KuCoin Crypto Exchange Review: Trading fees, tier requirements, and comparison against other exchanges
KuCoin is one of the most popular Crypto exchanges — reason enough to deep-dive into the trading conditions at KuCoin: I will first introduce and explain the KuCoin spot & futures fee structure & associated tier requirements to you. Second, we will have a look how the KuCoin fees compare to other exchanges and lastly we have a look for which traders KuCoin is especially attractive. So without further ado, let’s jump right into it:
KuCoin has a tiered fee structure, that means you pay different fees depending which tier level you are in. Currently, KuCoin has 13 tier levels, which you can achieve either through your spot trading volume, your futures trading volume, or by holding KCS, the native exchange token of KuCoin. What is great for KuCoin is that you only have to qualify for one of those requirements in order to be granted the respective tier level.
As a new user, you will start off in tier 0, giving you spot fees of 0.1% for maker trades and 0.1% for taker trades. Maker trades describes trades in which your position was executed as a limit order, while taker trades are market orders. Many exchanges have cheaper fees for maker trades, however KuCoin starts off with the same fee level both for maker and taker trades. In higher tier levels, maker trades are significantly cheaper compared to taker trades.
One special aspect of KuCoin is that you can save 20% of your fees if you opt to pay the fees with the KCS token. You will need to activate this function and have KCS available in your account.
Once you either hold 1000 KCS tokens, have more than 50 Bitcoin spot volume or 200 BTC futures volume in the last 30 days, you will move up to tier 1, giving you cheaper fees. Your spot trading fees can go as low as -0.005% as maker and 0.025% as taker if you trade extremely large volumes. KuCoin actually applies asset specific fees, meaning that you will pay different fees based on which coin you are trading.
However, most of the large coins are in class A, which is the cheapest category and the fees which I have just shown you apply. For class B, the spot fees start at 0.2 and 0.2% for maker and taker, whereas for class C they start at 0.3 and 0.3%.
Let’s have a look at futures trading fees:
KuCoin actually applies the same 13 tier levels to futures trading than it does for spot trading. In tier 0, your maker fees are 0.02% and your taker fees are 0.06%, which is lower than spot trading, however remember that you mostly leverage your positions in futures trading, and hence have much higher volume which those percentages are applied to. In general, the effect of trading fees on your performance is oftentimes highly underestimated. We did an analysis, and depending on the trading style you have, you will have to make a profit of up to 250% as a scalping trader, or 130% as a typical day trader just to break-even on fees if you are not at a fee efficient exchange. We have made a seperate medium article on the influence of trading fees on your performance, I’ll link it here for you. Alright, as a next step let’s have a look how the KuCoin fees compare to other exchanges:
The easiest way to compare the fees of KuCoin to other exchanges is to just use the automated fee analysis from dr-fee.
We just type in our trading volume, in this case let’s do 1 million USD spot volume, which would just qualify us for the 50 Bitcoin volume requirement of the second tier level as seen earlier, and 5 million USD futures volume. Let’s assume we only have market orders, so 0% maker trades, have 20.000 USD on our account and do not hold any KCS tokens. We click next, and I’ll skip the email part here for you and find the fee analysis output.
Actually, for the scenario we just entered, KuCoin isn’t the cheapest exchange, but also not the most expensive one. At KuCoin, the user would have paid 48,000 USD in fees per year, while at Cryptocom, the user would have paid roughly 22,000. At Bitfinex, the trader would have paid more than 56,000 USD in fees though.
This is only one scenario though, for different volumes and order types the fees can be much different. In general, KuCoin is not the cheapest exchange, but also not the most expensive one.
Actually, for spot trading, the maker fees at KuCoin are around average in the market…
… while the taker fees even a bit below average I would say.
For Futures trading, the maker fees start off rather high compared to other exchanges but get more competitive with higher volumes…
…while the taker fees start off rather high as well, but also stay comparably high.
This is only an overall view though, some people are willing to hold a lot of KCS tokens and get very low fees through this, or the combination of trading products and orders can make KuCoin very attractive. You can just use the dr-fee analysis I’ve shown you further above to find out the specific fees for you. If you don’t want to type in the volumes by yourself, you can also just connect your existing exchange account through a read only API, the tool will read your trade history and can judge based on this how much fees you would have paid at the other exchanges.
If you want to trade at KuCoin, you can sign-up through this link, which will give you 10% off your trading fees. This would actually bring down your trading fees from the 48,000 USD which we have seen in the example to roughly 43,000 USD, so a 5,000 USD saving.
If you think you got some valuable information from this article, we would highly appreciate if you leave us a clap and subscribe to our channel. We will continue to develop content for traders, and like this you right away see when we upload a new article. For all updates, you can also follow our Twitter account.
Stay safe and happy trading!
All information in this article may not be up-to-date anymore while reading and should not considered to be financial advice!
