A Letter from KuCoin CEO: MOVING 4WARD On the Road of Crypto Mass Adoption

Dear all,

I am honored to take this exciting moment to share my personal thoughts and experience with KuCoin throughout the past four years and express my gratitude to every user that supported us all the way through. Together, we’ve witnessed historical moments of the crypto industry in the changing bullish and bearish market, and together we’ve created our history.

We’ve achieved huge milestones. The total market cap of the crypto market has exceeded $2.5 trillion for the first time this year, and that of Bitcoin has surpassed behemoth such as Tesla. At the same time, the increase in key statistics throughout the past four years ushered in the rapid growth of KuCoin. The cumulative transaction volume has exceeded $470 billion, the number of registered users has surpassed 8 million, and the highest daily transaction volume outstripped $10 billion.

Today, KuCoin has grown into a top 5 crypto exchange in the world, and is named as one of the best crypto exchanges for 2021 by Forbes Advisor. These achievements are inseparable from the support of every KuCoin user. Today, on the fourth anniversary of KuCoin, I would like to sincerely thank you for being the catalyst for its changes.

Over the past four years, we have continuously explored and extended beyond the boundaries of the crypto industry in the bull-bear cycle. We are dedicated to lowering the threshold for every user to enter the crypto industry. Let’s take this precious moment to trace back to where we began and took off.

Prologue: The dream is taking shape. KuCoin 1.0 went live in 2017, where our mission to become the “People’s Exchange” has officially started.

In Full Swing: Breaking the Limit. KuCoin entered a year of rapid growth in 2018, during which the top daily trading volume broke $400 million, and we have secured a $20 million Round A Funding from IDG Capital and Matrix Partners. Since then, KuCoin accelerated its strategic plan to expand into global markets.

Beyond boundaries: Non-stop in innovation. KuCoin’s crypto ecosystem took shape in 2019, and we have launched various groundbreaking products, including KuCoin 2.0, KuCoin Futures, Pool-X staking, and KuCoin Margin that year. Since then, users can easy-access one-stop crypto financial services here at KuCoin.

Inheriting the past: Resolving difficulties with wisdom. In 2020, we successfully transformed through 312-plunge, Bitcoin halving, DeFi boom, and bear-bull turnover. More importantly, with an overall upgrade in KuCoin security level, we are more capable of the smooth-running for the start of a new bull run.

To the future: Looking ahead in times of change. In 2021, the best trending topic of the crypto market covers NFT, Meme tokens, GameFi, and Metaverse. KuCoin keeps close with the hot topics while maintaining its features of simplicity and entertainment to provide the best cryptocurrencies and trading tools for our users. For instance, we launched the KuCoin Trading Bot as an AI-based wealth management tool. So far, 3.27 million trading bots are serving users for passive income. In addition, we launched KuCoin Win, the first token listing platform combined with entertainment, allowing participants to access the initial token distribution of promising blockchain projects in a brand-new way.

Back in 2017, shortly after a new coin was listed on KuCoin, some investors suffered from abnormal losses due to a short-term failure of our platform. KuCoin, still in its infancy, quickly took the responsibility to provide the best solutions to address users’ losses. It was then when KuCoin was nicknamed as the “People’s Exchange”, and we have never forgotten our original intention in the past four years to provide the best crypto services for the masses as a trusted exchange.

Here at KuCoin, we believe that everyone will get involved with crypto in the future. We are dedicated to becoming the catalyst behind mass adoption by constructing a simplified crypto exchange platform for every user to get easy access.

It's easier said than done to serve users in more than 200 countries and regions. In order to increase our global reach while improving localized services, we’ve been working hard to improve the overall stability and security of the platform. At the same time, we support nearly 20 languages, more than 50 fiat payments, and serve 300,000 global users through local communities.

As we witness the growing number of felicitous participants in this crypto journey offered by KuCoin, our localized team keeps creating more entertaining activities for users around the world to celebrate their cultural events. For instance, during the Euro Cup, we invited all users to share their best moments in the tournament. When Eid Al-Adha approached, we celebrated the Islamic festival with Muslim users around the world. The adoption of crypto assets not only promotes the free flow of digital value around the world but also facilitates the interaction, understanding, and cohesion of global residents.

With the inevitable trend towards the exponential growth of the crypto industry, the turning point is also approaching. At this moment, we’re thinking about the future direction for the development of KuCoin and the overall industry.

We always say that our industry is still constrained to the elites rather than reach for the masses. This dilemma also appeared in the early stage of the Internet, during which a few people first started with human-computer interaction to connect to the Internet and browse webs and news as isolated nodes. Therefore, the overall progress on the mass adoption of the Internet was slow due to the limited interaction between users.

Later, with the addition of "social" elements, the number of Internet users grew exponentially. Similarly, the crypto industry was born with strong financial attributes. In the early stage of development, trading is the basic demand of crypto users. That is the reason why major crypto exchanges, including KuCoin, focus on creating better trading tools. However, we all know that a faster horse can never be transformed into a car. The industry needs a catalyst to upgrade for future mass adoption by meeting the higher level of human needs.

What is the future of a crypto exchange? KuCoin is trying to give the answer - “social”. A qualified trading product should also satisfy people's social needs in the crypto world, and KuCoin is transforming itself into the first, maybe the largest Social Trading platform in the future. The integration of SOCIAL and TRADING can make trading itself easier. Imagine that you can learn from others’ trading strategies, get to know them through portfolios, and even have a program to place orders or take profit for you. Crypto trading is no longer a game for a small group of professional investors. Instead, everyone can do it easily and confidently. And through the information and interaction services provided by the platform, even a newcomer will have a bigger chance to win. 

In Q4 of this year, lots of new SOCIAL features will be launched, allowing users to better understand and trade crypto on KuCoin, and find global crypto investors who share the same interest.

The 4th anniversary is a brand-new starting point for KuCoin. We would like to thank every user, employee, and partner who walked along with us during the past four years. As rewards, we have prepared exclusive NFT gifts and special events like KuCoin Crypto Friday for everyone. I hope you’ll enjoy the celebration with us. The future is yet to come, and I hope we will walk further together to build a disruptive future for the crypto world.

Johnny LYU

September 2021.