crypto.news
OKX, a Seychelles-based digital asset exchange, recently moved $163 million worth of its utility token OKB in a cluster of 20 transactions. It occurred amid a price consolidation witnessed by the asset following a drop from the high of $51 last week.
The development was first called to attention by Whale Alert, an on-chain whale surveillance system. As indexed by Whale Alert, the first of the series of transactions occurred today at 2:05 AM (UTC), involving 180,000 OKB worth $8.1 million at the time.
🚨 180,000 #OKB (8,109,600 USD) transferred from #OKEx to unknown wallethttps://t.co/VM7oZXtxcu
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) March 23, 2023
The remaining 19 transactions followed shortly, with the last occurring at 7:35 AM (UTC). All trades involved 180,000 OKB, resulting in a cumulative amount of precisely 3.6 million OKB tokens. The tokens are currently valued at $163 million against prevailing rates.
OKX has not made any public announcement regarding the transactions as of press time, but an investigation carried out by crypto.news reveals that they could be tied to the exchange’s buy-back & burn initiative, which started as far back as May 2019.
All the tokens were sent to a main recipient address identified as the OKB buy-back & burn dedicated address. Since the initiative’s launch, OKX has been incinerating a significant amount of OKB tokens every quarter to mitigate the token’s extensive supply. However, its report on the program reveals that the latest burn occurred in February 2021.
The dedicated burning address has received thousands of OKB tokens since May 10, 2019. The latest slew of transportation is the most recent batch. The address currently holds 57.1 million OKB tokens, valued at a whopping $2.6 billion as of press time.
OKB’s supply and price actions
Owing partly to the incineration exercise, OKB’s circulating supply now sits at an estimated 60 million tokens, per data from CoinMarketCap and Etherscan. Despite its current consolidation, OKB remains one of the few assets that have registered new highs during this year’s market-wide rallies.
OKB hit an all-time high value of $58.66 on Feb. 18 amid one of the recently-engineered market-wide rallies. Following the surge, the asset fell prey to the bears, plummeting to a low of $37.6 on March 10. Despite a comeback following the downturn, OKB is still 22% down from its ATH. It is currently trading for $45.34.