KuCoin

• Commodity Futures Trading CommissionDecided30 March 2026

  A federal court entered a CFTC consent order permanently barring KuCoin’s operator from letting US participants trade on its system unless it first registers as a foreign board of trade, with a $500,000 civil penalty.

  The CFTC had sued Peken Global and three related companies — Mek Global Ltd, PhoenixFin Pte Ltd and Flashdot Ltd — in March 2024, alleging an unregistered digital asset derivatives exchange, a failure to register as a futures commission merchant, and know-your-customer procedures the agency called a sham. The money here is small; the bar is not, and it is permanent unless the registration happens.

  CoinDesk — reported, not the source document · United States · The authority made this finding.

• US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New YorkDecided27 January 2025

  Peken Global Ltd, the operator of KuCoin, pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, agreed to more than $297m in fine and forfeiture, and undertook to leave the United States for at least two years.

  The penalty is a $112.9m criminal fine and $184.5m of forfeiture. The company admitted failing to run the anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer programmes US law requires, and prosecutors said the exchange was used to move billions of dollars of suspicious transactions including proceeds of darknet markets, ransomware and fraud. Two of its founders, Chun Gan and Ke Tang, gave up any role in running it. Sources disagree about where Peken Global is incorporated — the Seychelles in some accounts, the Turks and Caicos in others — and we have not been able to settle it, so this page does not say.

  CoinDesk — reported, not the source document · United States · The authority made this finding.

• Financial Services Agency of JapanDecided28 November 2024

  Japan issued a warning to KuCoin for conducting crypto-asset exchange business with Japanese residents over the internet without registration, and published its name on the list of unregistered operators.

  The FSA’s published list of persons conducting virtual currency exchange business without registration names the operator at the Seychelles, with Johnny Lyu as its representative, for having "conducted crypto-asset exchange business with residents of Japan as counterparties through the internet" in breach of article 63-2 of the Payment Services Act. Keep it in proportion: Japan registers no offshore exchange that will not accept its rules, so this is about market access rather than about customer money, and four of the eight exchanges ranked here are on the same list. It is still a regulator naming a company in public and leaving it there.

  Financial Services Agency of Japan — the authority’s own document · Japan · The authority made this finding.

None of this moves the score on this page. The weights are published on the methodology page and they read licences, costs, payments, platforms and disclosures — there is no component for what an authority has done, and adding a penalty nobody could see would be worse than the gap. It is written here instead, above everything good about this broker, which is where we think it belongs.