KuCoin ranks #26 of 508 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #73: 47 of the 72 assets ahead of it are not native coins but tokens or claims. A token is issued on a host blockchain rather than running its own; a claim stands for an asset already counted. Of the 64 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 59% are claims on other assets, 34% are tokens and 6% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | C · 56/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #26 |
| Rank counting claims | #73 |
| Market capitalisation | $1.1B |
| Price | $7.54 |
| Circulating supply | 139,655,021 KCS |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | PoSA (exchange chain) |
| Network purpose | Exchange chain |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
C — 56 out of 100, provisional (from 15 of 17 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 49 to 63 (D to C).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 9.1 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards | 5.8 | group average, 4 of 6 measured |
| Properties (10 whitepaper checks) (Source) | 3 | 3 of 10 passed source |
| Anyone can mint (permissionless) | ✗ | PoSA (exchange chain) |
| Limited supply | ✗ | no fixed maximum |
| No pre-issuance or developer mint | ✗ | |
| No developer tax | ✓ | |
| No authority that can halt the chain or freeze funds | ✓ | KCC is a geth-derived PoSA chain with no documented protocol-level freeze or clawback of native KCS. |
| No central team | ✗ | KCC is a geth fork maintained in the kcc-community repository by the KuCoin-backed KCC GoDAO team. |
| Fees under one cent | ✓ | typical fee $0.00047 |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | 3-second PoSA blocks with probabilistic confirmation; no fast-finality gadget. |
| UTXO ledger | ✗ | |
| Privacy built into the protocol | ✗ | |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space) | 7.5 | average of 4 measures source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.00047 |
| Throughput (1,000 transactions a second or more 10) | 8.3 | about 317 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 1.7 | a block every 3 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 1.25 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 250 MB per 10 minutes |
| Security (9 checks) | 4 | 4 of 9 passed source |
| Miners paid over $1 million a day | ✗ | not mined |
| Miners paid over $100,000 a day | ✗ | |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | ✗ | not mined |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | ✓ | 33.3% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✗ | 100% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | KCC is a geth fork maintained in the kcc-community repository by the KuCoin-backed KCC GoDAO team. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 6,624 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Decentralisation: who can mint (Source) | 8.6 | Proof of stake: 8.6 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Decentralisation: nodes (Source) | — | Not yet counted |
| Decentralisation: holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Capabilities (protocol features) | 0 | 0 of 6 passed source |
| Decentralisation | ||
| Network-level privacy: the node hides where a transaction came from (Dandelion++, Tor or I2P, on by default) | ✗ | KCC (geth fork) relays transactions directly. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | No light-client protocol; wallets trust RPC servers. |
| Scalability | ||
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✗ | geth-style gcmode full prunes state but keeps every block. |
| Native payment channels or instant payments | ✗ | No payment channels. |
| Security | ||
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | No confidential transactions. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | No sender or receiver hiding. |
| Issuance | 3.3 | group average |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 0 | 100% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. All 200M KCS were issued by KuCoin in 2017 (100M ICO, 70M founders, 30M angel investors). That is more than the current total supply of 142.16M KCS after buyback-and-burn (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23), so the figure is 100. source |
| Fundraising | 0 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 100% of supply was theirs to sell, 91.4% sold so far. Public ICO 13 Aug-1 Sep 2017 sold 100M KCS at 0.000055 BTC (~5,500 BTC, ~$20M) plus 30M KCS to angel investors before the ICO = 130M sold (matching Dropstab's 130M). 130M / 142,155,021 KCS (CoinGecko total, 2026-10-24) = 91.4%. 30M KCS went to angel investors before the ICO. Public ICO 13 August to 1 September 2017 sold 100M KCS at 0.000055 BTC each, about $20M (ByteTree, altFINS). One aggregator (Dropstab) reports $45M and 130M KCS, which conflicts. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No cut and no new issuance: KCS has a fixed, fully pre-issued supply reduced by buyback-and-burn; KCC validators are paid from fees, not minted rewards. source |
| Supply & Demand | 6.6 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 4.9 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 7 | 7 exchanges |
| Volume rank among the top 200 | 0 | $856,893 traded in 24 hours; #645 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (ranked on the median day of the last 30, $1,033,478) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 1 | 0.10% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 3.6 | $128,264 within 2% of the price on 3 exchanges, 0.01% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 1 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 7.6 | $1.1B, 7.6 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Futures exposure (open interest ÷ market cap, less is better) | 10 | no perpetual futures on the exchanges read |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 8.2 | no fixed maximum; 140 million in circulation |
| Record | 6.3 | group average |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | 10 | 3 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| No halt, freeze or reversal in five years | ✓ | |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 9 | 9 full years since 2017-09-17, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 0 | 2 positive, 4 negative, 3 not yet researched source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 2 of 6 | ✓ | 6 commits in 1 of the last 12 months (github.com/kcc-community/kcc); KCC client v1.4.8-stable, 2 Jul 2025; the only releases in the last 24 months were cut on 1-2 Jul 2025 (two stable, two unstable). |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes, +2 | ✓ | KRC-20 (ERC-20) contracts on KuCoin Community Chain's EVM, where KCS is the gas token, open to any account. |
| Negative | ||
| Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2023-09-06, −1 | ✗ | go-ethereum GHSA-ppjg-v974-84cm (CVE-2023-40591, High) lets a flood of p2p pings spawn unbounded goroutines until the node runs out of memory; KCC's current client kcc v1.4.8-stable (geth-1.10-era fork; the public RPC also reports v1.4.8) still answers pings in a new goroutine (fixed in 1.12.1). |
| Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2024-05-06, −1 | ✗ | go-ethereum GHSA-4xc9-8hmq-j652 (CVE-2024-32972, High) lets a GetBlockHeaders request with count 0 make the node load every header back to genesis; KCC's current client kcc v1.4.8-stable (geth-1.10-era fork; the public RPC also reports v1.4.8) lacks the 1.13.15 cap. |
| Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2026-01-13, −1 | ✗ | go-ethereum GHSA-mr7q-c9w9-wh4h (CVE-2026-22862, High) lets a crafted p2p message crash the node with a too-short ECIES ciphertext; KCC's current client kcc v1.4.8-stable (geth-1.10-era fork; the public RPC also reports v1.4.8) lacks the 1.16.8 length check. |
| Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2026-02-17, −1 | ✗ | go-ethereum GHSA-2gjw-fg97-vg3r (CVE-2026-26314, High) lets a crafted p2p message crash the node through unchecked secp256k1 point coordinates; KCC's current client kcc v1.4.8-stable (geth-1.10-era fork; the public RPC also reports v1.4.8) lacks the 1.16.9 coordinate check. |
| Not yet researched | ||
| Shipped a security fix in two years | – | |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years | – | |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years | – | |
Seventeen criteria, weighted equally. The Cryptocurrency Standards group four parts: properties (ten checks drawn from the Bitcoin whitepaper), scalability (four measures), security (nine checks) and decentralisation (three scales). Provisional: criteria marked — are not yet measured and are left out of the average. A rating of structure and market depth, not a price forecast or investment advice. How the grade is built · Highest-graded cryptocurrencies.
139,655,021 KCS are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 100% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 91.4% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
All 200M KCS were issued by KuCoin in 2017 (100M ICO, 70M founders, 30M angel investors). That is more than the current total supply of 142.16M KCS after buyback-and-burn (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23), so the figure is 100.
30M KCS went to angel investors before the ICO. Public ICO 13 August to 1 September 2017 sold 100M KCS at 0.000055 BTC each, about $20M (ByteTree, altFINS). One aggregator (Dropstab) reports $45M and 130M KCS, which conflicts.
Public ICO 13 Aug-1 Sep 2017 sold 100M KCS at 0.000055 BTC (~5,500 BTC, ~$20M) plus 30M KCS to angel investors before the ICO = 130M sold (matching Dropstab's 130M). 130M / 142,155,021 KCS (CoinGecko total, 2026-10-24) = 91.4%.
No cut and no new issuance: KCS has a fixed, fully pre-issued supply reduced by buyback-and-burn; KCC validators are paid from fees, not minted rewards.
Sources: bytetree.com · coincodex.com · cryptoast.fr · coingecko.com · kucoin.com · docs.kcc.io. Researched 2026-10-24, medium confidence.
No SEC/CFTC determination — unclassified.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
KuCoin is #26 among cryptocurrencies and #73 in the market ranking, which lists wrapped coins, staked derivatives, stablecoins and tokens alongside them. CoinSpectrum counts an asset once, and counts only cryptocurrencies: assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus. A wrapped coin, a staked derivative or a stablecoin is a claim on something already counted; a token, memecoin or otherwise, runs on another chain's blocks. All of them are listed, each in its own section, and none is added to the total. The 47 places between KuCoin's two ranks are held by claims and tokens, not by other networks. The methodology sets out the rule and the counting rule argues for it.
The price above is the median of the exchanges the site reads live, checked every minute and cross-checked against a market snapshot (how market data is gathered). The grade is scored on published criteria, each with its source (the method). The site is independent, nothing on it is a paid placement, and its statements are signed (about CoinSpectrum, the manifesto).
See the 1 wrapped and staked claim on KuCoin →