KuCoin lists a great many assets, including a lot of small caps that never make it onto Binance or Kraken. That is the reason most people end up tracking a KuCoin portfolio, and it brings one specific problem worth understanding before you start.
Moonitor does not connect to your KuCoin account. No API key, no login. It reads the public price feed and you enter your holdings. See crypto portfolio tracker without API keys for why.
The long tail is the point
If your portfolio is BTC and ETH, almost any exchange will do. KuCoin earns its place when you hold things that are harder to price: newer tokens, smaller projects, assets that only have a market on a handful of venues.
For those coins KuCoin is often the only supported exchange in Moonitor that lists them at all, which makes it the only way to get a live price into your total rather than typing a number you looked up once.
Pair naming
KuCoin quotes most things against USDT. A few majors also have USDC or BTC quoted pairs.
Search for the pair as BASE/QUOTE, for example KCS/USDT. If a coin has both a USDT and a BTC pair, pick based on how you want to read it: the USDT pair tells you the dollar value, the BTC pair tells you whether the coin is gaining or losing against Bitcoin.
The thin pair problem
This is the thing to actually pay attention to on KuCoin.
A pair with little trading volume produces an unreliable price. The last trade might be minutes old, the spread between buy and sell can be wide, and a single small order moves the quoted price by a noticeable percentage. Feed that into a portfolio total and the total inherits the noise.
Practical consequences:
- Your total will jump around for reasons that have nothing to do with the market. A thin pair can show a large percentage move on one small trade.
- Profit figures become approximate. The weighted average of what you paid is exact, because you typed it in. The current value is only as good as the last trade.
- You could not actually sell at that price. Selling a meaningful position into a thin book moves the price against you, sometimes a lot. The quoted figure is optimistic.
None of this is a reason to avoid KuCoin. It is a reason to read small cap totals as an estimate rather than a number.
If a coin has a pair on more than one supported exchange, track it on whichever has the deeper book. For most assets that is the larger venue.
Setting it up
- Choose KuCoin as the exchange.
- Search for your pair, usually against USDT.
- Add each purchase separately with the amount and price paid.
Entering buys individually rather than as one averaged line lets Moonitor compute the weighted average correctly. See tracking crypto profit and loss.
Delistings
Small cap listings are less permanent than major ones. Exchanges delist assets that lose volume, and when a pair is delisted its price feed stops.
If a market stops updating, that is usually why. Move the holding to another exchange that still lists it, or if nothing does, keep the entry for your records and accept that the value is stale. A total containing a dead pair looks correct and is not, which is the worst kind of wrong.
