KuCoin launched a global brand campaign on 8 October under the line "Trust, Built-in.", built around a film starring Adam Scott, the Australian golfer who won the 2013 Masters and became the exchange's first paid brand ambassador a year ago. The release was issued from Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where the company that operates KuCoin is now registered.
Twenty months ago that company pleaded guilty to a federal crime in New York. Chief executive BC Wong said in the campaign release that the ambassadorship's original line, "Trust First. Trade Next.", "remains the long-term brand proposition that defines KuCoin". A platform upgrade the company calls KuCoin 5.0 "is how we put that idea into practice", he added, and compliance is the first of the six areas that the upgrade covers, with details deferred to a later announcement.
Scott said in the release that "real confidence comes from strong foundations and a commitment to keep improving, even under pressure". KuCoin has not named an agency, disclosed a budget, said which countries the film will run in, or published the golfer's fee.
The $297M Guilty Plea
Peken Global Limited, which has run KuCoin since at least September 2019, pleaded guilty on 27 January 2025 to operating a money transmitting business without the licence American law requires. Wong entered the plea on the company's behalf in Manhattan federal court. The penalty came to more than $297M, made up of $184.5M surrendered to the government and roughly $112.9M in fines.
The Justice Department said KuCoin never registered with FinCEN, the US Treasury unit that tracks financial crime, and never filed a report of suspicious activity of the kind banks must submit. Until at least July 2023 it did not ask customers for identifying information at all, according to the department. KuCoin brought in mandatory identity checks for new customers in August 2023 but did not apply them to the existing ones.
Between about September 2017 and March 2024 the exchange served roughly 1.5M registered users in the United States and earned at least $184.5M in fees from them, which is the sum it surrendered. Danielle Sassoon, then the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said KuCoin "avoided implementing required anti-money laundering policies designed to identify criminal actors".
Co-founders Chun Gan and Ke Tang were charged but did not plead guilty. Each entered a two-year deferred prosecution agreement, under which the charges fall away if the terms are met, paid about $2.7M and agreed to stay out of any management role at the company.
A Consent Order, Not A Clock
KuCoin agreed to leave the US market for two years as part of the plea, a period that would have run out in January 2027. A separate order has since replaced that deadline with a condition.
The federal court in Manhattan entered a consent order at the end of March 2026 permanently barring Peken Global from letting US customers onto the exchange. The bar lifts only if the company registers with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a foreign board of trade, the status a non-US venue needs to take American business, and the order added a $500,000 civil penalty. There is now no date on which KuCoin may return, only a registration it has not made.
New York's attorney general had already pushed the exchange out of the state, settling with it in December 2023 for more than $22M over allegations that it operated without registering as a broker-dealer. That figure was made up of $16.77M refunded to 177,800 investors in New York and a $5.3M penalty.
Canada's financial intelligence unit fined KuCoin C$19.55M in July 2025, its largest penalty of the kind, for failing to register as a money services business. It found the exchange had missed 2,952 reports of large virtual currency transfers between June 2021 and May 2024, along with 33 reports of suspicious transactions, some of which it linked to darknet markets. KuCoin has appealed to the Federal Court of Canada, arguing it is not a Canadian business and does not market to Canadians.
Europe Licensed It, Then Barred It
Austria's financial regulator granted KuCoin EU Exchange GmbH a licence on 27 November 2025 under MiCA, the European Union's crypto rulebook, which let it serve customers across the bloc from one approval. On 23 February 2026 the same regulator barred the entity from concluding business relationships of any kind with new customers.
The regulator said KuCoin EU no longer had the people holding its anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing functions, roles it said were filled when the licence was granted. The order stands until an anti-money-laundering officer, a sanctions compliance officer and deputies for both are appointed. Sabina Liu, who runs KuCoin EU, said its priority in Austria is "to establish a governance framework that reflects the expectations of European regulators".
The 8 October campaign release lists a European licence among the exchange's compliance credentials without mentioning the restriction. Those same European rules are now pushing exchanges to drop stablecoins whose issuers hold no licence, and Britain has opened its own authorisation window for crypto firms.
The Fourth Trust Campaign In A Year
KuCoin has run four trust-themed pushes since October 2025. It signed Scott that month under "Trust First. Trade Next.", added the cyclist Tadej Pogačar in February 2026 under "Trust, Proven by Performance", and ran an activation at Tomorrowland Winter in March. Announcing the Pogačar deal, Wong said: "We are not building visibility, we are building credibility."
Mark Ritson, a former marketing professor who writes on brand strategy, has put Crypto.com's brand outlay and commitments at more than $1B, including $700M across twenty years for naming rights on the Los Angeles arena. The money bought recognition rather than a reason to sign up, he argued: "the brand remains, after a billion dollars, a logo in search of a reason."
The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Kim Kardashian $1.26M in October 2022 for promoting a token without disclosing a $250,000 payment, and charged eight more people in March 2023 over promoting Justin Sun's tokens. Shaquille O'Neal paid $1.8M in 2025 to settle an FTX investor suit without admitting wrongdoing, and most claims against Tom Brady, Larry David and other FTX promoters were dismissed in May 2025.
British broadcast rules introduced in September 2024 restrict advertising for tradable crypto assets to specialist financial channels and programming. They also require that the products be available only to customers who pass a vetting procedure before they can buy.
Figures Without An Audit
KuCoin says it has more than 45M registered users across more than 200 countries, up from 40M in February, with no disclosure supporting either figure. CoinMarketCap ranked it seventh among the exchanges it tracks for June 2026, on $108.7B of volume that month and 2.29% of the tracked total. Coinbase, which files audited accounts, reported 6.4% of global trading volume across the whole of 2025 on revenue of $7.18B.
Published coverage of the campaign in the two days after it appeared consisted of KuCoin's own release, carried by newswires and rewritten. None of it put the conviction, the Canadian appeal or the Austrian restriction to the company.
