OKEx delists 16 crypto projects in seventh round of cuts

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Sixteen crypto projects, having failed to prove any utility or attract serious investor attention, have now lost the favor of a major crypto exchange. OKEx has announced their seventh batch bath of delisted projects, with a timeline to end their trading pairs in the next week.

On their support page, OKEx announced they will end trading for the following projects effective 06:00 December 14, 2019 (UTC): OFCOIN, ugChain, Merculet, UCOT, IPChain, Olympus Labs, Insolar, RealChain, CIChain, TokenStars, CAI.TODAY, Delphy, Hi Mutual Society, Light Chain, SelfSell and WinToken.

All orders involving these tokens must be completed by the December 14 cut off time or they will be canceled. Anyone still holding the tokens will have until 06:00 on December 31, 2019 (UTC) to withdraw their assets. After that time, no support will be offered to swap or map these tokens.

The exchange notes they decided to delist these projects based on user feedback and their delisting guidelines. Those guidelines generally suggest the exchange will delist a project either because it has virtually no trade volume or activity, or the projects managers take some kind of untrustworthy action. OKEx noted their police of regularly delisting projects:

“To create a robust trading environment and offer the best trading experience to our users, we constantly monitor the performance of all listed projects and review their listing qualifications on a regular basis.”

Socios.com and chiliZ CEO Alexandre Dreyfus suggested on Twitter that this delisting might come from Chinese regulatory pressure as well.

.@OKEx is cleaning their exchange with the delisting of many projects's pairs. More likely due to CN pressure. Expect more and the same from @HuobiGlobal. This is a VERY healthy process. 🙂 Good for the future. https://t.co/0XWrVUGUeC

— Alexandre Dreyfus 🇹🇷 (@alex_dreyfus) December 9, 2019

OKEx has often proven in the past that they rather support tokens with some utility and real value than projects that are more speculative in nature. On December 5, they announced the launch of Bitcoin SV (BSV) futures, allowing users to trade in the potential value of real Bitcoin.

The exchange has also proven in the past that they are responsive to regulatory demands in the regions they operate. In September, OKEx opted to delist both the Monero and Dash privacy coins. While no reason was given, speculation at the time was they wanted to stay on the right side of regulations from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).