Hello steem community! In this post I want to share my personal opinions and experience on the KuCoin exchange platform, and the coin called KuCoin Shares $KCS associated with it.

3 reasons why KuCoin is showing immense potential as a leading exchange:

#1 Great listings give this exchange the edge in the long term.
Currently the exchange has arguably the most interesting tokens of 2018 already listed, with new tokens being listed every few days. Notably you can find some unique ones such as RPX and DBC both NEO NEP5 tokens (similar to Ethereum ERC20 tokens).
The instant feeless Raiblocks coin got listed on KuCoin before Binance. This listing alone shows that KuCoin is a strong competitor in the cryptocurrency exchange space and the competence of the dev team as well.

#2 Working product
The platform itself is working just fine. I never had any issues with withdrawing and executing trades. Admittedly, few weeks back the platform had some login issues, that seems to be solved now. The biggest competitor, Binance, in the early months from its inception had similar issues and KuCoin proves to be solving theirs even faster.

#3 Plenty of room to grow
Currently the trading volume keeps increasing at a steady pace, currently ranging from 100-200million per day on KuCoin. The biggest two as of this writing, Bithumb and Binance are currently sitting at around 4 billion each 24h trading volume. If the platform keeps performing well while growing its userbase it has 10x-20x trading volume potential.

3 reasons why KuCoin Shares the coin issued by the KuCoin exchange is both great for the exchange and great for the investor.

#1 You get passive income in the form of KuCoin bonus just by buying and holding (no you don’t have to do anything else). The passive income you get is paid out daily and derived from the trading fees. The more trading on the platform occurs the more you get paid out. The more you hold the more you get paid. This attributes the coin with tangible value from which the demand will skyrocket if mass adoption kicks in. Early investors/adopters are the biggest gainers.

#2 The payouts are in 70+ coins, making it an effective way to diversify your portfolio and invest in something that benefits from the huge daily market fluctuations.

#3 Fee reduction and buy back mechanism. With every 1000th KCS you own you get 0.01% reduction with max 0.30% reduction. I foresee institutional investors and whales liking this feature. On top of this every yearly quarter a buy back is being placed from 10% of the profits made by the exchange itself. Tokens bought from this buyback are burned reducing the supply and increasing the value of the remaining coins.

Things to consider that could drive the value down.

Kucoin Bonus reduction
The KuCoin bonus you receive for holding KuCoin shares is 50% of the 0.1% trading fee on the exchange divided among all KuCoin Share holders. In march 2018 this percentage will probably be reduced by 10-15%. However, I expect by that time that KuCoin will grow 2x-3x in trading volume and $KCS value will significantly increase. The KuCoin whitepaper says that the percentage will never drop below 15% no matter how big KuCoin exchange becomes.

Maintaining the platform functional as higher trading levels would prove to be difficult but I have a feeling that the team can handle it.

End thoughts and price prediction

Future media exposure and mass adoption of this exchange could dramatically increase the account registration and trading volume. This would drive the price of $KCS higher than $BNB as it offers better intrinsic value than the latter token.
Any price prediction for any coin/token or project in the crypto world would be purely speculative and based on a gut feeling. With that being said IMHO this token has a lot room to grow and could hit the 100$ per coin in summer of 2018. If the crypto bullish trend continues by the end of 2018 we could see this coin 10x from current price of 14$ as of this writing.

Referral link https://www.kucoin.com/#/?r=1tJb1

Link to the whitepaper https://assets.kucoin.com/kucoin_whitepaper_en.pdf

Link to the video explaining KuCoin Bonus

Link to the Kucoin bonus calculator https://kucoinshares.com/

Everything in this article is my personal opinion and not financial advice. Invest only what you can afford to lose.