KuCoin in 2022 Q1 Review

2022/05/17 10:00:00

As we enter 2022, crypto winter seems to be upon us as Bitcoin has fallen from its November peak at $68,500 to $45,000, and the entire crypto market has shed roughly $1.2 trillion in Q1, 2022. There is a definite chill in the air of the crypto market, but KuCoin continued to grow at a rapid pace in the first quarter of 2022.

Growth By Numbers

Trading Volume*

In Q1 of 2022, KuCoin's cumulative trading volume exceeded $1 trillion (Spot + Futures), with an average daily volume of over $11 billion, having an increase of 362.51% YoY. It is worth mentioning that in Q1, as for the daily peak trading volume, KuCoin Spot exceeded $9 billion, and Futures reached nearly $15 billion. (*Trading Volume = Buy/Long + Sell/Short)

Users

And with roughly 6 million new registered users in 2022 Q1, up 491% YoY. Among them, Asia, the Middle East & Africa and Europe ranked the top 3 areas in terms of user growth. Asia dominates the most significant growth with its new registered users up 1,503% YoY, while the Middle East & Africa and Europe are up 300% and 219%, respectively. User activity has also increased significantly in 2022 Q1, with the number of active users increasing by nearly 451% YoY.

KuCoin Community

The influence of the KuCoin community has continuously been expanding. As an exchange for, by, and of the people, KuCoin is developing a community where everyone can benefit from growth and have their opinions heard. In Q1, KuCoin's official Twitter has an additional 320,000 followers, reaching a total of 1.6 million followers. It has become an important window for KuCoin fans to understand the real-time dynamic news of KuCoin; the number of KuCon Global Communities has increased to 23, and the total number of community fans also exceeded 580,000. The KuCoin community has become the base for every KuCoin user to communicate freely. It also provides localized services for users with different trading preferences in more and more countries and regions.

KCS

With the release of the KCS Whitepaper on March 29, 2022, a new era of KCS is coming. The KCS Whitepaper provides detailed explanations and bold prospects for future development, governance, token redistribution, value capture and deflationary mechanism, and the self-circulating ecosystem of KCS.

As the KCS Whitepaper showed, to better support the sustainable development and growth of the KCS ecosystem, KCS redistributed the 90 million KCS locked at the time of issuance, from which 20 million KCS, more than $400 million, would be directly burned, which accelerate the process of KCS burn. As of now, a total of 54,120,079 KCS have been burnt.

In addition, the development of KCC (KuCoin Community Chain) will become an important booster for KCS. KCC, a decentralized public chain built by the fans of KCS and KuCoin’s fan communities, will expand the decentralized use case for KCS, including paying KCS as gas fees or resource consumption fees, staking KCS to empower liquidity mining, and more.

What's more, The KCS Management Foundation will serve as the entity responsible for the development, decision-making, investment, and application of KCS. And with the vision of “from geeks to mass adoption”, KCS is building a blockchain-based value sell-circulation ecosystem to connect the world of both centralization and decentralization and explore the Web 3.0 world.

(Source: KuCoin)

Trading Experience & Customer Service

KuCoin has made more detailed optimizations in the trading experience: the original Staking platform Pool-X has been upgraded to KuCoin Earn with an optimized page that is simple and easy to use and is more suitable for traders’ usage habits. In addition, KuCoin Earn has added financial products of stablecoin, major coins and new projects in 35 assets options.

The KuCoin customer service team continuously provides users with comprehensive support; the customer service bot runs stably and quickly to support users' regular problems with less solving time. The customer service system is fully optimized, equipped with an advanced customer service team, and can solve user problems more quickly and accurately. The KuCoin customer service team plans to fully upgrade the customer service bot and its configuration to bring a multi-functional, optimized customer experience. The Help Center will also add tutorials in more languages to meet the needs of users in different regions of the world.

Team & Talents

Since 2022, more than 200 talents from crypto, internet, finance, and other industries have joined the KuCoin family, and the KuCoin staff is close to 1,000 around the world. We believe that talents are a key competitive advantage to make us stand out from the fast-changing crypto world, so we keep expanding our team in all areas of expertise to meet the growing demand of our users. Here are the positions being recruited. If you are interested in the crypto industry, please contact us.

Products & Features

New Listings

As the home of crypto gems, KuCoin has listed 44 promising crypto gems and 59 trading pairs in Q1 of 2022, of which 19 crypto assets with world premiere listing on KuCoin achieved outstanding performance, including 3 tokens getting listed on Spotlight and 3 projects launched on BurningDrop. During Q1, the best performance token is GLMR with an increase of 155x. LOVE and CLH (the 18th Spotlight project) also impressed, rising 109x and 29x, respectively.

(Source: Crypto Challengers)

New Offerings

Fiat On-ramp

Providing users with simple and convenient services is the purpose of KuCoin. To further lower the barriers to buying crypto with fiat currencies, KuCoin supports SEPA payment, the most popular payment method in Europe, allowing users to deposit EUR to KuCoin with ease. Users can deposit EUR at KuCoin with SEPA and then use the balance of your KuCoin account to purchase crypto assets such as USDT through Fast Buy, which brings great convenience for EU citizens to buy cryptocurrencies with EUR.

Isolated Margin

The launching of Isolated Margin provides users with more trading options. In 2022 Q1, KuCoin Isolated Margin supports more than 60 tokens, including BTC, ETH, NEAR, SOL, APE, and other trending crypto assets. Unlike Cross-Margin, in Isolated Leverage mode, each trading pair has an independent position and has a specific isolated margin account. And the debt ratio of each trading pair transaction is calculated independently and does not affect each other. In other words, the risk is isolated in each Isolated Margin Account. Once liquidation happens, it will not affect other isolated positions. Thereby, it offers a more manageable risk, which helps crypto beginners to get a good start with margin trading.

Cloud Mining

On March 2, 2022, KuCoin officially launched its new mining model Cloud Mining. Cloud Mining is a new remote mining model that allows most users to participate in mining and jointly maintain the security of the main network and earn BTC income. With low costs, ease of operation, and stable access to quality assets, users can mine without purchasing a mining machine. At the end of 2022 Q1, KuCoin Cloud Mining launched two products, with an APY of over 160% both. Cloud Mining provides investors with another way to earn passive income.

Content Creator Program

In order to provide an open opportunity to crypto industry enthusiasts and content creators to create content related to KuCoin and the crypto industry, we were proud to launch the brand-new Content Creator Program on March 25 to encourage everyone to participate in the construction of the KuCoin Ecosystem. And we have prepared a prize pool worth over $1 million for all industry enthusiasts and content creators to participate actively and win great prizes. Click here to learn more about details on how to participate monthly.

Partnerships

KuCoin & Xangle

Xangle is a platform specializing in high-quality virtual asset information disclosure and data research, with many domestic and foreign virtual asset exchanges currently using Xangle's credit rating report when discovering projects and reviewing listings. On March 22, KuCoin signed a business agreement with the virtual asset data research platform, Xangle. Under this agreement, Xangle's operator CrossAngle supports project discovery and listing screening as a third-party audit agency through a business agreement with KuCoin.

(Source: KuCoin & Xangle)

KuCoin Partners with Bloktopia to Build Meta Office

As a Metaverse-friendly crypto exchange, KuCoin is accelerating the layout of the Metaverse and actively exploring its development. The KuCoin Meta Office built on Bloktopia is a virtual space that will provide an immersive user experience. In the future, the office will support users to browse and trade NFT, participate in online AMA, view crypto market trading data and K-line, and even have live chat and communication with others like in a new social media.

(Source: KuCoin & Bloktopia)

Research & Investment

KuCoin Labs

In Q1 2022, KuCoin Labs has further expanded the partnership with multiple popular blockchain ecosystems such as KCC, Avalanche, Near, Cosmos etc., through participating the Hackathon reviews and conducting deeper research. In addition to these, new strategic partnerships have also been established with 46 institutional crypto funds, including Jump Crypto, TRGC and Republic.

Moreover, KuCoin Labs has been expanding its investment footprint in Q1, including investments in nine crypto-native projects and the subscription of two crypto private equity funds amounting over ten million.

(Source: KuCoin Labs)

On March 16, KuCoin Labs announced a strategic investment in MojitoSwap, the first DEX on the KCC, to support the more comprehensive development of MojitoSwap in the KCC ecosystem. This investment is KuCoin Labs' first round of investment in MojitoSwap and is also the first time that KuCoin Labs directly invested in the KCC ecosystem native project. The investment from KuCoin Labs would better assist MojitoSwap in improving its products, operations, branding, and liquidity. Moreover, the investment opened a more diversified form of resource exchange between KuCoin Exchange, MojitoSwap, and KCC, helping KuCoin to strengthen its in-depth development in the field of decentralized ecosystem.

(Source: KuCoin & MojitoSwap)

In addition, KuCoin Labs finished and produced the 2021 Annual Report covering a summary of different blockchain categories and the forecasting of the 2022 crypto industry. This report contains in–depth exploration in the industrial infrastructure, NFT, DeFi, DAOs as well as the security issues within the crypto industry. Furthermore, KuCoin Labs keeps up with the industry's latest trend topics and produces four short research reports in February 2022, covering areas including Cosmos ecosystem, Metaverse, NFT pricing and Fair Launch.

Into the Cryptoverse Report

As the participant and accelerator of the crypto industry, KuCoin launched the ‘Into the Cryptoverse’ related survey of the global crypto market. In 2022 Q1, there are two reports about the Turkey and Germany crypto market released. The report for Turkey states that in 2021 the investor‘s interest in cryptocurrencies continues to grow, especially among women and older generations. The demand for digital assets grows amidst an ongoing financial crisis in the country. More specifically, the Turkish lira has lost nearly 50% of its value, and inflation runs wild in the country. To avoid the decreasing purchasing power from savings in lira, consumers flock to alternative investment solutions. The U.S. Dollar and gold remain favorable options, but overall demand for exposure to cryptocurrencies is rising.

As for the Germany crypto market, the evolving legal regulation for the decentralized industry in Germany has resulted in the fact that 16% of the German population aged between 18 to 60 are crypto investors who own cryptocurrencies or have traded cryptocurrencies in the past six months. Statistics also reveal that 41% of the aforementioned crypto investors intend to increase the share of their investments in cryptocurrencies over the coming six months. Another 13% of Germans are crypto-curious and intend to invest in cryptocurrencies in the coming six months. However, only 23% of the crypto-curious stated that they are highly likely to invest in cryptocurrencies, with the rest remaining hesitant.

Forwards and Onwards

In Q1 of 2022, KuCoin has achieved another significant milestone. Together with the KCS Management Foundation and KCC, we co-released the KCS Whitepaper, which planned a bright future for the KCS ecosystem and cleared that expanding application scenarios in the decentralized world will be the priority of KCS's future development, which includes vigorously developing KCC and contribute to building the Web 3.0 world. As a world-leading crypto exchange, KuCoin is also exploring more innovative products, such as IGO (NFT launchpad) and NFT Marketplace, which lower the barriers to access the GameFi and Web 3.0 space for investors; KuCard, which supports crypto asset payment, and more. All of these will be available in the coming months, so stay tuned and be ready to step into a better crypto world with KuCoin.