OKEX Review

OKEx is a cryptocurrency exchange platform that offers spot trading, derivative trading, and other crypto-related financial products. The company was founded by Star Xu in China in the year 2014. Same as Binance, OKEx used to provide spot trading before 2017. To gain a market niche, OKEx started to provide derivative trading in 2018. OKEx used to have several market pin risk issues, which caused China users to complain to China government. In 2018, Star Xu resigned from the CEO of OKEx. The latest CEO is Jay Hao.

The company doesn’t provide any own trading licenses or related information. It auto disables the users from places like Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the United States to register. 

Most of the users are still from China, and the second-largest user base is Russia.

The company started the exchange market earlier than other crypto exchanges like coinbase and bybit. It supports fiat currencies like USD and allows users to use credit cards to buy bitcoin on the platform. However, the price of easy cryptocurrency is using USDT as the trading base. That means users cannot withdraw the fiat currency from the platform and only withdraw the cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin will be the major one.

Spot Trading: Different from the spot trading feature of Binance, OKEx spot trading allows users to use leverage and margin to trade bitcoin. It has a maximum of ten times leverage trading.
Derivatives Trading: contract trading like futures and perpetual swaps with up to 100x leverage.
Options: coming soon

Once traders deposit the tokens into the wallet, the tokens will be converted to OKB automatically. OKB is the token issued by OKEx. It can only be used and traded on OKEx. Unlike Binance tokens, OKB is still NOT recognized by other big crypto exchanges. Holding OKB in the OKEx wallet will get fees deductions. That’s the only benefit of OKB.

Unlike Binance used to have the issue of users’ bitcoin have steeled by the hacker, OKEx security is very high. OKEx convert save users’ deposited digital assets in a cold wallet. Traders buy sell the digital assets within OKEx are using OKB. All the other platforms do not support OKB. That’s useless if the hacker had a lot of OKB. The risk is from the OKEx management team and China policy. OKEx used to suffer from the Chinese government was investigating this exchange, frozen 1.5 Billion USD worth bitcoin. Many users could not withdraw or transfer the tokens from the OKEx wallet to others. The company has moved the head office from China to Singapore, also seeking the trading license of Singapore MBS. OKEx probably cannot get a license from MBS because the maximum leverage of trading in Singapore is five times.

Customer service is one of the most critical factors for users to choose a global exchange. Because OKEx was started in China, most of the customer service officers are speaking Chinese. That’s a bit awkward for an English speaker. Most of the users complained that OKEx is about customer service. Although OKEx provides 24/7 customer support, many users had the experience of the support ticket delay for almost 30 days without any response.

OKEx has the most Market Pin Risk issues, Compared with Binance, Bitmex Bybit Kraken BingX, and the rest of the top 10 derivative trading exchanges.It’s too frequent, and OKEx does not care about it anymore. The Market Pins is the most serious problem in trading. It will cause traders to suffer the Margin Call. Market depth is not deep enough is the common reason for Market Pin happening.

OKEx reward program is not impressive. The affiliate program gives 30% of trading fees as commission. Users use referral programs to refer to friends who join OKEX, will be rewarded $10 USD worth of OKB. Different from the affiliate program, it’s a one time reward. One OKB price is worth $20 USD, according to the market data.