OKB Doubles in Price, Hits Record High as OKX Plans to Slash Supply

OKB, the native token of global cryptocurrency exchange OKX, hit a new all-time high mark on Wednesday, more than doubling in price amid word that its supply would be cut and more than 65 million tokens would be “burned” or effectively destroyed.

The token, which also acts as the native gas token for OKX’s Ethereum layer-2 network X-Layer, jumped as high as $135 before settling around $103 as of this writing. The nearly 124% gain makes it the biggest mover among the top 100 crypto assets by market cap over the last 24 hours. Almost $3.5 billion worth of OKB has changed hands during that span.

The surge comes as OKX plans to upgrade X-Layer, aiming to make it one of the ecosystem’s leading networks for DeFi, real world asset (RWA) tokenization, and payments in the process. 

In addition to technological improvements like reduced gas cost and increased throughput on X-Layer, the exchange is also decommissioning a similar network in its OKT Chain, and making a major change to OKB tokenomics with a massive token burn. 

“OKX will carry out a one-time burn of the 65,256,712.097 OKB that has been accumulated from historical repurchases and treasury reserves, and will switch to using a smart contract to automatically burn all OKB transferred to a blackhole address. After this operation is completed, the total OKB supply will be fixed at 21 million,” the firm wrote in a statement.

The 21 million OKB supply matches the supply of crypto’s largest asset, Bitcoin, but is far from its originally intended 300 million token supply.

At current prices, the burn transaction—which is expected to take place on August 15—would incinerate around $6.7 billion worth of OKB tokens. Once the burn takes place, OKX will upgrade the token’s smart contract, removing the ability to mint and burn additional tokens. 

Prior to the burn, the firm announced it will also convert all OKT Chain tokens (OKT) in user accounts to OKB as part of its decommissioning of OKT Chain, sending OKT up more than 100% as well. Though the chain will remain operable until January 1, 2026 – the token will periodically and automatically be converted to OKB when deposited on the OKX Exchange. 

OKX began a more formal expansion in the United States this April when it set up a regional headquarters in San Jose, California, and began allowing U.S. customers to buy, sell, and trade leading crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum via its centralized exchange and OKX Wallet.