KuCoin

KuCoin was founded in 2017 and is operated by Peken Global Limited, a company based in the Seychelles. It is known for listing smaller and newer coins that the largest exchanges do not, which is exactly why people arrive at it, and exactly why the questions about who runs it and under what rules matter more than usual.

In January 2025 the company that runs KuCoin pleaded guilty in New York to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. According to the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, KuCoin required no identifying information from customers until at least July 2023, never registered with FinCEN or filed a suspicious activity report, and served about 1.5 million registered users in the US. It agreed to pay more than $297 million, to stay out of the US market for at least two years, and that two of its founders would have no further role in running it; prosecution of those two founders was deferred for two years.

It publishes proof of reserves, and that is worth using. KuCoin's reserves page shows its wallet holdings against what it owes users for the main coins, with a third-party report and a way to check that your own balance was counted. As with every exchange that does this, it proves assets, not the absence of other debts: an exchange can pass a reserves check and still owe more elsewhere.

The keys are KuCoin's. A balance there is a claim on an offshore company, and for many of the small coins it lists, the exchange may also be one of very few places that coin can be sold at all, which is a second risk on top of the first. Check what a holding would really fetch before relying on it with Sellability. Nobody from KuCoin will ever ask for your seed phrase or ask you to move funds to a wallet they name.