OKX CEO Clarifies Reasons For Boycotting Memecoin Mania

Star Xu, OKX CEO has explained the crypto exchange’s reason for refusing to list memecoins amidst the mania in the ecosystem at the moment.

Capitalizing on the Solana Momentum

In recent weeks, there has been massive excitement in the memecoin ecosystem with many of the crypto registering huge profits. 

With the majority of the latest memecoins like BOOK OF MEME (BOME) resident on Solana (SOL), there’s no doubt that many token creators are making moves to capitalize on the growth of the protocol in recent times.

The price of SOL  jumped by a significant percentage, almost reaching $200. In addition, Solana’s DEX volume hits an all-time-high (ATH) record of $3.5 billion. Cumulatively, the protocol’s weekly DEX volume reached over $13.3 billion on Saturday, per data from DefiLlama.

Notably, Shiba Inu (SHIB), Dogecoin (DOGE), and Pepe coin (PEPE) were at the center of the memecoin mania.

While other crypto exchanges like Binance joined the memecoin mania by listing many new tokens, OKX did not make any move in that direction. This forced an X user identified as a member of the Electra Protocol to request the listing of XEP on the crypto exchange. 

In response, Star explained OKX’s disposition and policy towards listing crypto.

OKX Treading With Caution

Firstly, he stated that the vision of the OKX listing team is to discover valuable and early-stage utility tokens for its customers. According to Star, every token that the exchange lists on its platform is birthed from thorough research which includes tracking the performance of such token overtime. Therefore, listing a token on OKX is never a matter of pitching, per his explanation.

Let me clarify OKX listing team’s vision is discover valuable and early stage utility tokens for our customers. We don’t accept pitching for listing, we research potential projects from the market and keep to track the performance of the tokens for long time. Our listing… https://t.co/JgRr6JaZJq

— Star (@star_okx) March 18, 2024

The OKX listing team eventually makes their decision independently without any external influence. Consequently, he advised those who engage in pitching tokens for listing on OKX to desist from the act.

“Continue to push tokens to okx team members at Twitter will not help anything, please stop to do it.

Similar to OKX sentiment, founder and CEO of CryptoQuant Ki Young Ju shared his concerns about the recent memecoin rally, and in his opinion, this kind of digital asset brings harm to the crypto industry. 

“It’s frustrating to see billion-dollar-cap memecoins overshadow hardworking teams building legit products to advance this industry. Easy money can’t drive industry-wide progress, as shown by the 2018 ICO burst,” he said.

As part of its effort to adhere to strong ethical standards and regulations, OKX has phased out USDT trading in Europe ahead of the implementation of the Market in Crypto Asset (MiCA) rule.