OKCoin – Crypto broker: reviews
OKCoin is one of the top-tier crypto brokers of the world. It doesn’t only mean high traffic (and yes, OKCoin has a lot of daily visitors). It’s also equally available throughout the world and is similarly well-known throughout the world. Or so they say.
If you bother to look for the reviews online, you’ll see that there aren’t a lot of customer reviews in the web. Regardless, the existing reviews can give you at least some semblance of a clear picture. The companies themselves, naturally, rarely bother to show the impartial reviews to let you know all their flaws. They must be perfect in the eyes of the users.
Let’s see first what the platform is, what their core values are and how well they live up to them.
What is OKCoin?
OKCoin is a crypto exchange with the minor trading feature. Therefore, OKCoin allows its users to:
- Buy 7 sorts of popular cryptocurrencies for USD, EUR or Singapore dollar (with limitations)
- Convert crypto to crypto through a ‘spot’ market
The platform uses a very basic set of trading features, but it’s not the main drawing card. OKCoin’s motto is ‘Everyone’s trader’. It implies high affordability and accessibility and the ease of doing business with this platform.
The features associated with it are represented on the front page in a set of core features the company prides itself with. Among them:
- Low fees. The maker fee for the lowest monthly trade volume is 0.1%, and the taker fee is 0.2%. The bigger the sum, the lower the fees get
- High-level security. Constant monitoring, multifactor authentication, this sort of thing. It’s a big worrying when companies emphasize security as their main principle, because such companies are also more likely to be scam
- ‘Best’ uptime. In theory, you’ll be able to trade when it both benefits you and company the most
Apart from all of it, no more interesting features. Not even the learning hub, just a shabby blog with somewhat interesting articles.
The ranking
There sadly aren’t enough reviews on the review aggregators like Trustpilot or other websites where users are expected to write feedback. The existing reviews average out to 3.1/5 on Trustpilot. So, an ‘average’ experience. Fortunately, there are more than enough Reddit reviews online, though they are not ranked.
The disadvantages
From the reviews on different websites, including Reddit, you can gather somewhat of a clear picture of their mode of work.
The website can fail. OKCoin may claim that their upside is the best in the world, but the facts speak for themselves. It’s not uncommon for this website to freeze and lag, even in the prime hours. It’s actually not clear whether the freezes are technical issues or intentionally created problems. But more on that note later.
Now, it’s pretty obvious that the ‘OKCoin’ company isn’t entirely truthful about their stability. They claim actually that OKCoin is, quote, ‘available in 190+ countries’, which should inspire omnipresent stability, but seems pretty comical, given that there are only 193 countries in UN.
It means they operate under every jurisdiction in the world, including those where the free Internet is unavailable.
Your funds aren’t safe. Be that for security reasons, as they all claim it to be, or because it’s a scam website, but a lot of users who left their reviews on different websites are angry because they lost their money unfairly.
Remember the bit about freezes from above? There are rumors that OKCoin creates these performance drops in the prime time so that users would leave their positions open and lose money. It’s a bit wild, but not impossible, seeing how they arrest people’s money anyway for thought-up reasons (suspicious activity, age restrictions, additional verification requirement, etc).
The support is pretty poor. It’s part of the larger issue, actually. The support may be efficient at solving financial problems, because that’s what they are paid to do, after all. However, it’s also very effective at dragging your case on and on until you leave the platform frustrated and happy.
Usually, the staff arrests your funds for some awkward reason you’ve never heard of before. Then you’ll try to return your money, but they won’t do it because it either takes a lot of time, apparently, or because you broke a few strange rules that exist to be a reason for arrest, not for your safety.
Additionally, the support team seems unprofessional. For instance, they keep pestering users to provide additional documents where they won’t find anything they don’t know already about you. It’s likely because different support teams aren’t connected to each other or maybe even the full database. Such bureaucratic gridlock is nothing new for trading platforms.
The advantages
Working with OKCoin has several benefits, funnily enough. Mostly, they are associated with the ease of starting business here, but one of them stands out.
The fees are truly small. The fees are small, and it’s suspicious. The broker never works against themselves, only against the user (to some degree). But it seems that all the funds that do arrive at your personal account don’t change much from the funds you earned. But there’s also the challenge of getting them out, because the staff can always freeze your funds for no apparent reason.
In conclusion
OKCoin is very suspicious. Even if they have an absolute right to take your funds on their own legal terms, it doesn’t make them a good platform. There are many other brands that treat their users will more respect.
The technical side may be not bad, but it doesn’t compensate for the risks you’re about to undergo if you decide to set up an account here.