KuCoin
3.7/10 total
For years the default recommendation whenever someone wanted a large altcoin exchange without identity checks, which stopped being true on 15 July 2023 when verification became mandatory. Existing unverified accounts were not grandfathered: they kept withdrawals and sell-side spot orders but lost the ability to deposit. In January 2025 the company pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, paid over $297 million, and agreed to leave the US market for two years, so any stale guide recommending it to a US reader is wrong.
Scores
Weights are published in the method and applied identically to every entry.
For
- Very wide altcoin listing, including small caps that larger venues will not touch
- Base spot fee of 0.1% both sides, low in absolute terms
- Fully covered the September 2020 hot wallet breach: roughly $281 million taken, 84% recovered through tracing and partner freezes and the remainder paid from its insurance fund, with no user losses
- Mature public API with spot, margin and futures endpoints
Against
- Flipped from optional to mandatory KYC on 15 July 2023 and applied it to accounts that already existed, blocking deposits for anyone who refused
- Pleaded guilty in January 2025 and agreed to a two-year exit from the US market, so US residents lost access
- Lost about $281 million of hot wallet funds in September 2020 to a private key compromise later attributed to the Lazarus Group
- Fully custodial with no verified onion service or no-JavaScript path
- Verification requires a document photo plus facial recognition, not just an email
Agent access 5/10
Good documented REST and WebSocket API, but it sits behind a verified account and issued keys, and US-resident automation is barred by the DOJ settlement.
Reported separately and not counted in the total. It measures what an autonomous agent can do unattended, not whether the service is safe to use.
Fees
0.1% maker / 0.1% taker
Base-tier (LV0) spot rates before volume tiers or the KCS fee-payment discount. Pairs are split into liquidity classes and the tier ladder runs to 0% maker at the top, so this is the entry rate rather than a typical high-volume rate.
Specification
- Type
- Custodial exchange
- KYC policy
- KYC required
- Custody model
- custodial
- Account required
- yes
- Assets
- 700+
- Chains
- 80+
- Operating since
- 2017
- Jurisdiction
- Seychelles
- Onion service
- no
- Works without JS
- no
- Open source
- no
- Facts checked
- 2026-07-31
Links
Plain links, no referral parameters. Verify the domain yourself; phishing clones of every service in this table exist.