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Outlet profile

KuCoin

crypto-industry promotional

Owned byOperated by Peken Global Ltd. and PhoenixFin Ltd., both registered in the Seychelles. Co-founders Chun Gan and Ke Tang stepped back from management under a 2025 U.S. legal settlement. Institutional investors include IDG Capital, Matrix Partners, Jump Crypto, Susquehanna, and Circle Ventures.
FundingExchange-funded: KuCoin's news and content platform is an in-house operation financed by trading fee revenue from the cryptocurrency exchange. The company has raised approximately $180 million in venture capital across multiple funding rounds.
On the administrationmostly neutral

Background

KuCoin was founded in 2017 in China by Chun Gan, Ke Tang, and Johnny Lyu, and quickly became one of the world's larger retail cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume. As China tightened restrictions on crypto businesses, the exchange relocated first to Singapore and then to the Seychelles. In March 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a federal indictment charging KuCoin and co-founders Gan and Tang with operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and willfully failing to maintain anti-money laundering controls; the government alleged the platform processed over $9 billion in suspicious transactions from U.S. customers. In January 2025, Peken Global Ltd. pleaded guilty to the unlicensed money-transmission count, agreed to pay approximately $297 million in criminal forfeitures and fines, and committed to a two-year withdrawal from the U.S. market; Gan and Tang were removed from management. The exchange's branded news section, which publishes market recaps, exchange announcements, and crypto-industry analysis, is a content-marketing and user-retention tool rather than an editorially independent newsroom. Coverage is uniformly favorable to the cryptocurrency industry and does not engage in political or foreign-policy reporting.

Sources

  1. KuCoin – Wikipedia
  2. KuCoin Pleads Guilty to Unlicensed Money Transmission, Agrees to Pay $297.4 Million – NYU Compliance & Enforcement
  3. KuCoin Pleads Guilty in Crypto Case, Agrees to Pay $300 Million – Bloomberg
  4. U.S. Indicts KuCoin: What It Means for Cryptocurrency Companies – Orrick
  5. KuCoin Crypto News & Insights – KuCoin.com
  6. KuCoin – Crunchbase
  7. DOJ Press Release: KuCoin Pleads Guilty – SDNY

Profile compiled 2026-09-16; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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