OKB Wiki: Coin History, Techstack, and Crypto News

OKB is the native cryptocurrency token of the OKX exchange, formerly the OKEx exchange. It is meant to provide discounts on trading fees and act as a governance token for choosing which cryptocurrencies are allowed on the platform. The exchange is based in Malta.

History

The OKEx crypto exchange was launched in 2017. The OKEx native cryptocurrency OKB was launched in March 2018. The exchange had 10 versions of its test net before the mainnet launch in December 2020.

There are 300,000,000 OKB currently in circulation out of the total available 1 billion OKB. The remaining 700,000,000 OKBs are due to be released in June 2022. Of the 300 million OKB in circulation, 40% is dedicated to the founders and project, 10% is with investors while 50% remains for airdrops and rewards. Of the 700 million to be released in 2022, 100 million goes to early investors, 200 million to the funding team, 100 million goes to building the OK blockchain foundation, and 300 million goes to public awards.

OKX is an offshoot of the China-based OKCoin platform which has been in operation since 2013. OKCoin continues to be in operation with its original purpose of exchanging traditional currency with cryptocurrency being maintained. OKX focuses purely on trading cryptocurrencies.

The exchange changed its name from OKEx to OKX in January 2022. In March 2022, ManchesterF FC and OKX got into a partnership, with Manchester FC announcing OKX as their official cryptocurrency partner.

Biggest Claims to Fame

Holders of OKB get up to a 40% discount on transactions on the OKX exchange depending on how much OKX they own. The more OKB a user owns, the higher the discount gets. The discounts are very attractive, especially for people who hold regular transactions which increases the number of people who buy OKB for the discount.

OKX regularly burns OKB tokens in order to increase the value of OKB. They use 30% of the commissions they earn to do so. By burning a percentage of the OKB in circulation, the number of OKB on the market reduces, which in turn leads to the value of OKB on the market increasing to make up for the reduced amount of OKB on the market. The team also ensures all the burns are made public which increases the transparency of the platform and gives people confidence in it.

Biggest Criticism

Withdrawals of OKB stopped suddenly in October 2020 due to the arrest of the OKX owner. He is suspected to hold the private key for transactions and due to his arrest, the entire platform was put on hold. This caused a variety of issues including a mass withdrawal of finance after the platform came back up and several people choosing to exit the network because they learnt a platform shutdown was one of the risks.

In 2018, claims were brought up against OKX that they were charging up to 1 million US dollars to list different tokens. Representatives from OKX said the claims were not true but the claim made people suspicious of them. The claims were supported by evidence that once a cryptocurrency was listed on the exchange, the value of the cryptocurrency went up in value significantly.

OKB is not open for US-based investors. This is due to the regulations required for cryptocurrencies in the US market. This has brought up the question of what could be so bad with the platform that they would exclude one of the largest and most valuable cryptocurrency markets from the running to avoid American regulatory bodies and investigators.

Sylvain Ribes, an investor and cryptocurrency trader carried out an investigation using publically available information on the OKB platform trades that found that nearly 93% of the trades on the platform are faked. If this information is true and comes to be confirmed, the value of OKB will dip drastically which will cause many investors to end up losing money.

The founder of OKX and the cofounder had a disagreement that led to the cofounder’s OKX account being shut down with over 800 million RMB getting lost in the process. The cofounder argued and sued the platform over it. It also brought up the question of if they could lock out a former partner and lose the partner’s money, what was stopping them from locking and draining other people’s accounts in the same way.

Team

OKX was formed by Mingxing 'Star' Xu in 2017. Star Xu studied at the University of science and technology in Beijing and Renmin University in China. He is the founder of OKCoin and the co-founder of OKX.