KuCoin

KuCoin is a centralized crypto exchange: you deposit coins or buy them, KuCoin holds them in its own wallets, and you trade against other users on its order books. The global site at kucoin.com is operated by Peken Global Limited. The US Justice Department described Peken in January 2025 as a Seychelles-based entity that has run KuCoin since at least September 2019; the CFTC's March 2026 release calls it a Turks and Caicos company, and the current terms of use (updated 29 September 2026) are governed by Turks and Caicos law. KuCoin does not publish a head-office address on the pages we opened.

The exchange launched in the third quarter of 2017, according to its own timeline, and the DOJ's statement of facts also dates its founding to about September 2017. The company's about page credits the code to two founders it calls Michael and Eric; the DOJ identifies them as Chun Gan and Ke Tang. Under the January 2025 plea agreement, neither may hold any role in KuCoin's management or operations. The chief executive since early 2025 is BC Wong, previously the company's chief legal officer, according to KuCoin's timeline.

KuCoin says it serves over 45 million users in more than 200 countries and regions and lists more than 1,000 tokens. Those are company figures without a date. The DOJ, citing court documents, put the customer base at more than 30 million in early 2025.

The house token is KCS (KuCoin Token). Holding it, or choosing to pay fees in it, takes 20% off spot trading fees, and KCS balances count toward VIP perks. KCS is a utility token issued by the exchange's group; it is not equity in Peken Global, and its value depends on the exchange's fortunes.

Most people come to KuCoin for its token list. The spot market carries a large number of small and newly launched tokens alongside the majors, and a GemSPACE section promotes early listings, airdrops and token-locking pools. Breadth cuts both ways: small-cap tokens can be thinly traded, and the exchange keeps separate "special treatment" and delisting pages for tokens it is winding down.

Around the order book sit the products a large offshore venue usually offers:

• Spot trading, plus a simple Convert screen for instant swaps.
• Margin trading and futures: USDT- and USDC-margined perpetual contracts, coin-margined (inverse) contracts and contracts on stock indexes and gold.
• Trading bots (grid, DCA and similar strategies) and copy trading.
• KuCoin Earn: flexible savings, staking, dual-currency products, a KCUSD product the company says is backed by US Treasury securities, and crypto loans.
• Fiat on-ramps through card payments, bank transfer where supported, a P2P marketplace and third-party providers (Banxa, Simplex, BTC Direct, Onramp).
• KuCard, a payment card, and KuCoin Pay for merchants, where available.

Earn products and futures carry their own risks on top of exchange custody: yields are set by KuCoin, principal-protection language applies only as the product terms define it, and leveraged positions can be liquidated. Availability of each product differs by country.

KuCoin's base spot fee is 0.1% for both makers and takers on Class A tokens, the class that covers most large coins. Tokens are sorted into three classes, and the fee tier follows the base currency of the pair: in KCS/USDT, the KCS class sets the rate and the fee is charged in USDT. Paying fees in KCS cuts the rate by 20%, and a KCS loyalty programme adds a further 0.5% to 2% discount.

Rates fall with 30-day volume and asset holdings. From VIP 8 upward the maker fee on spot is zero. The company notes that actual fees can differ for some coins and that the fee shown on each trading page is the one that applies.

On 14 July 2026 we measured the all-in cost of a $10,000 market buy of bitcoin at 0.10%, and 0.1036% at $100,000. The same run found 18.0 BTC of resting asks within 0.1% of the best price, which is a thin book for a venue of this size: orders much larger than $100,000 will move the price more than the fee schedule suggests. The API answered in 465 ms. These are our own dated measurements, not company figures. The comparison with other exchanges uses the same data.

Withdrawal fees are set per coin and network and are listed on the Withdrawal Fees tab of the same page; they change with network conditions, so check the figure on the withdrawal screen before you confirm.

KuCoin is not available in the United States. The terms of use list the US and its territories first among excluded jurisdictions, followed by Singapore, mainland China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, the Canadian provinces of Ontario and British Columbia, France, the Netherlands, and the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of Ukraine. The company says it may change the list at its discretion.

The US exclusion is a legal obligation, not a business choice. In the January 2025 plea, Peken agreed that KuCoin would leave the US market for at least two years. The DOJ said KuCoin had served about 1.5 million registered US users between 2017 and March 2024 and earned at least $184.5 million in fees from them. Then on 30 March 2026 a federal court in New York entered a CFTC consent order that permanently enjoins Peken from the violation charged, letting US persons trade on its platform without registering as a foreign board of trade. Using a VPN to reach the site from the US breaches the terms and puts the account at risk of being frozen.

In the European Union, KuCoin set up KuCoin EU Exchange GmbH in Vienna. ESMA's register shows it authorised by Austria's FMA on 27 November 2025 as a crypto-asset service provider, with services notified for 28 EEA states. The FMA then banned new business on 19 February 2026 after the entity's anti-money-laundering and sanctions officer posts were no longer properly filled. It lifted that ban on 18 May 2026, but said in the same notice that a decision of 18 February 2026 still makes commencing business operations inadmissible, because governance and senior-management requirements were not yet met. We found no later FMA notice lifting that prohibition as of 29 October 2026.

Elsewhere, KuCoin says it holds an AUSTRAC digital currency exchange registration in Australia (2025) and backs KuCoin Thailand, a locally licensed exchange formerly called ERX that rebranded in April 2025. Both are company statements; check the AUSTRAC register and the Thai SEC's list of licensed operators before relying on them. In Dubai, the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority said in March 2026 that four KuCoin entities held no Dubai licence, and on 24 June 2026 it fined Peken Global and ordered it to stop serving Dubai residents. VARA said Peken cooperated and intends to apply for a licence.

KuCoin holds your assets, so its safety comes down to three things: whether the reserves are there, how well the wallets are secured, and whether the company stays on the right side of regulators in the places it serves. On the first, there is partial evidence; on the third, the record is poor.

The proof-of-reserves page, as of October 2026, shows a snapshot dated 30 September 2026. It lists reserve ratios of 109% for BTC, 117% for ETH, 110% for USDT and 127% for USDC, with user balances and wallet holdings for each, and lets a logged-in user check that their balance is included in a Merkle tree. The page says the reserves are "verified by an independent third party" but does not name the firm or link a signed report. A self-published snapshot shows the coins were in identified wallets at one moment; it does not show liabilities outside the listed assets or that the coins were not borrowed. Our guide on how to read a proof of reserves covers what to look for. Mazars, which had prepared an earlier KuCoin reserves report, paused all crypto proof-of-reserves work in December 2022.

KuCoin publishes no insurance policy covering customer balances and no dollar-figured protection fund on the pages we opened. Its security centre describes account controls (identity verification, anti-phishing codes, device management, withdrawal address protection) and claims SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certifications. Those certifications describe internal controls; they do not guarantee that client funds are covered. KuCoin runs a bug bounty programme, announced on its site.

The legal record is the main risk factor. The DOJ found that KuCoin did not require any identifying information from customers until at least July 2023, never registered with FinCEN and filed no suspicious-activity reports, and was used to move funds from darknet markets, ransomware and fraud. Peken pleaded guilty, paid about $297 million and accepted the US exit. Mandatory identity checks for new and active users began in August 2023, according to the same filing.

In plain terms, the risks are: an exchange that loses a licence or is ordered out of a country can restrict accounts at short notice; balances held on any exchange are unsecured claims if the company fails (see what happens when an exchange goes bankrupt); and the operator sits in an offshore jurisdiction where a customer's legal recourse is limited.

On 26 September 2020 attackers drained KuCoin's hot wallets using leaked private keys. Reported losses were about $281 million across bitcoin, ether, ERC-20 tokens and other assets. Chainalysis later linked the laundering pattern to North Korea's Lazarus Group.

KuCoin's own Safeguard Program page still lists the token projects that froze, swapped or re-issued stolen tokens, and records that Tether froze about 22 million USDT withdrawn from KuCoin. Later in 2020, then-CEO Johnny Lyu said 84% of affected assets had been recovered through such measures and law enforcement, and that the remaining 16% was covered by KuCoin and its insurance fund.

That is the company's account. KuCoin never published an independent audit of the recovery and reimbursement, and no regulator or court has confirmed it. We record the outcome as "claimed", not confirmed.

Signing up requires an email or phone number and identity verification. KuCoin has required identity checks for new users since August 2023, according to the DOJ's filing. Expect to provide a government ID, a selfie and proof of address for higher limits; the exact tiers vary by country.

To withdraw crypto, move the asset from your trading account to the funding account, choose the coin and the network, paste a destination address you control, and confirm with your security checks. Picking the wrong network is the most common cause of lost withdrawals: the receiving wallet must support the same chain. At VIP 0 the 24-hour withdrawal limit is the equivalent of 1,000,000 USDT, rising with VIP level. Fiat withdrawals depend on what rails exist in your country, and often run through the P2P market or a third-party partner.

If you only use KuCoin to reach tokens that trade nowhere else, keep the balance there no longer than the trade requires. Our guide to moving crypto off an exchange walks through the steps and the checks.

KuCoin advertises 24/7 customer service and takes requests through a ticket form at kucoin.com/support/requests and through its help centre. The site lists no general support phone number on the pages checked for this profile, so search results offering a "KuCoin support number" should be treated as likely scams.

Before trusting a message, email, Telegram account or website that claims to be KuCoin, check it in the company's Official Verification Center at kucoin.com/cert. KuCoin staff will not ask for your password, two-factor codes or a transfer to a "safe" address. Offers to sell "verified KuCoin accounts" break the terms and are a common route to fraud.

For law-enforcement requests and whistleblowing, the site footer links separate contact pages.

The dated milestones, from company pages and court and regulator filings:

• 2017 (third quarter): KuCoin launches its trading platform.
• September 2020: about $281 million stolen from hot wallets; the company says users were covered.
• December 2023: settlement with the New York Attorney General; New York users blocked.
• March 2024: DOJ indictment of Peken Global and co-founders Gan and Tang; CFTC civil complaint filed the same month.
• January 2025: guilty plea, about $297 million in penalties, US exit; BC Wong becomes CEO.
• April 2025: ERX in Thailand rebrands as KuCoin Thailand, per KuCoin.
• 27 November 2025: KuCoin EU Exchange GmbH authorised under MiCA by Austria's FMA.
• February 2026: FMA bans new business at KuCoin EU and separately prohibits commencing business; the new-business ban is lifted on 18 May 2026.
• March 2026: VARA investor alert in Dubai (5 March); CFTC consent order with a permanent injunction and $500,000 penalty (30 March).
• 24 June 2026: VARA fines Peken Global.