KuCoin Expands Into Thailand’s Competitive Crypto Market

Crypto exchange KuCoin is further expanding its presence in Southeast Asia by targeting Thailand's rapidly growing crypto market. The company announced on April 23 that it plans to launch a new platform offering digital assets and related services in the country.

As part of this expansion, ERX Company Ltd, Thailand’s first digital token exchange supervised by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), will rebrand as KuCoin Thailand starting April 22. The crypto exchange will operate under the ERX name, which has recently obtained a crypto exchange license from Thailand’s financial regulators.

Att Tongyai Asavanund, CEO of ERX, stated, “We’re strengthening our ability to offer localized solutions tailored to the Thai market.” Existing users of ERX have already been migrated to the new KuCoin Thailand platform. The KuCoin TH app is now available for download on both Android and iOS.

KuCoin enters a competitive market, joining eight other companies already licensed by the Thai SEC to operate as crypto and digital asset exchanges. Some of the key players in the market include WAAN Exchange, Gulf Binance, Thai Digital Assets Exchange, InnovestX Securities, GMO-Z.com Cryptonomics, Upbit Exchange, Bitkub Online, and Orbix Trade.

Bitkub, which is the largest crypto exchange in Thailand, boasts a daily trading volume of around $70 million, according to CoinGecko. In comparison, KuCoin’s global platform reports a much higher daily trading volume of $3.8 billion.

In January, Thailand introduced a pilot program allowing tourists to use Bitcoin for payments in a sandboxed environment on the holiday island of Phuket, although the program has yet to be launched. While cryptocurrency trading remains popular in the country, the use of crypto assets for payments was banned by the central bank in 2022.

In early April, Thai regulators targeted foreign peer-to-peer crypto platforms in an effort to curb scams and money laundering. Meanwhile, KuCoin is working to settle a lawsuit with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which sued the exchange in March 2024 for violating the Commodity Exchange Act under the previous administration.