A Look at OKB – Another Exchange Token or an Undervalued Asset?

UTC by Natallia Maksimenko · 5 min read
A Look at OKB – Another Exchange Token or an Undervalued Asset?
Photo: Shutterstock

OKB utility token used on the OKEx trading platform experiences a significant price serge. Tokeninsight research institute foresees a positive outlook on OKB’s ecosystem development as the OKEx Empire continues to expand.

Recently OKEx, one of the world’s largest crypto trading platforms, gained recognition for surpassing BitMEX in Bitcoin futures trading, who had long held the futures throne. Along with this surge in trading volume, OKB, a utility token that can be used on OKEx, recently experienced a price surge following the announcement of the OKChain TestNet. OKChain is OKEx’s first public blockchain and OKDEX is a decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) that will operate on the blockchain. During this period, OKB’s price surged more than 24% in seven days, hitting 7.44 USDT, a new all-time high.

Although OKB token’s price has since slumped along with the rest of the crypto market, Tokeninsight, a blockchain research and rating institute, has expressed they foresee a positive outlook on OKB’s ecosystem development, using the “Income Approach H Model” to evaluate the buyback and burn data released by the exchange. In this article, we take a further look at OKB, its ecosystem, and its future prospects.

OKB’s Use Cases Are Expanding

Issued by the OK Blockchain Foundation, OKB is the circulating utility token of the OKEx ecosystem. The original supply of OKB was one billion tokens, though 700 million of unissued OKB were burned by the Foundation in February 2020 following the launch of the OKChain TestNet. OKB was issued on the Ethereum blockchain but will later be migrated to OKChain. The Foundation has also promised that there will be no further issuance of OKB in the future, meaning OKB has entered “absolute deflation” and has become the world’s first fully circulating platform token.

By buying back OKB from the secondary market and burning them, OKEx is spending its revenue to give back to its supporters, helping facilitate the development of the OKB ecosystem. From an announcement published by OKEx, 30% of trading fee revenue from the spot market was used to repurchase and burn OKB between May 4, 2019, and Feb 29, 2020, in seven rounds. The exchange reported that they had burned a total of 17,161,709.06 OKB during the buyback and burn campaigns, leaving circulation at 282,838,290.94 OKB.

OKB has been traded and used by ten million users worldwide over the past two years. The token has been adopted by OKEx as its utility token, providing its users with benefits including trading fee discounts, voting rights, and merchant privileges. There are already 35 external use cases for OKB, including payments, wallets, and loans, and OKEx anticipates more to come. What’s more, OKB is now available on eight fiat gateways, meaning that users can purchase OKB with US Dollars, Euros, Korean Won, Vietnamese Dong, Indonesian Rupiah, and more. In total, OKB is being traded on over 50 other exchanges, covering 141 countries and territories.

OKChain, OKT, and OKB

On Feb 10, 2020, OKChain TestNet went live. OKChain is built to support a wide range of decentralized applications, as well as allowing users to issue their own digital assets, create trading pairs, and trade them freely. OKEx is confident that the infrastructure it is developing will support large-scale commercial applications and contribute to the blockchain industry’s continuous push for wider adoption. With multi-chain support, data layering, and other special features, OKChain aims to build a high-performance public blockchain for anyone to use as they see it. OKEx’s DEX will be the first application built on OKChain. What separates this DEX from existing ones is that it will work more as an infrastructure than a simple platform, allowing users to build their own DEX by capitalizing on the blockchain’s underlying tools. Nonetheless, building a DEX remains just one of the possible applications users will be able to build on OKChain. Without having to worry about the complicated underlying blockchain technology, OKChain will be every developer’s toolbox for creativity and entrepreneurship.

To fulfill the requirements of OKChain’s Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism, OKT, the native token of OKChain, will be issued along with the launch of the chain. The issuance will occur in the MainNet genesis block and in node blocks, where it is expected to increase by 1-5% per year. OKEx has said OKB holders will share the OKT issued in the genesis block, complete details of which will be announced when the MainNet goes live. Both OKB and OKT are inseparable on OKChain, and the dual token design is helpful to eliminate the issues which have appeared on other exchange blockchains. For chains such as Binance Chain, the flawed design creates a crisis for chain’s ecosystem development since BNB’s deflation model causes most of the chain’s token holders to speculate with the price of the token rather than using it for building and operating applications.

The World Ahead

OKEx now leads Bitcoin futures trading, surpassing BitMEX with a 40% lead in the market. During this recent period of extreme market volatility, OKEx has shown greater stability over its rivals with no clawback, no auto deleveraging (ADL), and a robust API that prevented institutional investors from taking the harsh losses made on some other exchanges. OKEx’s performance over the past two years can be attributed to their willingness to listen to their community and adapt accordingly. As the OKEx Empire continues to expand, holders of the OKB token can anticipate even better times to come. To put it into numbers, in a recent valuation report, Tokeninsight put OKB’s target price based on discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation at US$6.59, while the secondary market price remains around US$4.36 at the time of writing. We are certainly excited about what’s to come.

Altcoin News, Bitcoin News, Blockchain News, Cryptocurrency News, News
Related Articles