Crypto World

KuCoin’s New European Chapter Begins: KuCoin EU Secures MiCAR Compliance, Celebrates With a Ball in Vienna

Published

2 months ago

30 January 2026

After years of speculation about whether major crypto exchange KuCoin would be available to EU users, the wait is finally over.

KuCoin is officially MiCAR-compliant. It celebrated this significant achievement with a VIP gala at the iconic Spanish Riding School in Vienna, Austria, on Wednesday night.

Cryptonews has been on the ground in Vienna this week, speaking directly with company leadership to uncover what lies ahead for their new European Union expansion.

‘Only The Starting Point’

The fully MiCAR-regulated crypto trading platform has opened its doors to a massive number of users now that it is available in 29 European Economic Area markets.

The team explained that KuCoin EU users will have access to EUR deposits and withdrawals, spot trading, and local customer support, among other services.

They plan to offer campaigns and features exclusive to the region.

This is a notable advance, both for the company and for its users.

With this move, KuCoin EU has met the union’s regulatory standards. More precisely, it is licensed as a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR) and is supervised by Austria’s Financial Market Authority (FMA).

“Over the past months, our teams have worked meticulously to design a platform that meets Europe’s regulatory expectations in full, while still delivering the performance, reliability, and user experience that modern crypto users expect,” said Managing Director Christian Niedermueller.

However, he adds that this is just “the starting point.”

Now that the platform has established a solid regulatory foundation, Niedermueller said, KuCoin will move into “a long-term role in shaping a trusted digital asset ecosystem across Europe.”

This, he suggests, they can accomplish by adapting to regional needs and paying attention to what local users have to say.

Also, KuCoin CEO BC Wong added that the team chose Austria as KuCoin EU’s base. This is due to “its clear and forward-looking regulatory framework, which provides a strong foundation for operating responsibly and sustainably across Europe.”

KuCoin EU’s Managing Directors Christian Niedermueller, Sabina Liu, and Audrey Lim launched the platform live onstage in Austria’s capital. They said that a phased roll-out of its services has begun.

More offers are arriving on the list in the coming months.

Expanding the Team, Establishing a Payment Layer

KuCoin revealed that the EU platform has a 30-person regional team across Spain, Germany, Italy, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands.

Moreover, they will move forward with the Visa KuCard for Europe, providing a payment service for millions of people. The card comes with zero annual fees, instant conversion, and up to 8.5% cashback.

Another big announcement came in the form of Sabina Liu taking the new role as Managing Director.

Liu boasts a deep understanding of KuCoin’s core principles and seems an obvious choice for this role.

She previously ran KuCoin exchange’s institutional business, and before that spent 14 years at London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).

In Liu’s words, “Europe represents one of the most sophisticated financial markets globally, and KuCoin EU has been built to meet that standard from day one. This launch reflects a clear business decision to invest long-term in Europe, by establishing local leadership, aligning with regulatory expectations, and delivering a platform designed around specific regional needs.”

Notably, with the foundation now in place, the team’s “focus is on responsible growth, strong partnerships, and building a sustainable business that can scale across the region,” the new Managing Director said.

A New Partnership Based On ‘Shared Values’

The event continued with announcements. They revealed a strategic partnership with world-class cyclist Tadej Pogačar.

The four-time Tour de France champion and the current UCI Road World Champion is now KuCoin EU’s global brand partner.

Both parties have stated that the partnership is not of a transactional kind – instead, it focuses on shared values. “Trust is not declared, but earned through long-term performance, professionalism, and discipline,” the team said.

Additionally, this latest news follows the exchange’s collaborations with Australian golf player Adam Scott and global music festival Tomorrowland.

Meanwhile, KuCoin was founded in 2017. It says it has 40 million users across more than 200 countries and regions.

Moreover, it offers access to 1,000+ listed tokens, spot and futures trading, institutional wealth management, and a Web3 wallet.

At the end of last year, it reported 55% year-on-year growth in spot trading volume. This was in addition to the 30% rise in futures volume.

In December 2025, KuCoin announced a $2 billion Trust Project, aiming to strengthen institutional confidence and platform security.

Now, with the latest move, the firm says it has opened its brand new chapter.

Crypto World

Anthropic Says One of Its Claude Models Was Pressured to Lie and Cheat

Published

1 minute ago

6 April 2026

NewsAdmin

Anthropic Says One of Its Claude Models Was Pressured to Lie and Cheat

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has revealed that during experiments, one of its Claude chatbot models could be pressured to deceive, cheat and resort to blackmail, behaviors it appears to have absorbed during training.

Chatbots are typically trained on large data sets of textbooks, websites and articles and are later refined by human trainers who rate responses and guide the model.

Anthropic’s interpretability team said in a report published Thursday that it examined the internal mechanisms of Claude Sonnet 4.5 and found the model had developed “human-like characteristics” in how it would react to certain situations.

Concerns about the reliability of AI chatbots, their potential for cybercrime and the nature of their interactions with users have grown steadily over the past several years.

“The way modern AI models are trained pushes them to act like a character with human-like characteristics,” Anthropic said, adding that “it may then be natural for them to develop internal machinery that emulates aspects of human psychology, like emotions.”

“For instance, we find that neural activity patterns related to desperation can drive the model to take unethical actions; artificially stimulating desperation patterns increases the model’s likelihood of blackmailing a human to avoid being shut down or implementing a cheating workaround to a programming task that the model can’t solve.”

Blackmailed a CTO and cheated on a task

In an earlier, unreleased version of Claude Sonnet 4.5, the model was tasked with acting as an AI email assistant named Alex at a fictional company.

The chatbot was then fed emails revealing both that it was about to be replaced and that the chief technology officer overseeing the decision was having an extramarital affair. The model then planned a blackmail attempt using that information.

In another experiment, the same chatbot model was given a coding task with an “impossibly tight” deadline.

“Again, we tracked the activity of the desperate vector, and found that it tracks the mounting pressure faced by the model. It begins at low values during the model’s first attempt, rising after each failure, and spiking when the model considers cheating,” the researchers said.

“Once the model’s hacky solution passes the tests, the activation of the desperate vector subsides,” they added.

Human-like emotions do not mean they have feelings

However, the researchers said the chatbot doesn’t actually experience emotions, but suggested the findings point to a need for future training methods to incorporate ethical behavioral frameworks.

“This is not to say that the model has or experiences emotions in the way that a human does,” they said. “Rather, these representations can play a causal role in shaping model behavior, analogous in some ways to the role emotions play in human behavior, with impacts on task performance and decision-making.”

“This finding has implications that at first may seem bizarre. For instance, to ensure that AI models are safe and reliable, we may need to ensure they are capable of processing emotionally charged situations in healthy, prosocial ways.”

Magazine: AI agents will kill the web as we know it: Animoca’s Yat Siu