KuCoin has long been in the shadow of Binance, its better-known competitor. If token price is any indicator, however, KuCoin ($KCS) has been on the rise in both the eyes of investors and those of traders.

The KuCoin story is a curious one. Ask around and you’ll find that for many, KuCoin just suddenly appeared. No splashy market entrance, no glitzy press campaign — it simply opened its doors to traders, and that was that. Despite not entering the market with much fanfare, KuCoin did do one thing right from the very beginning — it offered tokens and trading pairs that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

When KuCoin came online in September 2017 — only a month after Binance’s debut — it hit the ground running at a very particular moment. The cryptocurrency market was still in the midst of a cool-off period after a parabolic spring campaign. ICOs were catching on in earnest and were helping to aggregate value in both BTC and ETH. Exchanges were still in their infancy — Coinbase, Bittrex, Poloniex, Kraken, and Bitfinex were the best known but had paltry altcoin offerings.

What happened next may have seemed like the obvious play, but no one until KuCoin had decided to do it — the KuCoin team put all those ingredients together and created what they dubbed “The People’s Exchange.” KuCoin knew that people were sick of having to gamble on shady exchanges like Liqui.io, EtherDelta, and others to buy obscure altcoins. They knew that if people had an option for buying those same altcoins on a legitimate exchange, then they wouldn’t hesitate to leave places like EtherDelta forever.

That’s exactly what happened — except the exodus away from low liquidity exchanges with bad customer service didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t only because of KuCoin. Several other exchanges formed around the same concept. Coss and Bibox debuted not long after KuCoin and went after the same market. Huobi expanded its offerings to try and grab more market share. Despite the market politics and turbulence, KuCoin came out strong and carved a place for itself by virtue of offering a no-nonsense user experience backed by an impressive array of tokens.