7,000 addresses, 90% centralized, how far is OKB from being an ecosystem?

On the afternoon of the 10th, OKEX suddenly dropped a bombshell: it announced the launch of the OKchain public chain test network and destroyed 700 million unissued OKBs at one time. The market reacted strongly to this. When mainstream currencies fell back, OKB quickly rose by more than 40%, and led to a collective rise in platform currencies such as HT, BNB, and MX, because the market sentiment believed that other platforms would follow suit.

The cleverness of OKB's move is that it announced that OKB holders can obtain OKT, a new token issued by OKchain in the future, in proportion. This will attract OKB holders not to rush to sell in a short period of time, but to wait to receive OKT candy. This is also the reason why OKB can stabilize after rising.

The value of OKT depends on the future ecological development of OKchain. Therefore, OKEX’s announcement spent a lot of space to describe the future. In fact, the ecology was OKB’s shortcoming in the past. In terms of the number of addresses, Binance’s BNB has about 310,000 addresses, Huobi’s HT has more than 10,000 addresses, and OKB has only more than 7,000 addresses.

How many users does OKB have? The official propaganda said that there are millions of users (sometimes in interviews, they said tens of millions of users), and OKEX users are in the tens of millions. According to the general logic of the cryptocurrency circle, there should be some water. After all, the addresses of Bitcoin or Ethereum are only in the tens of millions.

The OKB Ecosystem 2019 Annual Report states that there are 35 ecological partners, with application scenarios covering many fields such as transactions, payments, travel, leisure and entertainment, online loan and financial management, and life services. But there is a word game here: the official announcement states that "OKB's 35 ecological partners have cumulatively served tens of millions of users", and many media have turned it into OKB having tens of millions of users. In fact, this should be the number of users of the partners themselves. For example, a certain coin has reached a cooperation with the NBA, but it cannot be said that NBA users are the users of the certain coin.

However, as a centralized currency, platform coins are bound to be limited to exchanges in the initial stage. But in comparison, whether from the number of addresses or the number of on-chain transactions, BNB's ecology and usage scenarios are still clearly ahead, Huobi is also catching up, while OKEX and OKB are relatively lagging behind.

On the other hand, we can see that the top eleven addresses of OKB are fixed addresses within the exchange and have not changed, indicating that the vast majority of OKB are concentrated in OKEX. Although it is impossible to determine whether these coins belong to retail investors or OKEX itself, it can be imagined that most of them are coins purchased by the platform itself and OK employees, and they should have benefited a lot from this round of increases.

The official announcement also disclosed the five major ecological directions of OKChain's future construction, including digital asset issuance, independent construction of decentralized exchanges, issuance of Defi applications, operation of smart contracts, cross-chain and other sectors. Among them, the first demonstration application launched by OKEx, OKEx DEX, was launched simultaneously. In addition, based on OKChain, OKEX also launched multiple applications such as blockchain browsers.

After OK's sudden bomb, Huobi and Binance's attitudes became awkward and ambiguous. How they will follow up is worth watching. Huobi followed up with a "stay tuned", and ZB and FCoin also announced the destruction of 1.4 billion and 700 million platform coins respectively.

Currently, OKB and HT are moving closer to the BNB ecosystem. As everyone becomes more homogeneous, the competition between them will become more intense. Whether it is OKB or OKT, the long-term value still depends on the number of holders, the real application scenarios, and the progress of technology research and development (the development of public chains is not simple). At present, BNB is still leading.