Adeyanju: That probably explains why you list a lot of altcoins—since most of your users are from emerging markets. But isn’t that too risky, considering these coins are susceptible to pump and dump schemes? Do you have measures in place to prevent or limit this susceptibility? Lyu: First, traders and investors must understand the risks and take personal responsibility before making investment decisions. The basic and most important recommendation is to check all the information about an asset and not buy coins that grow in price very quickly. In the investment field, risk and return are equal; expecting high returns will inevitably entail high risks That said, at KuCoin, we focus on quality while trying to bring a wider range of promising coins to the public. We have an expert research team who complete due diligence before listing coins, which ensures that we can prevent our users from most scams in the industry. But as I said before, this industry is full of uncertainties—including market impact and human factors. Users still need to understand these uncertainties before investing.

Adeyanju: Was this strategy of listing altcoins pivotal to growing your userbase to the 18 million users you mentioned in your recent fundraising announcement? Lyu: Yes, that’s right. Listing promising altcoin is a big part of our strategy. From the early days, we figured that, while bitcoin and ether will continue to be the major tokens, most traders will want access to more tradable assets. That’s why KuCoin is one of the few exchanges that started to list many promising altcoins. But alongside this, we also spent the bear market of 2018/2019 strengthening our infrastructure and product offering. We introduced many new features like margin and futures trading, and we are also one of the first platforms to introduce staking services for proof-of-stake tokens. We also followed the market trend and introduced our own launchpad platform. These initiatives helped us attract many new users when the recent bull run arrived. Adeyanju: I’d like to go a little deeper into your strategy of listing altcoins. But let’s spend some time talking about where you’re headed as an exchange, especially after recently securing $150 million in funding. What’s next? Is there going to be a change of strategy? Lyu: In general, we will continue to be the people’s exchange just as our slogan says, and this means we will evolve ourselves on the basis of the needs of our customers. We will continue to find and offer the next crypto gem on our platform. Also, the industry is still in its infancy, and we need to bring in more users. KuCoin is focused on onboarding as many users as possible. I believe three major barriers prevent new traders from starting their crypto journey. The first one is policies and regulations. The second one relates to on-ramping from fiat to crypto. And the third one is about how to start the first trade. For the first part, the regulation part, KuCoin is trying to apply for licenses in many markets, and we’ve already gotten some of them. We are trying to expand our fiat on-ramp gateways for the second part. In November, we launched our fiat account feature, which allows users to deposit fiat such as euro and US dollar to the platform. We’ve also announced another fiat improvement relating to our integration of SEPA, which is quite popular in Europe. For the third part, which is about making the first trade, we noticed that many new traders could hardly understand the order book as well as terms like limit orders and stop orders. So we are trying to offer a simplified interface for them. We’ve also noticed that those who know how to make a trade still struggle to make trading decisions. That’s why we’ve introduced social trading features called KuCoin S, which allows users to get to know more about how other people trade and to get to know what is happening in the market. All this info could help them to make better trading decisions—to improve their chance of making a profit. On the product side, we will invest in improving our offerings in terms of social trading because we believe this is the trend of the future.