Trying Another Crypto Exchange - KuCoin

After the great response from my last crypto-exchange post on Mandala ($MDXT), whose exchange token I've invested in in hopes for good future returns 🤞, I decided to do another one.

At first I thought I should do some proper big-names: like Coinbase who had that outstanding Superbowl commercial ...

... To be fair, despite its mobile app's glitches, Coinbase is much more popular than Uphold which is faster, has less glitches, and I am no way advocating for because it's saved me tons of time in the past.

The above are just opinions based on my personal experience: minutes, hours, days, months, years spent waiting for the pending status on Coinbase to ... change.

If you'd like some more official info, here's some screenshots from investopedia article on the matter:

Here's some more basic info:

What did Investopedia conclude?
(Coinbase is potentially cheaper)

What are Uphold & Coinbase?

How do they work?

And what about the IRS?

Do what you want with this info or DYOR.

Anyway back to the true star of this post: KuCoin.

According to CoinMarketCap, on April 10th 2022, the KuCoin crypto token was sitting at around 12 USD ($12).

It's suffered some quick temporary growth today, obviously because I'm talking about it which of course made it very popular. (Looks like everything spiked n' dipped April 10)

Current Market Cap: 1,613,377,880 USD or ~ 1.6 billion

Why did I choose KuCoin?
I wanted some Fantom ($FTM) and, according to Coin Market Cap, KuCoin was the way to go.

I could've used Mandala which I've invested in but I wanted to have another account to hold and trade stuff. In crypto, you want to be secure but sometimes you don't want all your cryptos in one basket because ... shit happens.

If one of these exchanges, goes down or tries to con me with some "you're going to need a new driver's license from the DMV to buy those tomatoes" nonsense, I'd prefer to be prepared.

Coin Gecko said I could do Crypto.com or Binance or HitBTC but I think crypto.com requires pictures of legal documents, I'm on Mandala because it's Binance-like without the VPN headaches, and idk wtf HitBTC is ... perhaps that'll be my next article if it's easy to use and has a good exchange token.

Here's the a quick trading page for $MDXT whose price is currently 0.03 USD
($0.03 cents)

Here's the front page for KuCoin.

They claim that 1 out of 4 crypto holders uses KuCoin which I can sort of believe since it is another crypto exchange where all I needed was an email, some 2FA verification, and a wallet address to send and receive crypto tokens from.

KuCoin has a nice News section which I thought was nice. It's mostly stuff about their own coin, what they're doing with it, what their plans are, which is expected. If you give your clients more stuff to read, so they feel like they know more about what they're investing it makes them feel more .. invested (couldn't think of another word lol).

There's a lot of options here for KuCoin Exchange:

They even have some NFT stuff, which looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen ... but until then I'll keep an eye on these just in case they're not exactly worthless dead ends.

30 USD ($30) sounds a bit steep for a Pokemon Egg knock-off but there's NFTs of rocks going for millions nowadays so maybe I'll check out whatever Pikaster is.

I have pretty high standards when it comes to crypto games due to Splinterlands so fingers crossed 🤞 this won't be a waste of time.

Here's their About page:

Here's the guys's twitter page. He's been supposedly active since 2011.

On CoinMarketCap and Bitcoin Wiki, here's what I could find about KuCoin:

Created in 2017, located in Seychelles.

5 million users, 100 countries

Partnered with IDG Capital and Matrix Partners in November 2018

Suffered a cyber attack in September 2020 where hackers stole almost $300 million USD of digital assets -- suspected North Korean hackers.

But was able to, with the help of law enforcement agencies, recover most of the stolen funds and refund the rest of its affected users using its insurance fund.

The KuCoin hack was the FOURTH LARGEST crypto heist ever.

So according to this, KuCoin isn't licensed in the US.

But if you have a VPN ... you have a VPN 😉

So where was I?

Showed some background and history on KuCoin and now to what I'm doing:

Email, 2FA code, trading security code to get a KuCoin account

Find a wallet address to send KuCoin some tokens.

Sending LTC to KuCoin to get some Fantom ($FTM)
And maybe some KuCoin but it's $22 so maybe not too many of them.

Among what KuCoin does take, it also accepts AVAX, BNB, Matic, but NOT Hive token.

This is a negative point against them but people who put big-money on Pokemon knock-offs are probably prone to the occasional faux pas.

As far as trading goes on KuCoin, it's like most places -- you need to find your desired pair.

So we need to go from a starter, like LTC, to USDT/Tether and then to FTM/Fantom.

I'll start with LTC since it's fast.

Looks like we have to transfer funds/tokens from the Main account to the Trading account to swap.

After that we get to the trading page here below.

We'll be trading in the bottom right of the screen above after entering our trading security code. It's 6 digits so not hard to forget but perhaps easier than other places to hack.

Here's a close up of the the spot trading section.

So we'll be selecting "Market" in the top left under "Spot", selling LTC for USDT so we just click 100% for LTC, and I'm guessing KuCoin calculates fees into the amount.

Once we're sure about the amount, we'll be smashing that big red button to get things things going.

Maybe just once or twice ... we don't want to break it

After we get a quick success banner and cool sound effect, we can move on to getting our USDT/FTM pair, or Tether to Fantom pair.

We've done LTC to USDT, now we're going to swap USDT for FTM.

Make sure we're in Market and then we'll hit 100% for USDT on the BUY side to get FTM.

And then ...

... Just kidding. Go ahead and click it.

Now we have some FTM ... or actually I have some FTM, but now you know how to get some for yourself on KuCoin.

As far as recent news for KuCoin and Fantom, here's what I found:

Hope this was helpful and I look forward to writing about other crypto and exchanges in the near future!

Image Sources:

Brave.com
CoinMarketCap.com
KuCoin.com
GIPHY.com