OKX token soars to 6-week high as major coins struggle: here’s why

OKB (OKB/USD), the native token of global crypto exchange OKX, has soared in the past 24 hours to hit its highest level since early November.

Data on market aggregator CoinGecko shows that OKB was up more than 5% early Friday morning (as at 06:00 ET), trading around $24.10. The OKX token was also flying against Bitcoin and Ethereum, with data showing that OKB was 8.8% up against the benchmark cryptocurrency and more than 11% up against its ETH pair.

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The token was changing hands at 0.00140686 BTC and 0.01974396 ETH at the time of writing.

Why is the OKB token up?

As noted above, OKB is the utility token used within the OKX ecosystem. The cryptocurrency is issued by the OKX Foundation and offers benefits such as trading fee discounts to holders. One can also buy OKB and trade it or hold it as an investment.

Now, as to why the deflationary token’s value is going up, it’s down to what OKX has brought to the crypto market. The exchange has listed Floki Inu (FLOKI/USD), a popular Doge-inspired token. According to listing news shared earlier today, one can now trade FLOKI on OKX – currently available spot trading pairs include FLOKI/USDT and FLOKI/USDC.OKB could also be seeing significant buy pressure after Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and Twitter owner, started following OKX on Twitter.

OKB price up 15% in past week

While Bitcoin and Ethereum led most other top coins in shedding gains seen earlier in the week, the OKX token surged higher on Friday to bring its weekly gains to over 15%. Over the past fortnight, OKB was nearly 10%, with the token’s price hitting a new monthly high since falling sharply in November following the collapse of FTX.

The OKB trading volume is up more than 61% in the past 24 hours and the price surge has pushed OKB up the crypto rankings by market cap. According to CoinGecko, the utility token is currently the 12th-largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of just over $6 billion.