You can now deposit, withdraw, and trade Solana (SOL), Sushi (SUSHI), Stellar (XLM), and Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) against USD on Okcoin with some of the lowest fees around. 👀
TL;DR
- What? You can now deposit, withdraw, and trade Solana, Sushi, Stellar, and Wrapped Bitcoin against USD on Okcoin.
- Who? All Okcoin customers except for residents of the EU, the UK, Singapore, and Brunei.
- When? Deposits, withdrawals, and trading are available now! âš¡
What is Solana (SOL)?
Solana is a blockchain project aiming to scale decentralized applications (DApps) thanks to a hybrid consensus model, combining proof-of-stake (PoS) with a new framework called proof-of-history (PoH).
Proof-of-history? The idea here is to chain messages together on the blockchain in order to encrypt the relative order and time of each message. With PoH, the Solana blockchain becomes its own clock – meaning confirmation times can be much quicker.
SOL is Solana’s native token and is used to pay for transactions on the platform. SOL has offered one of the highest return on investment of the entire crypto world this year: It traded at $1.5 in January 2021 and is changing hands at $180 at the time of listing. 🚀
What is Stellar (XLM)?
Stellar is an open source blockchain project focused on cross border payments. It aims to connect financial institutions together to provide low transaction costs in developing markets. Contrary to proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains, it runs on a federated byzantine agreement (FBA) algorithm, which allows for quicker transactions. Stellar was originally built on top of the Ripple protocol but was partly rewritten after a hard fork.
Lumen (XML) is Stellar’s native token. It was valued at $0.001 at the time of its launch and trades around $0.35 at the time of listing. 📈
What is SushiSwap (SUSHI)?
Launched in September 2020 as a fork of Uniswap, SushiSwap is a so-called automated market maker (AMM): a decentralized exchange using smart contracts to create cryptocurrency markets. AMMs can automatically set up trading liquidity between any two tokens and are aimed for seasoned crypto traders. Sushiswap, like most other AMMs, does not offer fiat/crypto pairs though, making the role of DeFi on-ramp platforms such as Okcoin all the more important. 😎
The native token of SushiSwap, SUSHI, is built on top of Ethereum. At its launch the price of SUSHI was $0.50; at the time of listing, it trades at $11, offering a return on investment of about 2200%. It allows its holders to:
- Propose and vote on protocol and community governance matters
- Lock their tokens to secure the network and receive staking rewards
What is Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC)?
Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) is a tokenized version of bitcoin built on top of Ethereum. WBTC is an ERC-20 token, which means it is integrated with Ethereum’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
What differentiates WBTC from other tokens is that it’s backed by Bitcoin at a 1:1 ratio, which ensures its price is pegged to that of Bitcoin. Every time a WBTC is sold for bitcoin, the WBTC is burned, everytime a WBTC is bought for bitcoin, a WBTC is created. The number of tokens is meant to remain exactly the same as the number of bitcoin in the network’s reserve. For example, the number of WBTC in circulation is 203,121 at the time of listing.
Why would that be useful? Well, for now, Bitcoin’s smart contract capabilities are limited compared to Ethereum. Transactions are also somewhat slow: 10mn for Bitcoin compared to close to 15 seconds for Ethereum. Bitcoin remains the foundation of the crypto world though, with a market capitalization of close to $1 trillion. In short, the aim of WBTC is to allow users to leverage the strength of Bitcoin with the speed and flexibility of DeFi. ðŸ§
