In brief

  • OKCoin is listing $YFI, $COMP, and $DOT.
  • It is eyeing up 15 more DeFi tokens.
  • It supports USD pairings for all three tokens.

Exchange OKCoin today announced that it will begin listing three tokens that have recently jumped in price: yearn.finance’s $YFI, Compound’s $COMP, and Polkadot’s $DOT. 

The exchange supports US dollar pairings for the three listings for customers in 150 countries including the US (save for New York state), but excluding Singapore, Brunei, Japan, and countries in the European Union.

It claims to be the second exchange that supports US dollar pairings for $YFI, after Coinbase Pro.

"As long-term crypto proponents, we fundamentally believe that DeFi shows the potential of decentralizing the full tech stack of the financial system,” Hong Fang, OKCoin’s CEO, told Decrypt

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Fang added: “What DeFi is trying to do now is to re-create a completely new tech stack outside the current banking system. It’s a fascinating continuation of the theme to build ‘individual monetary sovereignty’ from the ground up, which is what DeFi is doing now."

YFI, COMP, and DOT are governance tokens, meaning that holders can use them to vote on the future of the decentralized lending protocols that mint them. These tokens are also held for speculative purposes. 

People can earn YFI and COMP by using the protocols; lending or borrowing money from Compound earns you COMP, for instance. 

COMP kicked off a governance token craze when it launched at $97 on June 16 and shot up to $348 by June 21. Its current price is $155. YFI came out at the end of July. Its creator described it as worthless, but now a single YFI token costs $36,057. 

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DOT, meanwhile, is something of an outlier in the group. It powers Polkadot, an Ethereum competitor focused on interoperability, not decentralized finance.

OKCoin is considering listing a further 15 DeFi tokens, including Curve (CRV), Chainlink (LINK), and Synthetix (SNX). 

OKCoin claims to be a smartened-up, regulator-friendly exchange that diverged from OKEx a couple of years ago. OKEx is far larger, with a daily volume of $1.7 billion. 

Both have ‘BB’ ratings on Crypto Compare, a site that ranks the legitimacy of crypto exchanges, though OKEx is ranked at 19th position, and OKCoin at 16th. Only Gemini and Coinbase hold ‘AA’ ratings. It is a small exchange, trading just $19 million in the past 24 hours, but is growing.in size; this year it doubled its San Francisco staff to 80. 

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