdraw. For example, withdrawing NEO and GAS is free, but withdrawing ETH costs 0.01 ETH and withdrawing BTC costs 0.0005.

Binance currently costs users 0.1% per trade, offer free deposits, free NEO and GAS withdrawals, a 0.001 BTC and a 0.01 ETH withdrawal fee, respectively. As you can see, KuCoins fees are pretty similar when comparing them to Binance’s, a well known low-cost trading platform.

Receiving Dividends

If you want to calculate how much you will receive in coin dividends, you can click on this link and type in the amount of KCS you hold. Currently, holding 100 KCS will earn you around 10 cents a day in coin dividends from around 100 different coins. While this may seem like a small amount, keep in mind that the value of a unit of KCS can also go up. Since its launch, KCS has gone up over 900%.

Summary

KuCoin is easy to use, offers good security, has a mobile app, delivers low trading fees and gives incentives for trading/ holding KCS.  Moreover, the fact that exchanges are closing their doors to new user accounts due to a lack of scalability but KuCoin hasn’t makes it a solid choice for new users who are looking to trade in the altcoin market. That being said, KuCoin is definitely on its way to becoming one of the world’s largest global exchanges.

At the time of writing, KuCoin is currently the 28th largest exchange with a volume of $84,243,753. While this number is far behind global exchange leader Upbit ($4,309,450,07), it may continue its massive draw of new users and move into a top 10 spot. To enter the top-ten though, it needs to surpass Bittrex and gain around $600 million USD.