Welcome to our OKX review! (Can also be watched as video HERE)
One of the most influential aspects on trading performance are still fees, hence we are going to deep-dive into the OKX fees in this article. After the FTX meltdown, OKX is one of the leading exchanges both in terms of spot & futures trading.
After reading this article, you will exactly understand the OKX tier levels and requirements and the associated spot and futures fees. Moreover, you will know how OKX compares to other exchanges in terms of fees and which traders find outstanding trading conditions at OKX through our sweetspot analysis. We take a real deep-dive into the fees, looking at spot and futures as well as maker and taker trades at the different volume levels, which holds some interesting findings. So without further ado, let’s get right into it.
OKX applies a tiered fee structure both for spot and futures trading, meaning that the higher you rise in the tiers, both your maker and taker fees decrease. Therefore, it is desirable to rise in the tiers, so let’s have a look what type of requirements you have to fulfill to rise in those tiers.
OKX gives you three options to rise in the tier levels, which are holding of the OKB token, the asset balance on your account, or your trading volume. The OKB holding and asset balance are the same for both spot and futures trading, so let’s have a look at these first.
OKX in total has 13 tier levels, which are named level 1–5 and VIP 1–8. By holding the OKB, you can climb from level 1 to 5, while based in the assets you hold, you can reach up to tier VIP 5. When in VIP 5, you are in tier level 10. The 11th to 13th tier level you can only reach through your trading volume. Level 1–5 apply to traders which have less than 100,000 USD in balance on their account and have less than 10 million US Dollar spot trading volume or 50 million USD futures volume in the last 30 days. As a completely new trader at OKX, you will start of in tier 1, giving you spot fees of 0.08% for maker and 0.1% for taker trades. If you are not aware of the difference for maker and taker trades and why they are charged differently, we have made a dedicated article for this (LINK).
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As mentioned, the fees decrease the higher you rise in the tier levels, so how would you get into tier 2? You will need to hold 500 or more OKB tokens to get into tier 2 and have your spot fees reduced to 0.075% and 0.095% for maker and taker trades. 500 OKB tokens at the time of this article roughly equate 18,000 US Dollar. In order to get to level 5, you would need to hold 2,000 OKB, which is worth more than 70,000 USD, quite unlikely given that you hold less than 100,000 US Dollar in total balance on your account. If you hold more than 100,000 US Dollar of balance in your account, you will automatically be granted tier 6, or VIP 1 already. You can rise the tiers based on your asset balance until tier 10 or VIP 5, which requires you to hold more than 10 million US Dollar, however would give you 0% maker fees and 0.04% taker fees for spot trading. The higher tiers for OKX have some very attractive fee rates, even negative fees for maker trades starting from tier 11, but are very hard to reach. More than 500 million US Dollar spot volume in a month really is a lot! These fees and tier requirements have been for spot trading, how about futures trading though?
The OKB holding requirements and asset balance requirements are the same as for spot trading, however the volume requirements are higher in futures trading, which makes sense as futures trades are usually leveraged and also have lower fee levels. The ratio of spot vs futures volume requirements is roughly 1:5 at OKX, which is rather at the lower end. At Binance, ByBit, and Kraken, the ratio is typically around 1:10 or 1:20. What does that mean? At OKX, it is comparably easier to achieve the tier level through futures trading compared to spot trading. However, the tier requirements in general are set quite high at OKX. To reach the VIP levels, you’ll need 10 million USD spot volume or 50 million USD futures volume, which is already the highest tier at Crypto.com. The great part is, that no matter how you achieve the tier level, so through asset balance, spot or futures volume, you will be granted the tier levels fees for both spot and futures trading. So, for example, if reaching VIP 2 through futures trading, you will also enjoy the VIP 2 levels spot trading fees. Whether the low spot to futures volume requirement ration yields some especially attractive sweetspots at OKX we will see later during the in-depth comparison to other exchanges. The maker and taker fees for futures trading start off at 0.02 and 0.05% for maker and taker at OKX in the first tier level, and are down to 0.01 and 0.03% in tier 6. The fees can go down to -0.015 and 0.02% for maker and taker trades in the highest tier level, which is again very hard to reach. And don’t be mistaken by the very low percentage numbers of crypto trading fees though, especially for futures trading. Fees have a much higher effect on trading performance than many traders think. We did a dedicated article outlining the effect of fees on the trading performance (LINK).
How do the fees compare against other exchanges? Before looking at each dimension of spot and futures as well as maker and taker trades, let’s first of all have an overall view based on an example. You can easily compare your fees within seconds at all major exchanges through a tool such as dr-fee. Going to dr-fee.com, we go to the manual analysis, in which we type in our trading volume instead of connecting our account to the tool which would read our trading history automatically.
Let’s have an example of a trader in tier 6, so VIP 1 at OKX. We assume a spot volume of 15 million USD, and 75 million USD usd-m futures trading volume, right in the middle of the requirements of tier 6. Let’s say the trader has 50% maker and 50% taker trades, has 150,000 US Dollar balance, and would be willing to hold 10% of the balance in the native exchange token such as OKB for OKX or BNB for Binance. Moreover, the trader would be willing to pay the fees with the native exchange token. Let’s click next and I’ll skip the email part here for you.
As you can see, in this example OKX is roughly in the middle of the exchanges. At OKX, the user would have paid fees of 306,000 US Dollar in a year for those trades. The volumes we entered have been rather high, but that is quite a lot in fees, that’s why we always recommend to check for your most fee efficient exchange. At Kraken, the same user would have paid roughly 160k for the exact same trades or roughly half compared to OKX. We can also check for more exchanges, for example at Binance, the user would have paid 355 thousand US Dollar, or at MEXC even nearly half a million, roughly 61% more compared to OKX. This is only one scenario though, and other traders with different volumes, products traded and more or less maker and taker trades might be much better or worse off at OKX. Therefore, let’s have a more detailed analysis through our sweetspot charts.
We are now going to compare OKX to the fee levels at other exchanges, and we are starting with the spot maker fees. On the x-axis, we have the monthly trading volume, and on the y-axis, we see the associated fee levels. OKX is the black line here for these charts. For spot maker fees, OKX starts off at 0.08% fees, here hidden behind another line. The maker fees are among the cheapest in the market until a volume level of roughly a million US Dollar, only then many other exchanges have similar maker spot fees. However at lower volume, many exchanges have maker fees roughly double as high as OKX, at around 0.15% or even more. At volume levels between 1 million and roughly 250 million, I would say OKX is average, while at very high volume levels, the maker spot fees of OKX become very attractive again.
For spot taker fees, OKX starts quite attractive again at 0.1%, only beaten by Crypto.com. We see a similar pattern as in the maker spot fees, at higher volumes, the fees only decrease at a lower pace compared to other exchanges, therefore OKX becomes rather average again at these levels. What is the situation in futures trading though?
For futures maker fees, the OKX fees start at a pretty high level at 0.02% and only start to decrease at a volume level of 50 million US Dollar. At like 45 million USD volume, OKX is pretty much the most expensive exchange for futures maker fees. However then, at large volumes OKX gradually becomes more attractive, even to the point of being the cheapest exchange at very large volumes here at 2 billion monthly futures volume.
For futures taker trades, OKX starts at 0.05% fees, which is average in the market. The same pattern applies, the fees only start to decrease at rather high volumes, hence again OKX is among the most expensive exchanges at volume levels of 40–50 million USD. While OKX recovers at higher levels, it doesn’t reach a leading position for futures taker trades as in futures maker trades, but stays rather average. For futures taker trades, no exchange comes even close to the fees offered at Kraken.
So who is well off at OKX in terms of trading fees? To summarize low volume spot traders, so volumes below one million monthly spot volume have quite attractive fees at OKX. Moreover, very large volume traders both in spot and futures trading, especially traders with a large share of maker trades find attractive trading fees at OKX. On the other hand, medium volume traders both in spot and futures are paying significantly more in fees at OKX compared to other exchanges, as we have also seen during our analysis earlier at dr-fee. Overall, I would say OKX has average trading fees compared to other exchanges, with some sweetspots for low spot and very large volume spot and futures traders.
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Stay safe and happy trading!
All information in this article may not be up-to-date anymore while reading and should not considered to be financial advice!
