OKEx Exchange — Beginner’s Guide

OKEx is a digital assets exchange and has a Chinese origin. It’s a branch of OKCoin and the exchange is focused towards more professional crypto traders. OKEx offers a wide range of cryptocurrency pairs, which provides a greater opportunity for traders, who can also directly trade to and from FIAT currency.

Founded in 2011, it has slowly but steadily become the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange worldwide, in terms of volume. OKEx has recently shifted to the cryptocurrency friendly island of Malta. However, the main team is still situated in Hong Kong.

“Our founders are a group of technology specialists from all corners of the world.”, as reported to us by Andy Cheung, Head of Operations at OKEx, “Back in 2011, they came across with a new concept named ‘Bitcoin’ and were truly amazed by the idea of decentralization. Through endless reading and research, they educated themselves and soon became experts in the field of blockchain. Then, they decided to change their entrepreneurial direction and launched their first ever digital asset exchange.”

He further talks about the partners of OKEx: “The launch soon caught the interests of a number of leading venture capital firms, including VenturesLab which was co-founded by Tim Draper, approaching OKEx for discussing partnerships. The investors were all impressed by our beliefs and vision, and were willing to invest in the innovations for the future. Tens of millions of dollars were raised in several funding rounds, providing a vital contribution to OKEx’s today success.”

What’s special about OKEx?

OKEx is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, in terms of volume. This means that it has a high liquidity in most of its trading pairs. As of writing these words, a daily volume of more than $1 Bn USD to be exact.

Moreover, OKEx is known for having low trading fees — ranges from 0.03% to 0.15%. This is considerably cheaper than most other crypto exchanges.

It is also one of the few exchanges that support a fully independent stand-alone desktop platform. This makes it easier to trade on a low to medium end hardware, which might have limited memory. Additionally, OKEx also supports multiple monitors, which makes it easier to expand the charts view and other important valuable information and data.

How to Open and register a new account on OKEx

Now that you have decided to choose OKEx, let’s discuss how you can open an account on the exchange. The following steps explain the easy process:

Step 1: Go to OKEx Website

Access the OKEx website. A tip: Bookmark the original website so that you can open it easily. There has been instances where traders got into fraudulent websites and lost money. Therefore, always be sure that you are on the original website, which has its unique signed SSL certificate. Never click on links from unauthorized emails.

Step 2: Complete the signup process

Click on the ‘signup’ button on the top right corner of the screen and go through the short form, filling in the requested information. Click on ‘signup’ in the center down of the screen once you have uploaded all the information.

The home Screen: Once you have signed up successfully, the following screen opens up.

Hover over your email and press ‘setting’ to enter the setting menu. You have to enter the settings, from where you set up the “Fund Password” in the security tab. This is required before you can transfer any tokens.

Step 3: Setting up Fund Password and Depositing Funds

To set up fund password, you first have to bind your google authenticator. To set up google authenticator, you need to download the google authenticator application (in case not already there) to your smart phone and read the QR code in the bind “Bind Google Authenticator” screen on the website.

Important: The paraphrase next to the QR code is your backup key to reset your 2FA password in case your phone is stolen or lost. Keep it in a safe place, offline your computer.

Now you can set up the fund password and continue to deposit tokens in to your new account. After depositing, You will need to transfer funds from your deposit wallet (“My Wallet”) into your trading account which is called “Spot Account”.

In the “My Wallet” section, you can view all the tokens that have been deposited or withdrawn from the exchange. Once you click on a specific coin, it will create a dedicated wallet for that coin and store the coins there. You will be able to trade, once the coin was transferred to your trading or spot accounts.

Step 4: Placing Orders

To place orders, select “Token Trading” from the main menu. From there, select your base asset: USDT, BTC, ETH or OKB (OKex exchange token, very similar to Binance’s BNB). Then, you would see the list of the available trading pairs on your left side. You can use the search bar for an easier navigation.

After selecting the required trading pair, you place an order to buy or sell that pair using the buy and sell tabs in the middle of the screen (as seen on the image above). Set the order type, price and amount, before pressing the button to extract the command.

On the bottom of the home screen, you can also view all of your open and closed orders in the Open Orders and Order History tabs respectively.

The OKB Token

OKB is the official token of OKEx and, as mentioned, the OKEx exchange supports trading pairs against their OKB token. The token is an ERC-20 complaint token that can be easily traded over the exchange with decent volume on the ETH and BTC markets. There is a limited number of 1 billion OKB tokens, 600 million of which have been distributed to OKEx customers for community building and marketing. The rest of the tokens are locked up for a period that varies between one to three years.

Good luck trading on OKEx. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section below.

Originally published at cryptopotato.com on June 21, 2018.