As part of Binance’s aggressive growth strategy, they released a referral program which compensated referrers with 50% of the trading fees paid by the people they referred — on 10/27/2017. They stopped allowing new user registrations on January 4th, 2018.

Today, 1/8/2018, Binance announced they have re-opened new user registrations temporarily and randomly. At the same time, they will cut the referral fee bonus share from 50% to 20% for all new and existing referrals.

Has Binance given us another reason to use Kucoin Exchange?

On Christmas Day, I woke up feeling inspired to write a piece on Binance Exchange. It was entitled, ‘Binance Exchange: Fueling a Hot New Era of Token-based Exchange Models?’ You can see I am obviously a big supporter. I also have many referrals from including Binance’s referral link at the end of every article in the resource list for beginners. Well, Kucoin Exchange is beginning to steal the spotlight and are known as ‘The People’s Exchange.’

On January 5th, 2018, I wrote an article entitled, ‘Kucoin: The Exchange-based Token That Earns You a Dollar Cost Average and Diversified Portfolio, Daily.’ The article explores Kucoin’s innovative token-based exchange business model which gives the KCS tokenholder 50% of Kucoin exchange fees paid by traders — a daily dividend from the 77 tokens on their platform.

You know what Kucoin does with the remaining 50% of fees collected from traders on the platform? They give it to referrers under their affiliate program. I know affiliate programs have their negative stigma, but think about it — you’re going to pay the fee as a trader anyway…why not give part of that to another individual instead of all to the exchange?

My goal with using referral links is to share legitimate resources while also slowly weening myself off of the ‘traditional teat’ as I like to say. In other words, I want to cover the cryptosphere full-time and, in the process, transition to living 100% on cryptocurrency. This recent move by Binance kind of hurts my progress toward living on crypto, I mean, they cut referral earnings by 60% 2-months after starting the program.

Kucoin User Registration Expected to Remain Open While Scaling

Considering Kucoin’s growth strategy includes a defined referral program on their way to becoming a Top 10 exchange, I think it’s safe to say Kucoin will remain open to new registration as they scale their user-base. After reading their white paper, it’s clear the team focused heavily on the technical exchange infrastructure and mention their expectation of being able to handle order-flow when ‘the market is booming.’

It is imperative that Kucoin Exchange can continue to handle the new daily user registrations because they need those new users in order to reach that level of volume and achieve their goal of becoming a Top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges.

Taking a look at CoinMarketCap’s list of cryptocurrency exchanges and their corresponding 24-hour volume, Kucoin is well on their way to becoming a Top 10 exchange and just 3-months into their journey. They currently sit at #17 with $260,120,876 24-hour volume, just behind Gemini Exchange who has $297,532,500 24-hour trading volume.

Looks like Kucoin needs to just about 3x their current 24-hour volume to reach the Top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges. They recently announced reaching 300,000 registered members while Binance Exchange was announcing their 3,000,000th registered user.

Binance Beginnings Will Continue, But Kucoin Will Too

Part of this ‘Binance Beginnings’ series is to help guide newer cryptocurrency community members who may not be so savvy on navigating the space as a trader or even hodler. My rationale behind needing content like ‘Binance Beginnings’ is that Binance doesn’t even have the required human labor to scale their own platform and handle all user requests.

I’ve had multiple quality ICO projects apply for Binance’s ICO Launch Pad without even an email response. Same with their ‘Binance Labs,’ their sort of business incubator/accelerator — application in and, as you guessed, no response. There’s nothing more frustrating than when you’re trying to use somebody’s service, but that level of quality and service terms change so quickly.

The cool thing about Kucoin is that they are currently developing a way to automatically integrate ICOs into the platform. This means that not only will traders on Kucoin exchange be able to access these ICOs, but ICO projects will have a greater stage to shine on as they raise capital to build their projects. Expect to find some of the biggest up-and-coming ICOs at Kucoin exchange in the coming months.

Article Wrap-up (TL;DR)

Binance temporarily opened up new user registrations, but at random times so you need to keep trying if you can’t get in the first-time. The 50% referral fee share has been cut to 20% for new and existing Binance referrals. Kucoin Exchange takes the spotlight, is not expected to close new user registrations while successfully scaling their platform.

Until next time, make sure you follow the Binance Beginnings series below to be updates every-time I write a new article and post it to the series:

Below are some resources for beginning cryptocurrency enthusiasts or others interested in something new: