While not the biggest, KuCoin and Coss are two of the more interesting cryptocurrency exchanges. Both offer profit sharing tokens, which are a way to earn dividends AND build up a collection of unique coins.

Here’s how it works: Like any exchange, KuCoin and Coss charge small fees on each trade. Unlike other exchanges, they distribute half of these fees back to users. By owning a special token— known as KuCoin shares (KCS) and Coss tokens (COSS), respectively — you‘re eligible to receive these payments. They’re paid in the same form they’re collected. So, in other words, whatever coins were traded that day, you earn a small amount back as payment.

Profit-sharing tokens are an attractive investment for this very reason. If you aren’t an active trader, it’s a way to passively collect everything that’s hot, including brand new coins that are added throughout the year.

This is also the main downside to the concept. Unless you’re a whale, or early investor, you wind up collecting a lot of dust: Small fractions of inexpensive coins that are too small to trade. In my estimation, you need at least 100 KuCoin shares and 2000 Coss tokens MINIMUM to make the dividend worthwhile. The more you put in, the higher return you’ll get, as more dust becomes tradable.

For this reason, you typically wouldn’t want to invest in both exchanges — instead, put all your budget into one and maximize returns. As for which token is better; KCS vs COSS, that’s what I’ll try to answer next:

KuCoin vs. Coss: The Main Differences

First and foremost, KuCoin is much larger. Although it launched after Coss, it has nearly 80x the trading volume and (as of this writing) is ranked #15 amongst crypto exchanges. This is important for a profit-sharing investment, since a higher trade volume means a bigger payout. KuCoin lists a lot of unique coins, and is many investor’s go-to exchange.

Coss is a much smaller exchange, but not for a lack of good ideas. The company aims to introduce a wide range of features, including a payment gateway for merchants, a marketplace, and pre-paid credit cards. Starting in March 2018, Coss will allow users to buy ETH and BTC directly with credit cards. Should this expand to more coins as promised, Coss.io will be one of the very few places to trade altcoins against USD or Euro.

At present time, however, few of these features have seen any progress. Coss.io is primarily known as the exchange to buy COSS tokens (it makes up 55% of trades on their site), which is a bit worrisome. The team seems to be full of good ideas, but slow to make progress.

Fee Split Percentage

That said, KuCoin does not come without its risks as well. Investors experienced a few weeks panic in January as Ethereum transactions froze, and KuCoin abruptly cancelled their referral program. Things got back to normal quickly enough, but not without KuCoin getting a lot of flack.

In particular, it came out that KuCoin does not guarantee they’ll share 50% of their profits. They actually plan to lower it to 15% as profits increase. (At present time, it still sits at 50%.)

Coss.io, on the other hand, is locked-in at 50%. Their dividends are actually paid out by a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), which basically means they’re hard-coded into the system, and cannot be modified by the company.

While it’s unlikely KuCoin would every willfully cancel their profit sharing program, the fact that Coss is hard-coded at 50% is a bit more reassuring.

KuCoin vs. Coss: Earnings Comparison

To test this out what you actually earn from the dividends, I put $50 USD into each exchange. This got me 6.5 KuCoin Shares, and 46 Coss Tokens.

After 1 week of holding, here’s what I earned from each:

KuCoin: 4.5 cents (USD)

Split among 70 coins, with BTC, ETH, NEO and XRB (now NANO) being the largest, respectively.

I earned about 25 Sats of Bitcoin per day. This amounted to $0.02 USD per week — the most I got of any single coin.

Coss.io: 3.97 cents (USD)

Split among 45 coins, with COSS, ETH and BTC being the largest, respectively.

A snapshot of some of my earnings. My largest was a little over $0.01 USD in COSS and a little under $0.01 in ETH.

So both earned me about the same amount: Roughly 4 cents. Had I invested $5000 USD into this experiment, I would’ve earned about $4 from each, or $208 per year — not factoring in the potential growth of the exchanges and coins, of course.

KuCoin vs. Coss: Claiming Your Dividend

While earnings may be about the same, the process of getting your coins is vastly different.

With KuCoin everything is simple. Each day, the bonus is automatically added to your wallet (with the exception of some slow periods where it takes 2–3 days to update). You can click Explore > KuCoin Bonus to see a historical log of how much you’ve earned each day.

With Coss, you actually need to buy back your bonus. This gets around trade laws, which may otherwise may classify the dividend as illegal. The fee is small — 0.002 ETH (~$2 USD), but you have to pay it for each individual coin… and there’s over 45 of them.

Fortunately, Coss will “hang onto” the coins as long as you need. It’s basically like having them in your wallet; you just can’t trade or transfer until you pay and “distribute” them. Also noteworthy is the fact that non-Ethereum tokens (like BTC and Dash) have to be converted to ETH at the time you distribute them. But again, you can leave them in their “native” form as long as you want.

KuCoin vs. Coss: Who’s the Winner?

The answer comes down to risk vs reward. KuCoin is more established, it has an active community of traders, and is the top exchange for several coins (DRGN, Telcoin, Raiblocks — until just recently).

Coss.io is still ramping up. It’s not widely used yet by traders, except for those trading COSS tokens (making up 80% of all trading volume). Although it does have a promising future with fiat-pairings and other features on the horizon.

KuCoin is very likely to keep growing, provided the cryptomarket stays afloat, and there aren’t any scandals, hacks, or regulatory changes that threaten the exchange. It’s currently about 10x smaller than the largest exchanges, so there is decent room for growth.

Coss.io is more of a tossup. Before it announced fiat pairings, the token was in a long decline; down to $0.70 USD from its nearly $3 peak. It’s clear that many initial investors grew impatient and jumped ship. On the flipside, Coss is currently about 1000x smaller than the largest exchanges, so there is immense room for growth.

My Decision?

Drumroll please… I decided to go with KuCoin, primarily because I’m a low-rolling investor, and Coss’s distribution fee was likely to offset my gains. At ~$2.00 USD per coin, it would cost around $90 to ‘cash out’ my full dividend. Currently, you would need to hold at least 2000 COSS to earn that in a year. Granted, most investors are expecting the payout to grow substantially if fiat pairings and other features are successful.

KuCoin has already carved its niche. It’s a popular exchange. If it can so much as triple its volume in the coming months, each coin would earn you about $1.00 USD at year’s end — and that’s not including the moon missions you might catch.

You can use my referral links below to sign up for KuCoin or Coss: (Coss rewards me with a small reduction in trading fees. KuCoin stopped rewarding referrals, but I still post for the heck of it.)

Kucoin: https://www.kucoin.com/#/?r=7wJgdy

Coss: https://sso.coss.io/api/invite/B636ZKAPP1

If you want to buy with USD or Euro, use my Coinbase referral link and we’ll both be rewarded with $10 USD. For instructions, check out my guide on how to buy Ethereum instantly on Coinbase and send it to an exchange.

Lastly, if you found my research helpful, tips are always warmly appreciated:

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