Tl;dr: For 6 months Kucoin has prevented me from withdrawing ~$50K of my eCash coins. Despite multiple requests through email, Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, and even an article published on a popular crypto news site, I've yet to get any substantial response from Kucoin or their CEO u/Johnny_Kucoin. No apologies, no explanations, no timetable for when I can expect my money.

As many of you predicted, Kucoin has done nothing to resolve my issue. Here's what I wish had happened. After seeing my posts, Johnny or some other Kucoin representative would have replied with a clear explanation of the situation and a promise to make things right within a reasonable time frame. But instead what I got was more of the same:

Btw, it is a simple change. No other exchanges have had this problem. And I don't want your gratitude, I want you to do your job.

It's been in progress for months. And what about withdrawals?

Since what I wanted to happen didn't happen, here's what I hope happens next. I want as many people as possible to withdraw their funds from Kucoin.

I believe in crypto because it gives us the ability take back control of our money. And believe me, I hold the vast majority of my wealth on various cold storage devices, but I can't take custody of my funds if the exchange never lets me, if they take my money but won't give me what I paid for.

Imagine going into a store and buying something, but after paying for your item they say you're not allowed to take it home. They say to come back later, but each time you do, they only tell you they're working on it without so much as a sorry.

This is what Kucoin is basically doing to me and countless others based on the comments I got on my last post. Their subreddit is full of people's complaints, and it's barely been a month since good old Johnny was here on this very subreddit trying to defend himself against allegations that his exchange was using Cloudflare to deny website access during big price movement to profit on liquidations.

Maybe you've been fortunate and haven't had any issues with Kucoin, but there's no way to know if you might be next. Are you willing to take that risk?

I want people to withdraw their funds from Kucoin to send a message. This is how the market is supposed to work. If you treat your customers poorly, eventually you will lose those customers. After all, if the market doesn't provide the proper feedback, we can't blame anyone but ourselves for having to deal with such incompetence.

I think the crypto community has a golden opportunity here. An opportunity to make a statement that exchanges must answer to their users, not the other way around. This is exactly what crypto was made for. Not only for us to no longer have to rely on trusted third parties, but also to force any trusted third parties to do better.

Look, I don't expect all 8 million of Kucoin's users to suddenly withdraw their coins, but if I can get just enough of you to do so, it might finally get their attention.

I'm not trying to cancel Kucoin. I just want them to get their act together and start treating their customers right.

While it would be extremely hard to do something like this with traditional banks since it's so hard to self-custody fiat, it is possible with crypto. So if you belive in the power of crypto and why it was created, please share this story. Post it to other subreddits, spread it on Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Weibo, Wechat, Kakao, and Facebook. And if you have a Kucoin account, please withdraw your funds to a hardware device or at least to a more trustworthy exchange. Not only to send a message to Kucoin, but to protect yourselves from ending up in my situation. Because the last thing you want is for everyone else to withdraw before you get a chance to do so yourself.