OKCoin
OKCoin is a digital asset trading platform providing spot trading services between the US dollar, Euro, and Japanese Yen as fiat currencies, and Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and other digital assets to customers around the globe. OKCoin Exchange China operated a CNY/BTC spot pair with margin trading from its Beijing entity, while OKCoin International operates a USD/BTC spot pair with margin trading and BTC/USD futures from its Singapore entity.
Contents
At the moment, the head center of OKCoin is located in Beijing, with a staff of more than 140 people, about half a dozen specialists from abroad.
Main information
- Country: China
- Headquarter: Beijing
- Type: Exchange
- Round: Seed
- Cost: $1 million
- Date: 4-Sep-2013
- Investors: Ventures Lab
Description
International exchange of digital currencies OKCoin was founded in 2013. Rapidly developing, the company has established itself in the market as the largest exchange in terms of trading volumes. Strong management and technical team, headed by the Director General of the Old Xu (Xu Star) and technical Director of Changping jao (ChangpengZhao), put the company in the bitcoin industry with great success. In March 2014, OKCoin has received more than $10 million of venture capital from known investors such as Ceyuan Capital, Venture Labs and a famous investor from the Silicon Valley, Tim Draper (Tim Draper).
For private users, there are three levels of account: 0, 1 and 2. Level 0 is provided as soon as registration is complete. To obtain levels 1 and 2, it is necessary to go through the verification procedure, which involves the provision of personal data to the site, necessary for the identification of the user.
Depending on the verification level, the following restrictions apply:
- Level 0. The user can not replenish the Deposit and withdraw funds, even in digital currencies, therefore, trade is not available.
- Level 1. There are no restrictions on entering cryptocurrencies. Maximum output: up to 200 BTC, LTC 1000 and 5000 ETH per day.
- Level 2. No restrictions on the Deposit of funds in cryptocurrency. Enter up to $100,000 per day. Maximum output: up to 200 BTC, 5000 LTC, 1000 ETH and $100,000 per day.
History
OKCoin was founded by CEO Star Xu in 2013 and has raised US $10mm in investments from Ceyuan Ventures, Mantra Capital, Ventures Lab and other notable private investors including Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper.
Star Xu is an experienced technology executive. Professionally, Star worked at Yahoo/Alibaba as a search algorithm engineer before serving as Chief Technical Officer of DocIn.com – a popular file sharing company – where he managed a team of 120 engineers.[1]
OKCoin has publicly expressed intention to expand overseas and become a worldwide digital currency services company.
In April 2017, According to the report, OKCoin has stopped accepting US dollar. In the same month OKcoin joined Bitfinex in freezing wire transfers, citing ‘issues’ with intermediary banks. [2]
As of August 2016, OKCoin was the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world with a volume of over 16,000,000 Bitcoins per month.
In September 2017, OKCoin announced to stop Yuan-to-Bitcoin trading by October’s end.
Trading
The platform supports only four currency pairs: BTC/USD, LTC/USD, EUR/USD and ETC/USD. For each transaction, the cryptocurrency exchange charges a Commission fee. The size of the Commission depends on the user’s trading volume for the last 30 days. The higher the score, the lower the fee.
The size of the commission is small, the maximum can reach 0.2%. The support of margin trading is implemented at this crypto-exchange. Consequently, traders can use leverage to trade, which is an additional profit-making tool. To work in this mode, it is not necessary to have a cryptocurrency on the balance. But, it is necessary to understand that this is a risky tool, because, in the event of adverse changes in the rate, you can incur serious losses. Commission fees when using the margin trading regime are even more loyal. The size of leverage in the mode of margin trading depends on the level of the user, which is determined, including, based on his trading volumes.
In addition to the usual transactions for the purchase and sale of digital currencies, users have the opportunity to trade futures. For this purpose, a special service OKEx, working on the subdomain of the main site. According to the exchange’s management, the platform is one of the first to provide an opportunity to trade futures based on digital assets.
A variety of analytical tools are available to help make trading easier and more efficient. With their help, traders can analyze the dynamics of the price of the chosen cryptocurrency and make more correct and informed decisions when creating orders.
Despite the fact that the cryptocurrency exchange supports only four currency pairs, it is one of the largest platforms in the industry. In the past, it has always been at the top of the rankings. With increasing competition in the field, the platform’s positions decreased slightly, but not significantly. In terms of trade volume, it is slightly inferior to the leading platforms Poloniex and Kraken. According to the service CoinMarketCap, as of November 11, 2017, the daily trading volume on this exchange cryptocurrency is $13 728 807, which at the current rate corresponds to 2 172 BTC. It is worth noting that such a low figure is very much associated with the lack of the ability to enter US dollars on the platform. Earlier, the exchange demonstrated significantly higher trading volumes.
Controversy
On May 23, 2015, OKCoin made public a contractual dispute the company was having with Roger Ver over the management rights to the domain name “bitcoin.com.”[3] OKCoin management claimed that they could no longer pay Ver the money which was contractually owed to him due to a recent case in which Ripple Labs was fined $700,000 by FinCEN for failure to collect proper KYC paperwork from Ver. In response, Ver published several months of email history between himself and OKCoin demonstrating that OKCoin had not been making payments for several months prior to the news about Ripple’s fine.
In the emails, OKCoin CEO Star Xu claims to have discovered a more recent version of the contract signed by both parties, which included a clause that gave OKCoin the right to terminate the contract upon six months notice. Until this point, all communications between the two parties had been cryptographically signed using GPG, but Ver was able to prove that the newer version of the contract was signed with the same timestamped signature he appended to the previous version of the contract, indicating that his signature was merely copied over to the new document.
OKCoin proceeded to make a public offer of a $20,000 reward for anyone who was able to prove that Ver’s statements were false; Ver responded in kind by offering a $1,000,000 reward to anyone who could prove that the signature on the more recent contract was actually valid and not a forgery. The OKCoin reward was paid at the end of May, 2015 following the report of analysis of the contracts posted publicly by OKCoin.[4]
External links
- OKCoin Official website
- WeUseCoins – CNY Bitcoin Exchange
- Cryptocompare – OKCoin Exchange Reviews, Live Markets
- CoinMarketCap – OKCoin
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