OKCoin

OKCoin
Industry Bitcoin Exchange
Headquarters Beijing, China
Key people
Star Xu, CEO
Number of employees
130
Website okcoin.com

OKCoin is a Bitcoin company in China with core product lines of a Bitcoin exchange, and a mobile consumer payment and lending app. OKCoin Exchange China operates CNY/BTC spot pair with margin trading from its Beijing entity, while OKCoin International operates USD/BTC spot pair with margin trading and BTC/USD futures from its Singapore entity.

As of August 2016, OKCoin is the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world with a volume of over 16,000,000 Bitcoins per month.[1]

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.[2]

OKCoin has publicly expressed intention to expand overseas and become a worldwide digital currency services company.[3]

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."[4] 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.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[7] The OKCoin reward was paid at the end of May, 2015 following the report of analysis of the contracts posted publicly by OKCoin.[8]

References

  1. "Bitcoin Charts / Markets". www.bitcoincharts.com. Retrieved 2016-08-06.
  2. "The China King of Bitcoin: Star Xu - BEIJING, June 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/". Prnewswire.com. Retrieved 2014-06-30.
  3. Jon Southurst (@southtopia) (2014-05-19). "OKCoin and Huobi Discuss Bitcoin in China and Plans for Survival". Coindesk.com. Retrieved 2014-06-30.
  4. OKCoin) (2015-05-23). "OKCoin no longer managing Bitcoin.com due to contract conflict with domain owner". OKCoin Blog. Retrieved 2015-05-26.
  5. Stan Higgins) (2015-05-05). "FinCEN Fines Ripple Labs for Bank Secrecy Act Violations". Coindesk. Retrieved 2015-05-26.
  6. Joseph Young) (2015-05-25). "Roger Ver and OKCoin Squabble over Bitcoin.com, Breach of Contract". CoinTelegraph. Retrieved 2015-05-26.
  7. 1 2 Allen Scott) (2015-05-25). "Roger Ver: 'I Will Offer a $1,000,000 Bounty to Anyone Who Can Prove I Signed that Contract'". CoinTelegraph. Retrieved 2015-05-26.
  8. Ben McGinnes (2015-05-29). "Analysis of OKCoin Documents". Retrieved 2016-09-05.

External links

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