Stop Fighting Generated Code: Introducing a Hand-Crafted Go SDK for KuCoin

Integrating an exchange API is rarely difficult because an endpoint is missing. It is difficult because the integration becomes part of a system that must behave predictably when the network is slow, when rate limits are reached, when API documentation is ambiguous, and when a number must retain every decimal place. In that environment, convenience wrappers can be expensive: a client that merely exposes every endpoint is not necessarily a client that feels safe to build upon.

That is the motivation behind kucoin-go, an unofficial Go client for KuCoin’s UTA (Unified Trading Account) and Classic API families. The project is built from scratch against KuCoin’s current documentation rather than as a wrapper over the official Universal SDK. Its goal is deliberately narrower: offer a consistent, idiomatic Go experience and expand endpoint coverage method by method, with tests and documentation keeping pace. 1

“We'd rather ship a small, correct surface than a large, half-tested one.” — kucoin-go project README 1

This is not a claim that generated SDKs have no place. If your application needs comprehensive KuCoin coverage immediately, the official client remains the sensible choice. kucoin-go is for Go developers who prefer an explicit, thoughtfully designed API surface—and who value being able to see precisely what is implemented today.

Why a smaller SDK can be a better foundation

An exchange client occupies an awkward but important boundary. On one side are remote API shapes, rate limits, account models, and authentication rules. On the other are your Go services, jobs, alerting pipeline, or trading logic. A useful SDK should make that boundary visible rather than hiding it behind generic types and optimistic defaults.

kucoin-go applies a few clear rules at that boundary. Network calls take a context.Context as their first argument, letting an application define cancellation and timeout behavior using standard Go mechanisms. The client can also receive an injected *http.Client, clock, and logger, which makes it easier to apply a house network policy in production and to write controlled tests. 1

The project keeps KuCoin’s two account models explicit. UTA and Classic expose different permissions, hosts, and response shapes, so the SDK does not flatten them into one misleading abstraction. The current UTA surface is accessed through client.UTA; the Classic service root is planned for later coverage. This distinction is especially helpful when an application needs to reason about which account model a request actually belongs to. 1

Treat money as data, not as a float

One of the most intentional choices in kucoin-go is deceptively simple: price, quantity, PnL, and fee fields are represented as strings at the transport boundary. 1

That may look less convenient than decoding directly into float64, but it is the correct friction for financial values. Binary floating-point numbers cannot represent many decimal fractions exactly. If a service receives an exchange value, performs arithmetic, and serializes it again, silent rounding can turn an apparently harmless conversion into a difficult reconciliation problem.

The library therefore preserves the value exactly as it arrives from the API and asks the application to choose an arithmetic type intentionally—for example, math/big.Rat or a decimal package. It is a small API design decision with a useful message: precision should be an explicit responsibility, never an accidental by-product of JSON unmarshalling.

Transport behavior designed for production realities

A clean Go method signature is only half of an SDK. What happens when the server rejects a call, sends a business-level error, or asks the caller to slow down matters just as much.

kucoin-go uses a shared transport executor that decodes response envelopes and exposes useful metadata, including the HTTP status, KuCoin business code and message, request ID, rate-limit headers, and server timing headers. The SDK’s error hierarchy is designed to be inspected with Go’s native error helpers rather than parsed as text. 1

_, err := client.UTA.Market.GetTickers(ctx, market.TradeTypeSpot, "BTC-USDT" )
if errors.Is(err, transport.ErrRateLimited) {
    // Apply the application's backoff strategy.
}

var apiErr *transport.KucoinError
if errors.As(err, &apiErr) {
    fmt.Println(apiErr.HTTPStatus, apiErr.Code, apiErr.Message)
}

Its retry policy is conservative by design. It applies exponential backoff with jitter only to GET requests and bounds the total retry window. Write operations are not automatically retried. That distinction is important: reissuing a data lookup after a transient failure may be safe; reissuing a request that places, cancels, or amends an order can create a duplicate-action problem. The project makes the safer default explicit and leaves idempotency decisions with the application. 1

Authentication follows the same philosophy. The library includes an independently implemented HMAC-SHA256 signer for KuCoin authentication headers and validates it with known-answer fixture vectors. The README also recommends obtaining credentials from environment variables or a secret store, using the minimum permission required, and restricting keys by IP where the exchange supports it. 1

Documentation that is checked, not merely written

Many SDK repositories start with a good endpoint table and gradually lose the race between code changes and documentation. kucoin-go tries to remove that failure mode.

Its endpoint reference is generated from an internal manifest, internal/endpoints.yaml. Contributors update the manifest, regenerate docs/ENDPOINTS.md, and CI rejects a change if the generated file differs from the committed version. In addition, each exported method must link to the exact KuCoin documentation page that it implements. 2

The practical result is a highly useful question to ask before starting an integration: does the method exist here today? Rather than inferring coverage from a roadmap or package name, a developer can consult a concise list of supported methods, their account mode, HTTP method, permission requirement, test location, and a direct upstream documentation link. 2

Current scope: the honest version

This is an early, pre-1.0 Phase 1 checkpoint. Today, kucoin-go implements and tests UTA Market functionality only. It does not yet implement UTA account, order, position, leverage, or transfer operations; Classic Spot, Margin, and Futures coverage; or any WebSocket client. 1

The current coverage map contains ten UTA Market methods. Most are public read operations, while order-book retrieval is a notable exception: development smoke testing showed that GetOrderBook requires authentication and the General permission, despite appearing public alongside similar market-data endpoints. The SDK documents that requirement rather than letting users discover it at runtime. 2

That candor is a feature, not a disclaimer hidden at the bottom of the page. A library that makes its limits obvious allows developers to select it appropriately: it is ready to support UTA market-data integration and not ready to run a production order-execution workflow.

Quick start: fetch a ticker without API credentials

Public market-data calls offer the fastest way to evaluate the SDK. The repository requires Go 1.22 or later and installs with the standard command below. 1

go get github.com/tigusigalpa/kucoin-go

The following example retrieves the latest price for the BTC-USDT spot symbol. Because this call is public, the client can be created without credentials. 1

package main

import (
    "context"
    "fmt"
    "log"

    kucoin "github.com/tigusigalpa/kucoin-go"
    "github.com/tigusigalpa/kucoin-go/uta/market"
)

func main() {
    client := kucoin.NewClient()

    tickers, err := client.UTA.Market.GetTickers(
        context.Background(),
        market.TradeTypeSpot,
        "BTC-USDT",
    )
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }

    fmt.Println(tickers.List[0].LastPrice)
}

The example captures the intended ergonomics: the account model and domain are visible in the call path, request lifetime is represented by a context, and LastPrice remains an exact string until the application decides how to process it.

An invitation to shape the roadmap

The roadmap is organized around a reliable core first, then broader trading domains, then specialty capabilities such as funding, subaccounts, and additional KuCoin products. Contributions are welcome, particularly for a single missing REST endpoint accompanied by fixtures, tests, a documentation link, and an updated generated coverage entry. 1

If your project needs full API coverage now, start with the official SDK. If you need a compact Go client for UTA market data and want a codebase that favors clear constraints, typed boundaries, testability, and documentation fidelity, try kucoin-go.

Explore the repository, inspect the coverage map before integrating, and open an issue if the next endpoint on the roadmap is the one your project needs: github.com/tigusigalpa/kucoin-go.

kucoin-go is an unofficial community-maintained client. It is provided as-is and is not financial advice. Review the project’s security notice and test new integrations with least-privilege credentials before using them with funded accounts. 1

References