KuCoin Ends Services in Russia and Belarus

KuCoin, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges outside the US, has stopped serving users in Russia and Belarus with immediate effect. In an announcement on Thursday 29 October, the exchange said it would “discontinue services for users in Russia and Belarus effective immediately”, covering “all KuCoin products, services, and features”.

The exchange gave one reason: the move is “in line with applicable legal and regulatory requirements”. It did not say which laws, which regulator or which sanctions regime it had in mind, and it did not say how many accounts are affected. CoinDesk also reported that KuCoin did not identify “any specific sanctions or regulations behind the decision”.

What affected users have been told

KuCoin says it is running “an orderly termination process that allows affected users to close positions and withdraw their assets”. Users whose accounts are affected will receive a notification “with the relevant deadlines and instructions for orderly closure”. Those deadlines have not been published. Users who have not received a notice need take no action, according to the announcement.

The exchange repeated the message on X a couple of hours later. “Compliance is at the core of our operations and guides our decisions on where and how we offer our services,” it wrote, adding that its priority was “an orderly transition, including the closure of positions and withdrawal of assets”.

The announcement also warns users to stay alert to phishing and to use only official KuCoin channels.

How many people that covers is unclear. Reuters reported that KuCoin, which is based in the Seychelles, says it has 45 million customers in more than 200 countries. KuCoin has not said how many of them are in Russia or Belarus.

MEXC went first, nine days earlier

KuCoin is not the first exchange to pull out this month. On 20 October MEXC published a near-identical service update. “As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance global compliance, MEXC has decided to discontinue services for users of Russia or Belarus,” it said. Like KuCoin, MEXC said affected users would get individual notices “outlining the applicable timelines and procedures for closing positions and withdrawing assets”. It did not name a regulator either.

CoinDesk reported that Bitget also announced restrictions on Russian and Belarusian customers this month. TSN has not seen a Bitget statement.

The two exchanges were already on regulators’ radar elsewhere. In October South Korea said it would block the websites of 27 unregistered exchanges, KuCoin and MEXC among them. CoinDesk also notes KuCoin’s history in the US: in January 2025 it agreed to pay nearly $300m after pleading guilty to running an unlicensed money-transmitting business there. And in March this year, according to CoinDesk, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission barred its operator from serving US customers unless it registers as a foreign board of trade.

Why two exchanges using the same words matters

KuCoin’s and MEXC’s notices are worded so alike that they look like a shared compliance decision. Both are immediate. Both rely on notices to individual users rather than published deadlines. And both justify the exit only in general terms of “compliance”. That vagueness may be deliberate. By naming no rule, an exchange avoids admitting that it has been exposed to one, and leaves room to describe the change as housekeeping.

The background is well known even if the exchanges will not spell it out. Western governments have tightened sanctions on Russian finance since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. CoinDesk points out that some of those measures now reach crypto platforms outside the European Union that are alleged to have helped sanctioned entities move money. An offshore exchange with Russian customers therefore carries a growing risk of losing banking partners, payment providers or access to licences in bigger markets. At some point the cost of keeping those users outweighs the trading fees they bring in.

Binance shows how this can unfold. It left Russia in 2023 by selling its local business to CommEX, which closed six months later, according to CoinDesk. Elsewhere, enforcement keeps tightening on exchanges that are properly licensed: Ireland’s central bank recently fined Coinbase €3.25m over safeguarding, and the Philippine central bank is reported to be acting against Coins.ph. For Russian and Belarusian traders, the result is a shrinking set of large offshore venues. Those that remain are likely to be smaller and less visible to regulators, which works against what sanctions are meant to achieve.

Two things are still unknown: the deadline KuCoin is giving users to withdraw, and how many people are affected. Neither has been published.