KuCoin Touts 'Trust-First' Infrastructure

- In January 2025, KuCoin reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, pleading guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. The exchange agreed to pay nearly $300 million in fines and forfeiture and to exit the U.S. market for at least two years. - The charges, unsealed in March 2024, alleged that KuCoin and its founders willfully failed to establish required Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) programs until 2023. U.S. authorities claimed this failure allowed the exchange to be used for laundering over $9 billion in suspicious and criminal funds. - As part of the settlement, founders Chun Gan and Ke Tang, who were criminally charged, will not be involved in the exchange's operations for the two-year period while they remain at large. - To substantiate its security claims, KuCoin regularly publishes Proof of Reserves (PoR) reports audited by third-party firms. As of its 32nd report in mid-2025, key assets were shown to be overcollateralized, with Bitcoin reserves at 110% and Ethereum at 110% of user liabilities. - Despite its regulatory challenges in the U.S., the exchange reported significant growth in 2025, reaching over 41 million registered users and recording a total trading volume of $1.25 trillion for the year. - This focus on trust also follows a major security breach in September 2020, when hackers stole over $275 million in various cryptocurrencies due to a leak of private keys for the exchange's hot wallets. KuCoin stated at the time that its insurance fund would cover all user losses from the incident. - According to a TokenInsight report, KuCoin ranked as a top three global exchange by market share growth in 2025, leading all major centralized exchanges with a 5.83% net increase in the spot market.