OKX, DWF Labs coming to US as regulatory oversight vanishes

The OKX digital asset exchange and a questionable ‘crypto’ market maker are coming to America, drawn by the newfound regulatory free-for-all in the U.S. of A.

On April 15, the Seychelles-based OKX announced its return to American shores via the launch of the OKX US exchange, the stateside launch of OKX Wallet, and a new ‘regional headquarters’ in San Jose, California.

OKX also introduced a new CEO, former Barclays and crypto prime brokerage Hidden Road exec Roshan Robert, who claims to be looking forward to “leading our expansion into the United States and broadening access to digital assets in a secure, transparent, and compliant way.”

The U.S. launch will begin with “a phased rollout for new customers,” with a nationwide launch later this year. Legacy customers of OKX’s previous U.S.-facing exchange OKCoin, will be “seamlessly migrated” to OKX US. Robert told Fortune that the U.S. launch was more than just a rebrand, saying the “entire technology interface, everything has changed.”

Robert told CNBC that U.S. customers—both retail and institutional—now had “a new alternative” to domestic exchanges like Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Kraken, and Gemini. Globally, OKX ranks fifth in terms of 24-hour spot trading volume and monthly visits, according to Coingecko.

OKX’s U.S. return comes less than two months after the company reached a $504 million settlement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to atone for “flagrantly” operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business between 2017 and early 2024.

In January, OKX received pre-authorization to operate under Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations. MiCA’s continent-wide regulatory umbrella requires licensees to secure a license in one European Economic Area (EEA) jurisdiction, and OKX chose Malta.

But in April, Malta’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) imposed a €1.05 million ($1.1 million) penalty on OKX for anti-money laundering and prevention of terror financing shortcomings dating back to 2023. The FIU acknowledged that OKX had undertaken “proactive remediation” to shore up its compliance efforts but the historic violations couldn’t be ignored.

More recently, OKX came under fire for its platform being used by the North Korean hackers of the Bybit exchange, which suffered a $1.5 billion theft in February. The following month, OKX suspended its decentralized finance (DeFi) exchange aggregator service after $100 million of the ill-gotten gains were funneled through the service.

WTF DWF

Also planting a flag on U.S. shores is market maker/Web3 investment firm DWF Labs, which on April 16 announced its “strategic expansion to the United States” that will include opening an office in New York City. Founder/managing partner Andrei Grachev said DWF’s new “physical presence reflects our confidence in America’s role as the next growth region for institutional crypto adoption.”

DWF also confirmed reports from earlier this month that it had sent $25 million to World Liberty Financial (WLF), the DeFi project controlled by the family of U.S. President Donald Trump. DWF said it had “purchased $25 million” of WLF’s governance token WLFI in “a strategic private transaction,” reflecting DWF’s desire to “participate in WLFI governance and focus on projects addressing real-world financial needs.”

The early reports of DWF’s WLFI purchase also indicated that DWF had received one million in USD1, the new dollar-denominated stablecoin that WLF announced last month. DWF subsequently built six DeFi liquidity pools for USD1, worth a total of $18 million.

DWF’s announcement said its new “collaboration” with WLF will see DWF “provide liquidity for USD1, leveraging its deep liquidity network and algorithmic infrastructure across centralized and decentralized venues.”

DWF has a ‘colorful’ history, most recently being accused of artificially inflating token prices on the Binance exchange at the direction of DWF customers. At the time, Binance’s market surveillance team identified over $300 million in wash trades by DWF on behalf of its clients. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Binance’s response was to fire its surveillance team, a claim Binance denied. DWF similarly denied the Journal’s claims, saying the allegations “are unfounded and distort the facts.”

Grachev formerly ran the Russian offshoot of the Huobi (now HTX) exchange but left the company less than a year after its launch following a series of questionable activities, including allegedly failing to repay investors following a 2018 initial coin offering.

Fun fact: Huobi/HTX may or may not be controlled by Tron founder Justin Sun, who has purchased $75 million worth of WLFI—most of which went into Trump’s pocket—and is now a WLF adviser.

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Political memecoins are bad, except when…

For what it’s worth, DWF was among those voicing criticism of ‘political memecoins’ following February’s $LIBRA scandal involving Argentina’s President Javier Milei. At the time, DWF told Cointelegraph that memecoin projects needed to ensure that average investors “aren’t disadvantaged by a handful of well-funded or well-informed players claiming the lion’s share of the supply.”

Speaking of, a digital wallet linked to the team behind President Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin just withdrew $4.6 million in liquidity, marking the first time the wallet has withdrawn value. The funds, denominated in Circle’s USDC stablecoin, were sent to a Coinbase deposit address.

The withdrawal comes just days before the $TRUMP team is set to release 40 million additional $TRUMP tokens, representing 20% of the total circulating supply. $TRUMP hit an all-time high of $73.43 in the immediate aftermath of its January 19 launch, but has since sunk below $8 and will likely sink further following the upcoming unlock. Of the total one billion $TRUMP tokens available, the Trump team controls 80%. Over to you, DWF.

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Pass ‘go,’ collect nothing

The $TRUMP token may play a role in Trump’s latest crypto venture, a video game based on the iconic Monopoly board game. On April 15, Fortune reported that the Trump-branded game will be a spin on Monopoly Go!, a video game version released in 2023.

Trump’s longtime friend and Learning Annex founder Bill Zanker, who had a hand in the $TRUMP memecoin and Trump’s non-fungible token (NFT) collections, is backing Trump’s new game. A Zanker spokesperson said Trump’s game would launch by the end of this month but denied any ties to Monopoly Go!

That said, Trump’s second term has been characterized by his utter ‘no f*cks left to give’ approach to basically everything. This includes using the power of his office to target perceived enemies, like the nine white-shoe law firms that were so intimidated they agreed to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for Trump’s pet causes.

So if Trump were to release an obvious Monopoly knock-off using his name, would Hasbro have the stones to even verbalize a protest, let alone take him to court to protect their intellectual property?

Either way, it’s fun to speculate on what Trump Monopoly might look like. If it’s anything like the real estate mogul’s real-world dealings, the ‘Pay hospital $100’ Community Chest card will instead read ‘Tell hospital you’ll pay them $30, and if they don’t like it, they can take him to court.’

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Trump’s money grabs risking legislative progress?

In addition to WLF, $TRUMP, and the NFTs, Trump’s digital asset ventures include crypto-focused exchange-traded funds (ETFs) via Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) and a block reward mining partnership (American Bitcoin Corp) with miner Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT).

All these ventures are said to have already increased Trump’s net worth by around $1 billion (on paper, at least), and it seems clear that Trump intends to leave no crypto stone unturned in his pursuit of these easy pickings. (This could include making USD1 the digital currency for all federal government payments.)

These overt cash grabs—coupled with Trump’s advocacy for digital asset legislation that would further increase the value of his holdings—have alarmed Congressional Democrats and have even made some Republicans uneasy, but so far, there appears to be no stopping this runaway train.

TD Cowen analysts suggested this week that Trump’s unfettered grifting could ultimately prove too great a pill to swallow for those members of Congress who aren’t crypto true believers but are simply going with the flow. The wholesale abolition of most restraints on crypto dealings by federal agencies and the DOJ are also leaving many pols with a sense of impending doom.

The analysts expressed concern that “actions by the Trump family business and his administration could spark a backlash that derails positive government action.” While the analysts expressed measured confidence that Congressional outrage had yet to reach a boiling point, “the risk is rising rather than falling. It is why we see this as a key factor for crypto investors.”

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Every miner for themselves!

Other threats to crypto interests include Trump’s unprovoked trade war with nearly every nation not named Russia. The on-again/off-again/no exceptions/some exceptions tariffs have played havoc with global stock exchanges, along with the value of prominent tokens such as BTC.

BTC mining operators blanched last week when Trump imposed massive tariffs on technology imported from China, which is the source of many of the ASIC rigs miners use to conduct their operations. Then came suggestions that there would be exceptions to these tariffs, only for these hopes to be dashed after Trump insisted any ‘pause’ in imposing these costs was only temporary.

Singapore-based miner Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) appears to have had enough of the uncertainty. On April 15, Bloomberg reported that the company, which also manufactures ASIC rigs that it sells to other miners, would (for the time being, at least) keep its rigs for itself and “prioritize our own self-mining” at its sites in Bhutan and Norway rather than sell them to U.S.-based miners.

Jeff LaBerge, Bitdeer’s head of capital markets and strategy initiatives, said the company would take full advantage of the 90-day ‘pause’ on technology imports Trump announced on April 10 to ship rigs to the U.S. However, some Bitdeer customers have postponed delivery of new rigs until they know for sure what the mercurial Trump will do next.

Bitdeer, an offshoot of Chinese ASIC manufacturer Bitmain, has plans to launch its U.S.-based rig production later this year, a move it hopes will minimize further disruptions to its supply chain and revenue generation. But the semiconductors that power Bitdeer’s rigs come from Taiwan’s chip-making giant TSMC, and LaBerge expressed some confusion over how long those chips might remain exempt from Trump’s wrath. “We’re modeling for higher costs just in case.”

This is the last thing miners need right now, as the tariff uncertainty has played havoc with BTC’s fiat price, while the costs of producing a single BTC have never been higher. Sector-wide, miner profits are nearly one-third below their January level, when BTC’s price was reaching all-time highs in the post-inauguration euphoria. Hangovers suck, don’t they?

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Bo knows… hang on, we’ll think of something

The tariffs might not be all bad, at least, not in the minds of BTC maximalists if they raise revenue that might allow the government to buy tokens to stock the administration’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

The reserve announcement disappointed many maxis due to it consisting simply of BTC tokens already in the government’s possession. They were hoping for a massive expenditure of taxpayer dollars to buy more BTC on the open market that would light a fiat fire under the non-buoyant token.

The reserve announcement allowed for the possibility of adding additional BTC “provided that such strategies are budget neutral and do not impose incremental costs on United States taxpayers.” BTC maxis have since spent countless hours debating the definition of ‘budget neutral’ because their bags won’t pump the way they hope without the government riding to their fiscal rescue.

This week, Bo Hines, executive director of the new Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets, gave an interview to podcaster Anthony Pompliano. Hines has given a lot of interviews since his Council appointment in December, but no matter how long he talks, he never seems to say anything substantive. Like, never.

But maxis excitedly seized on one moment of the Pomp talk in which Hines addressed the ‘budget neutral’ hurdle. Claiming that “many high-IQ people” were coming up with “countless ideas” and “creative ways” to buy more BTC without sticking taxpayers with the bill, Hines offhandedly suggested that one of those ways could “be from, uh, you know, tariffs.”

There is one significant problem with the notion of using tariff revenue to buy speculative tokens on behalf of the American taxpayer. Tariff revenue will be needed to offset the billions of dollars in subsidies that the government will need to give domestic industries that can no longer sell their products abroad due to retaliatory tariffs imposed by America’s trading partners.

During Trump’s first term in office, the far less punitive tariffs he imposed on other nations required tens of billions of dollars in subsidies just for America’s farmers. This time around, the tab will be even higher, and redirecting tariff income to a speculative ‘reserve’ that many Americans don’t even understand, let alone support, will require raising taxes on other Americans. So, ‘budget neutral’ this is not.

But hey, Bo once played college football and twice failed to win elected office, but he did donate $1 million to the Make America Great Again super PAC one week before Trump’s re-election. So we’re sure this ‘high-IQ’ person will figure a way out of this jam somehow.

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