KuCoin

It holds the weakest custody position of any venue still operating at scale in our rating, and we score it 3 out of 10. Roughly $281m was taken in 2020, KuCoin said it covered the losses, and six years later no third party has independently confirmed that users were made whole. "Reimbursement stated, never verified" is the single most common pattern in exchange history and it is the reason we ask the question at all.

The legal record compounds it. A US guilty plea brought $297m in penalties. An Austrian regulator granted a licence and then barred the company from commencing business — a sequence that tells you a supervisor looked more closely after approving it and did not like what it found.

On reserves, KuCoin publishes a proof and names no auditor. That is better than nothing and materially weaker than the monthly, third-party-attested, liability-inclusive proofs at the top of this category. There is no theft fund either, so if assets went missing there is no pool to claim against and no precedent suggesting you would be paid.

What KuCoin has is breadth — 9 out of 10 on assets, one of the widest listings anywhere — and that is genuinely why people use it. The honest framing is that it is a venue to execute on and not a venue to hold on, and the difference matters more here than almost anywhere else.

A $10,000 bitcoin buy cost 0.10% on 14 July 2026, joint-cheapest in our rating. That headline hides the constraint: we measured 18.0 BTC of depth within 0.1% of best ask, the thinnest book of any venue we priced — a tenth of Kraken’s and under a third of Bybit’s.

At retail size the book does not bind and the cheap fee is real. At $100,000 the effective cost rose to 0.1036%, still cheap. Beyond that the depth is the price, and it will be worse here than the fee schedule suggests.

API response latency measured 465 ms, slower than most and roughly double Kraken’s.

The reason to be here is the asset list. If the token you want trades on KuCoin and nowhere reputable, that is a real reason to open an account — and given everything in the section above, a real reason to move the result off the platform once the trade settles.