Let’s face it – it’s now 2018, and within the past year exchanges have been popping up EVERYWHERE. With all of the internet hype around exchanges being hacked and people losing money, it’s hard to know what exchanges to trust. With all of the choices offering very similar services and assets, those new to the crypto-world can easily face a “paralysis of analysis” situation. Luckily, we’re here to help and give you a 100% honest review and complete guide on the Kucoin exchange!

The History of Kucoin

Kucoin is very new to the exchange space. It recently launched its 1.0 version in mid-August of 2017 after receiving an Angel Investment in early August. Since then, the exchange seems to have been pumping out enhancements and updates frequently. Now, who’s behind it? The team seems fairly well put-together (they even have fancy, well-photo-shopped head shots…). In all seriousness, the main team seems reputable and solid. Over the past few months, the exchange has gained huge traction mainly due to their multi-level-marketing invitation bonus program (not available anymore), low trading fees, and variety of coin offerings and support for many countries (plus, who wouldn’t want to win a Porsche?).

We’ll outline the security and safety of the exchange, a few features of the exchange, how to sign up, fees, how to trade, and give your our final verdict!

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Security and Safety

This is a HUGE concern for many traders and investors and for me, and utmost priority. No one wants to see their investment in the exchange one day, and gone the next. As stated earlier, Kucoin is fairly new and this means it still has time to be tried and tested for vulnerabilities. Some things we personally value about Kucoin is how they’ve implemented system-level and operational-level security standards.

Their system level standards were built following financing-level standards. Industry-standard transfer encryption protocol has been applied to data transfer layers which ensures that user data, and any other sensitive data, is stored through bank-level data encryption techniques. Their two-factor authentication adds another layer of security to validate transactions or withdrawals.

The operational level standards were built by internal risk control and operation process departments. These folks have designed strict production data operations and usage standards which required multi-level review and approval. These review processes check that all online data and core data undergo desensitization processes to help ensure security for the end user.

Kucoin Features

It is obvious from the site and platform that Kucoin has taken the time and investment to set themselves up for success in the competitive exchange market. Kucoin strives to differentiate themselves through a variety of ways such as:

An Established Professional Team:

The Kucoin team members seem to be well-established professionals with real, workforce experience within their specialized fields. The “Community Members” are another story, as there is no firm identification of who exactly these people even are or what they do (social moderators…?). Plus, their head shots are nowhere near as photo-shopped and fancy as the main crew. Maybe they’re trying to entice a sense of mystery here? Who knows.

Multi-language Support:

Kucoin currently supports 11 different languages on their platform, making it highly-accessible to a variety of countries and areas.

Million-level throughput of core trading engine:

The technology behind this trading engine results in no lag or delay during order processes, even during high-volume periods. The high-end order-making time of this engine is over 2 million/second with processing time of over 1 million/second. These numbers are significantly higher than the industry standard. A big plus here, and I’m sure the community is excited to see how this platform performs under stress in the future.

Powerful API Interface:

The interface of this platform efficiently pulls data from other systems to get real-time pricing and market access.

More than 100 Popular Block-Chain Assets:

Currently, Kucoin offers a variety of popular, and less popular crypto-assets. Kucoin currently offers a variety of trading pairs including USDT, BTC, ETH, NEO, and KCS. New coins are continuously being added to the platform.

Effective Marketing:

Let’s be honest, Multi-Level-Marketing (or, Pyramid Schemes) have gotten a really bad rap. Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with these types of referral programs. If the end-user isn’t paying any additional money over what they would without signing up through a referral, and the product they are signing up for is good, I only see this as a win-win-win. Win for the exchange who now has a new user, win for the referrer who now has a new referee who can also invite their friends. The exchange, Binance, saw massive growth through their referral program, and Kucoin is trending heavily upwards from this as well. In addition to the referral program, they stay up-to-date on social channels and have a great website and user experience, which should only get even better with time.

Financial System Stability:

Kucoin has multiple levels of protection to help keep your assets safe. As with any exchange, there is no guarantee. So it’s always best to use a desktop wallet to store your coins or a cold-storage device. They offer 2-factor authentication for account access (as well as re-entering 2 factor for buying and selling) and they’ve adopted a high-tech multi-layer and multi-cluster architecture. Extra precautions have been taken against hardware failure and natural disaster use-cases, where their bank-level deployment has 2 locations, and 3 data centers which handle tasks simultaneously in multiple locations to ensure stability. In addition to this, micro-withdrawal wallets have been built on AWS which includes a multi-layer firewall.

Efficient Customer Service:

Kucoin claims that they are dedicated to resolving customer needs without delay. To help meet this goal, they offer 24/7 customer service through their website, and email.

Clear Goals Moving into 2018

I love timelines, so I was interested when I saw Kucoin’s timeline for their goals moving into 2018. Here are some upcoming goals for the Kucoin Platform:

June, 2018 – Kucoin says they are planning to release a cryptocurrency pair self-releasing feature in June.

December, 2018 – 1,000+ cryptocurrencies should be listed by December, and the daily exchange volume is expected to be 100,000+ BTC.

June, 2019 – They’re aiming to be one of the Top 10 worldwide cryptocurrency exchange platforms by June of 2019 – Ambitious!

Signing Up for Kucoin

Signing up for Kucoin is fairly straightforward and user-friendly. Simply enter an email, choose your password, and verify your account through email (make sure to check spam! I had to).

The interface is very straightforward for beginner’s and pro’s alike. Once you get into your account, you can enable your 2-factor authentication, see your funds, active orders, deposits/withdrawals, etc. Before you withdraw funds, they’ll even give you a warning if there is network congestion and the estimated amount of time you can expect to wait (an important detail in my book).

Trading Fees

Deposit fees are free on Kucoin and trading fees are competitive at 0.1%, depending on the coin you’re trading. Some assets are free from fees, such as NEO and GAS. Coins such as BTC and BCH have fees as low as .0005.

If the amount that you withdraw is less than the current fee of the coin multiplied by 100,000, then your withdrawal will be processed automatically. Let’s say the withdrawal fee for BTC is .0005. If you withdraw less than the .0005 fee multiplied by 100,000 (which would be 50 BTC), your withdrawal will be fulfilled within a few seconds.

How to Trade

Trading on Kucoin is fairly straightforward. First, you’ll want to go to the “Markets” tab from the main page:

The next thing you’ll want to do is choose your trading pair. Kucoin offers you to trade BTC, ETH, NEO, USDT, or KCS to trade for Alt coins.

After you’ve selected your trading pairs, look to “Fast Trading” and choose buy or sell next to the coin you’d like to trade for.

You have two options here; you can either:

Hover your mouse over Buy or Sell (see image below) to quickly buy or sell coins, and it even calculates the fee you’ll pay, which I think is a pretty nifty feature.

Click anywhere on the row for the coin you want to buy and you’ll be taken to a more advanced interface to trade.

Our Final Kucoin Review Verdict

Drum-Roll Please…

Overall, Kucoin is still a new platform that we believe needs some additional time to prove itself. The exchange has a solid team behind it, and a solid go-to-market strategy. Based on the ever-increasing traction they’re getting, their multi-level marketing approach, variety of coin offerings and security, we think that Kucoin could be a solid contender in the exchange space. We’d love to hear your thoughts on Kucoin in the comments below.

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