Last year a new crypto exchange called KuCoin was launched with a very ambitious goal – to be among the top 10 crypto exchanges by 2019. The way they were operating and the high number of users they were gaining makes me look that it was achievable goal.
KuCoin looked wonderful
KuCoin platform was charging very low fee for trading and withdrawals, offering 91% of its profits to be shared with its users – 40% fee as referral commissions, 50% profits as dividends to its KCS coin and 10% of its profit to buy back & burn 50% of the KCS coins from the market. Aside this, a lot of promotions keep going on, offering goodies like a Porsche or a BMW to entice heavy traders.
I was wondering how they will earn for themselves if they keep sharing the major chunk of profits with its users. But why should I be concerned when I can get my share? So I opened my account there and invested in some KCS to see if it works as committed.
Initially, the platform felt very attractive to me. It has a very good speed, great interface, several options of tools for charts (sourced from Trading View), highest number of Market pairs I ever saw and consistent addition of new coins to their platform. I was happy to note that they were offering daily GAS on holding NEO in their wallet whereas Binance use to give GAS on a monthly basis. So I invested in Neo too on it.
Telltale signs of warning
Later I discovered that my GAS payments were missing every few days. It made me a bit furious. So I moved my NEO to Binance, immediately after the snap shot for ONT airdrop.
Unfortunately, I never got that ONT airdrop on KuCoin. I see a lot of complaints about not receiving ONT airdrop. I don’t know anyone who actually received it. After waiting for about a month, I decided to ask them in their official Telegram group for why the airdrop was delayed as Binance had delivered it the next day itself. It was the only message I sent to their official Telegram group and I was immediately blocked! It’s been two months to that incident; my account still remains blocked there.
Next I tweeted to them for clarification on the airdrop issue. I didn’t receive any response from them but thankfully, my account was not blocked on Twitter. However, I had lost all my confidence in them. How can one block their customer from their official Telegram group? Wasn’t this like Donald Trump blocking a Twitter account on his whim? It wasn’t acceptable to me. I decided to move out of this exchange and moved all my funds out of it.
Keeping away from such businesses is better to be safe
Only my KCS remained there and I was thinking to liquidate that after this quarters coin burn. But when I searched online, I found several complaints against them of coins missing from the wallet, insider jobs, non-payment of their frequent Twitter promotions, non-payment of daily KCS dividends etc. So I decided to sell out my KCS holdings at a loss and made an exit.
There is a lot of negativity surrounding this exchange online. However, it ended up booking its first quarterly profit of about $7 millions) last quarter. But this exchange is currently listed at No. 41 by volume with a less than 5K BTC volume per day. This is despite having one of the 5 largest numbers of trading pairs on its exchange. I dunno how do they maintain so many Markets with such low volumes.
Thankfully, I’m out of it! In retrospect, I thought, why was I using KuCoin when there are better exchanges which even have Steem listed on them? My mistake! I apologise to every one who used my referral code for joining KuCoin. Here is my referral invite for Huobi. Cheers! 😊 Happy trading!
- What are your experiences with KuCoin?
- Which is your preferred exchange?
Would you like to share it with me?
