Kucoin Exchange Review

What is Kucoin?

One of the newcomers in the industry, Kucoin is a cryptocurrency exchange based in Hong Kong. Kucoin exchange was launched in August 2017. However, the team was working on the exchange project from the year 2011, focusing on R&D and building the technical architecture of the platform. As for the management, the company’s founder and CEO is Michael Gan, the former technical expert at Ant Financial, which is the arm of Alibaba Group related to financial services. According to Kucoin strategic timeline, the management is quite ambitious and expects the exchange to enter the top 10 list of crypto exchanges by trading volume in 2019.

Although the company does not look dubious, we still wanted to check – is Kucoin legit?At the current moment, Kucoin is not licensed by any regulatory institution. Considering how young the company is, we might witness the company becoming regulated in the future. For the time being, Kucoin is transparent about its activity and we think it can be trusted.

How Secure is Kucoin?

Kucoin is still new to the crypto world, and no exchange hacks or breaches have happened so far. So, is Kucoin safe? We know that the only security measure provided on the platform is Google two-factor authenticator (2FA). Not only it can be used for login, but may also serve as the authorization before each trade is conducted. Although it might be irritating a bit, it certainly ensures some extra protection. The feature can be disabled at any time.

As for the financial safety, Kucoin keeps the funds in the multi-layer wallets online. The micro wallets are stored in the private networks built on Amazon Web Services cloud. On the other hand, Kucoin makes sure that macro wallets are stored at the banks. Although it all sounds good, the fact that Kucoin does not utilize the cold storage is a bit worrying.

Opening an Account at Kucoin Exchange

Signing up at Kucoin is pretty easy. To create the account, the user simply has to provide an email and a valid password. Once done, the trader gains access to all of the services on Kucoin. There are no verification requirements at the moment of this Kucoin review, but such will be introduced on November 1, 2018.

Starting from this date, all unverified users will have a 24 hour withdrawal limit set at 2 BTC. In order to lift that restriction, Kucoin recommends its users to complete KYC procedure straight away. The whole process is complex and takes from 2 to 4 weeks.

The verification at Kucoin consists of 3 steps. Firstly, the user has to provide the basic information about the identity, i.e. name/last name, gender, birth date, mobile number, full address with the address certificate photo attached. The second stage is to fill in the information about the ID (type, number, expiry date) and the permanent address. Kucoin also requires to upload the photo of ID, both front and back side. The last step includes the info about the source of funds, employment status, annual income etc.

Kucoin Exchange Payment Options

Currently, Kucoin offers only crypto-to-crypto trading, which means that all transactions in fiat are not supported. However, the exchange plans to introduce fiat to the exchange in August 2018, but it will be available to verified users solely.

It is possible to make transfers with almost 170 cryptocurrencies that Kucoin supports. Deposits are almost instant, while withdrawals may take up to 10 minutes. Nonetheless, this is super fast.

While deposits are free, for most of the withdrawals, the network fee is charged with an exception like NEO. On top of that, one should mind the minimum withdrawal amount for each virtual currency. For instance, for Ethereum the fee is 0.01 ETH, while the minimum amount to withdraw is 0.1 ETH. You can see other examples on the image below.

Kucoin Platform Review

It is fair to say that Kucoin platform is genuinely state-of-the-art in terms of features and design. Although it might not necessarily be for beginners, the platform has a lot of the functionality to offer a trader and we are going to cover that shortly in this Kucoin review 2018. Besides, it is also possible to trade on the go with mobile apps for Android and iOS.

Overall, there are over 300 pairs on this platform available in the following markets: BTC, ETH, NEO, USDT, and KCS (Kucoin Shares). On the website, the prices for each pair can be viewed in 32 fiat equivalents.

Essentially, there are two types of orders to place for each pair – buy and sell. One can notice that at the moment the platform lacks more order types, but no doubt Kucoin will extend the current number in the future. On the other hand, in terms of charting features, the platform shines. Prices can be viewed in 8 time frames and 10 chart types. Additionally, the charts are fully customizable from the visual side. What’s more, Kucoin also provides access to the library of 70 technical indicators. As for the margin trading, it is not available yet on the platform.

For every trade, Kucoin charges quite low fees – flat 0.1% regardless of the selected cryptocurrency.

Kucoin Bonus Program

Kucoin launched their official coin named KCS or Kucoin Shares with a total supply of 100,000,000 KCS. For all the holders of KCS, Kucoin has created sort of the dividend program. In order to be eligible for bonus distribution, the trader has to hold at least 6 KCS (more than 24 hours) on the account with 2FA enabled. The more the user owns, the more KCS dividends are awarded. Now let’s see how exactly it works.

According to the program description, Kucoin is using 50% of the trading fees to buy KCS from the market to distribute to KCS holders. The bonus is calculated by considering the exchange daily volume, the trading fees collected per day, and proportion of KCS account balance to the total supply. For example, the user may hold 1000 KCS with the exchange daily volume of 10000 BTC. With the fee 0.1% rate applied, the total trading fee collected per day is 10 BTC.  What the user will get is 10 * 50% * (1,000/100,000,000) or 0.00005 BTC simply put. The amount is then converted to KCS.  Kucoin pays out the bonus automatically on the daily basis.

Apart from this bonus, there is also a referral program on Kucoin. It allows the inviter to get up to 20% of the trading fees for each order that the referred person executes. The bonuses are issued every two hours.

Kucoin Reviews: Customer Support

Unlike many exchanges, Kucoin offers fast customer support. It is possible to reach out to the agents not only via email, but also with the full-fledged live chat. The client support is active 24/7. For indirect assistance, the user might be interested to check the articles on the Help Center.

On the whole, the website is very user-friendly and looks great. Moreover, it is multilingual with 12 languages available.

The Bottom Line

Overall, Kucoin is a splendid platform with a promising future. It offers advanced trading platform, low fees, nice support and great bonuses. According to Kucoin roadmap, they have big plans for improving the exchange, adding new features etc. This is the attitude community can certainly approve.

In case you were a bit suspicious at the beginning and wondering “Is Kucoin scam?”, we can assure you it is not.