Review contents
One of the cheapest crypto exchanges out there, great trading volume, and advanced trading features and tools. Plus, a great NFT marketplace and wallet! What more could you want?! It’s an awesome exchange. 5 stars from us.
OKX is a crypto exchange gaining popularity rapidly – millions of users in over 100 countries, and one of the biggest exchanges by the amount of money going through the exchange by people trading (buying and selling crypto).
It’s been around since 2017 (which is quite established for crypto), and was previously called OKEx exchange. In recent years it’s become super popular as they’ve now developed one of the best, if not, the best trading platforms out there. Plus one of the cheapest!
It’s easy to use, so perfect for beginners, plus got all the bells and whistles for advanced traders too.
It’s not just a trading platform either, there’s an NFT marketplace¹ and a wallet (more on these later), so you can shop, sell or trade all within the same platform (their website and app).
Better yet, if you are a trader, or looking to get into crypto trading there’s tonnes of features, and you can trade more sophisticated things like futures and options, and even create trading bots (more on all of these later). You can also trade with borrowed money (margin) too.
They’ve also got an awesome, easy to use app on both Apple and Android – very highly rated too 4.8 out of 5 on Apple and 4.6 on Google.
Plus, you can earn interest on your crypto if you want to, or get a loan backed by your crypto.
It’s got so much going on, you can even join a pool (group of people) to mine bitcoin, and build apps on a blockchain (a crypto network).
Are you geeking out yet? We cover everything below! Dive in!
Yep!
OKX is perfect for beginners in fact – it’s super simple to create your account and get started.
It’s a platform where you don’t need to know anything about crypto to get started (unlike some others). You’ll be walked through everything (if you choose to be), and you can be buying your first crypto coins within minutes.
You can even just buy with a credit and debit card in seconds if you like too, it’s so simple. You don’t have to use the more advanced exchange side of things until you’re comfortable.
Their free academy is one of the best places to learn more about crypto and crypto exchanges, it’s got fantastic information, clearly explained and even walkthroughs on how to do everything on their platform. It’s all nicely illustrated too.
We’ll cover NFTs later, but there’s also an OKX wallet, so you can buy, sell and manage your NFTs all from one place (we know you’re looking to get into NFTs, all the cool kids are doing it!).
By the way, you can get a mystery box worth up to $10,000¹ when you sign up with Nuts About Money – good luck, some people have got to win big!
For some people this might be a big bonus – you don’t actually need to identify yourself, or provide any personal details to use OKX.
It’s one of the few exchanges where you don’t need to do this. However, if you want to withdraw fairly large sums of crypto, you’ll have to verify your identity – this is to comply with anti-money laundering laws across the world.
The range of coins you can trade is pretty huge, it’s well into the hundreds. And of course all of the major coins, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
And quite handily, they’ve actually split them out into categories for easy navigation when using the exchange, which are:
Basically, it’s got all the coins everybody wants to trade, and when the people want a new coin, it gets added! They’re all vetted and reviewed initially, so there’s no outright scams that some other exchanges list – but that doesn’t mean a coin won’t go down in value!
Get a free mystery box worth up to $10,000 when you sign up with Nuts About Money. Good luck!
You can quickly and easily swap your coins for other coins, completely free, and in seconds – without actually using the exchange. Pretty handy right? There’s no fees and you’ll get a great price. You can even swap one stablecoin to another stablecoin (they’re coins like USD on the blockchain, which you can use to trade other coins).
To make simple orders for coins (rather than more sophisticated things like futures), you can use the basic exchange, which although is called basic, is actually great, and has everything you might want to see all in one view. Things trading volume, a chart of price movements and the current bids.
Here you can trade more sophisticated things like futures, options, perpetual swaps and trade with margin. We won’t cover what these all mean right now, but if you’re looking for these, OKX has got you covered.
There’s lots of handy charts to help you make trading decisions. You can see things like the ratio of traders betting the price will go up vs the price going down (long/short ratio), and the open interest (how many customers are wanting to trade). There’s lots more too!
A pretty cool feature is the ability to make a trading bot, without any coding or development skills. It’s fairly basic, but you can set buy and sell orders based on rules you set, so in theory, if your strategy works, you’ll be printing money in your sleep while the bot handles everything for you. But maybe not for the faint-hearted!
If you’re trading with size (large orders), you can actually bypass the exchange completely, and so not potentially lose money if the price is affected by your order (called slippage). This is called block trading or OTC (over-the-counter).
With Jumpstart you can find brand new crypto projects to invest in – but not just any old project – projects that have been reviewed and vetted by OKX. The projects will need to apply to OKX and pass strict assessment criteria. It’s very high risk, but could be very high reward.
OKX is one of the cheapest exchanges out there, you probably won’t find it much cheaper.
It has lots of different pricing tiers, which can get fairly complicated. So we won’t try and describe it in detail here, but a simple run-down is that pricing is based on:
So, you’ll basically pay less in fees the more you trade and the more money you have, which is pretty standard across all exchanges.
You’ll pay a fee per trade, which is a percentage of how much you want to buy or sell. You’ll either pay a taker or maker fee depending on your order, sounds confusing, but here we go:
Taker fee: if you buy or sell from the current price on the exchange. (You are taking money off the exchange).
Maker fee: if you add an order to the exchange but at a price different to the current price (so it doesn’t get immediately bought or sold). You are adding money to the exchange. (these are often slightly cheaper as it benefits the exchange to have more orders waiting).
The most common fees (for spot) are:
And if your trading volume starts hitting some big numbers, you’ll be moved onto the VIP fee structure which is based on trading volume, where fees become even less, and actually negative maker fees for the really big guns.
If you’re trading futures and options (which is buying and selling based on the value of a coin, and not the coin itself), the fees start even lower, at just 0.050% taker fees and 0.020% maker fees.
Here’s a comparison of starting fees:
Into NFTs?
OKX has got a great marketplace to buy and sell NFTs – which includes all the big brands such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks.
All you need to do is connect your wallet and you’re away. You can use an external wallet or create an OKX wallet (more below) to manage everything within OKX.
What’s cool too is they actually provide data on price and volume of each collection so you can do a bit of research too.
OKX also offers a wallet, which you can use to buy and sell NFTs – on any NFT marketplace, not just the OKX marketplace. And you can interact with decentralised apps (Dapps) across the whole of the crypto world (sometimes called web3).
You might not be familiar with Dapps, but as you learn more about crypto, they’re what it’s all about – running apps on a blockchain (a crypto network, like Ethereum).
And you’ll need a wallet to get involved. Popular examples are of course buying NFTs but other popular Dapps are ‘decentralised exchanges’, where you can swap cryptocurrencies directly on a blockchain (so no middleman). And in the future, who knows what they’ll be.
The OKX wallet is great, and it works via a Google Chrome browser plugin, so it is always available when you need it. It’s got everything you’d want, including previous transactions and a great view of all your NFTs too. If this sounds too complicated for you don't worry, you'll pick it up along the way.
The customer support is good overall.
There’s a great support centre which covers just above every question you’d ever have, plus there’s a chat-bot which is a computer program that will try and answer any question you ask it.
They also have a huge range of social accounts you can chat and get help on, such as Telegram, twitter, reddit and discord.
And you can create a support ticket, where they'll get back to you after a short while. Or, just send an email too.
And a big plus, you can actually speak to them over the phone too! With all support running 24/7.
Yes, it’s safe. It’s been around for a long time in the crypto world and is very much established. It’s trusted by millions of people across the world.
It has a huge focus on safety and security, and has developed its own sophisticated security measures. The crypto it holds (customers' money) are in cold wallets located in many different countries (which are wallets that have never touched the internet), and only accessible by certain employees, with no single person allowed access. The list goes on and on, but it’s safe to say it’s the highest safety you’ll find with a crypto exchange, and there’s never been any issues to date.
They are also registered with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Customers love it. There’s a massive 265,000 reviews on Google Play app store, with an average score of 4.4 out of 5. That’s good!
On Apple, there’s thousands of reviews and it’s got a score of 4.8 out of 5 (14,600 reviews).
Most of the reviews talk about how great the platform is and how easy it is to use, some even say it’s the best exchange out there – and we might have to agree with that.
We like OKX, a lot!
It’s one of the cheapest crypto exchanges out there – which is a big deal as fees can seriously add up and affect your profit when trading. Plus, it’s super popular, with loads of trading volume.
There’s a huge range of coins to trade, with new coins added all the time, and there’s advanced trading tools and features if you want them, this is optional of course.
The support is good too, and there’s tonnes of resources to learn from about trading and crypto.
What’s not to love? There’s only positives with OKX. And it gets a big 5 stars from us!
If you’re ready to get started, get a free mystery box worth up to $10,000¹. Or if you prefer to learn more, here’s the OKX website¹.
Yep! And it’s a pretty good one.
When you sign up, get a free mystery box worth up to $10,000¹, not bad! It’s one of the best deals out there. Good luck!
And full disclosure, we’ll get a small fee too. It helps us keep the lights on. But as always, we’re completely impartial – and big fans of OKX!
Get a free mystery box worth up to $10,000 when you sign up with Nuts About Money. Good luck!
Get a free mystery box worth up to $10,000 when you sign up with Nuts About Money. Good luck!
Get a free mystery box worth up to $10,000 when you sign up with Nuts About Money. Good luck!
Edward Savage is a leading expert on money, with a background of 8 years working in financial services in London, has a business, accounting and finance degree, runs an investing community, and teaches people about money. He writes about all aspects of personal finance, including pensions, investing, mortgages and insurance.
This article was written, reviewed and fact checked by the expert team at Nuts About Money. You’re in safe hands. Learn more.
We're experts in all things money, with years of combined experience working in the finance industry and writing about money. We understand the ins and outs, how to get the best deals, save money, and how to communicate money in an easy to understand way (we hope you agree).
More than 20 years of combined experience researching and writing about money
Researched and reviewed a wide range of financial services companies, and have a transparent review process
We follow a strict editorial code to ensure you get the best information possible
Get a free mystery box worth up to $10,000 when you sign up with Nuts About Money. Good luck!
