OKB is a utility token which gives perks to traders using the OKE exchange. It caught my attention because it's the highest ranked token on CoinMarketCap which I'd never heard of, currently ranked 23rd with a total market cap of $2.8 billion.
The price has done very well during 2023...
What is OKB and what utility does it have....?
It's a utility token native to the OK blockchain and OKX crypto exchange with four major uses...
- Holders can save up to 40% on trading fees, depending on how much they hold
- Holders can earn a passive income just for holding it.
- Holders can take part in various token sales.
- Holders get voting rights on development proposals....
So in short it's pretty much a standard trading token, very much like tokens linked to any other exchange, but the reason this coin has been doing so well recently is because the OKX exchange has become very popular: it is ranked third for liquidity and fourth for trading volume.
OKE is a Binance competitor....
So as the 3rd/ 4th largest exchange OKE is a serious competitor to Binance: they have plenty of trading pairs and a slick app and that's a big plus when considering investing maybe in OKB...
OKB Tokenomics
This is an odd (dodgy?) one...
There is a 300M total supply, of which 60M are deemed to be circulating, with around 240M stored in cold wallets, rather than OKE's hotwallet (to 'improve security').
All of the tokens have been released, mainly during 2022 so we are at max supply, sort of...
Both coinmarketcap and coingecko report a 60M total supply because they regard the rest as dormant, but in so doing they brink the OKB rank down from around 8th to its current 23rd position.
At one point CoinGecko did report the OKB ranking based on the 300M supply rather than 60M tokens, but they've since changed this to report inline with CoinMarketCap.
The thing is 85% of that supply isn't dormant in the same way as lost-key BTC is doramnt, someone presumably controls the keys to that rather large sum of money and can release it when they see fit, so I'm not impressed here at all.
Buy Back and Burn...
30% of the fees on spot trading are used to buy back OKB tokens which are burned every 3 months.
This is a lot like BNB, but TBH with those 'not dormant tokens' kicking around I'm not even thinking this is relevant!
OKB - Not for me...
While I like the idea of an exchange competitor for Binance and I like the utility offered with OKB the issue of those 85% of tokens which are in cold wallets which are really probably controlled by the exchange, I really don't like that.
They can just be released at any time whoever has the keys sees fit, there's potential for a real price crash and so on that basis I won't be Vesting in this particular coin!