The cryptocurrency claims market has long been a concern to all parties. Particularly, people are in an intense debate on how to solve issues related to cryptocurrency claims in recent years when various platforms have collapsed.

Let’s take the recently collapsed FTX as an example. This project misappropriated a large number of funds on the platform and used them in other fields. Still, it ran out of cash later, resulting in the inability to transfer funds from many users on the platform. This is a typical incident related to claims.

Since it was the second largest centralized exchange in the world at that time, FTX exerted a great impact on the whole crypto market in this incident. It caused lots of debt issues that still need to be solved properly. Its founder, SBF, is still under investigation and arrest by the US judiciary.

A similar case also happened to Celsius. Although their creditors may end up with partial payouts, the bankruptcy proceedings and financial issues are complex and could keep the lawsuit going for years.

Debt issues in the crypto market have always been a home truth, which, however, has spread in this round of bear market. The amount and the number of users involved are different from the past.

Crypto Claims Market

In the bear market of 2023 when the whole crypto market is shrinking, although the total market capitalization is much lower than that of the peak in the bull market of 2022, the size of the cryptocurrency claims market is growing bigger, which can be a huge market that has exceeded $200 billion base on the nominal value.

However, if participants want to carry out productive business in this market, a lot of stakeholders are expected to get involved. Moreover, solutions to the debts and claims under the traditional financial system are only partially applicable to the crypto market. We need to explore more cases in this aspect.

Some projects take the opportunity to provide solutions to this problem in the crypto market. OPNX, a cryptocurrency claims exchange launched recently, is designed to solve the claims in this aspect.

About OPNX

Open Exchange(OPNX) is a newly-launched cryptocurrency claims exchange, which can also be treated as a platform for users to claim cryptocurrency compensation.

OPNX was co-founded by Kyle Davies, the co-founder of Three Arrows Capital, Su Zhu, and Kyle Davies, the co-founders of CoinFLEX. It allows users to tokenize their claims and get cash in advance by trading.

In its statement to the public, Leslie Lamb, the CEO of OPNX, admitted frankly that OPNX is created to benefit the current blockchain industry, in which the value of the claims market has been over $200 billion. Victims of collapsed platforms such as FTX and Celsius take a long time to regain their assets. However, OPNX is dedicated to helping them get their due benefits in a better and more effective way.

source: https://opnx.com/

Source: https://opnx.com/

Users who know well the crypto market should be familiar with Three Arrows Capital-a company that has been focusing on the blockchain industry for a long time. It was co-founded by Kyle Davies and Su Zhu in 2012. As one of the largest hedge funds in cryptocurrency in the past, Three Arrows Capital supported many familiar projects.

Only last year, Three Arrows Capital applied for bankruptcy protection from the US government agencies. It has been caught in various problems recently, resulting in billions of dollars in debt.

It is against such a backdrop that OPNX was created. It has soon caught wide attention in the market since its launch, but the trading volume on the platform was poor at the beginning. However, it has issued the governance token $OX and enabled claims and trading of Celsius, helping OPNX gain some popularity in the market. Nevertheless, OPNX is gradually turning into a platform for trading cryptocurrencies. With only minimal trading volume, the project seems to use the initial goal of being a claims platform as a gimmick.

At the very beginning, OPNX claimed that it would support the trading claims of 10 crypto companies, including Celsius, FTX, Genesis, and BlockFi.

The claim token initially launched by OPNX is based on the claims of CoinFLEX. The Supreme Court of Seychelles has approved the reorganization terms, and CoinFLEX distributed 83.65 million rvUSD to creditors.

The CoinFLEX exchange stopped operating in April of this year. Since there is a relationship between the co-founders of CoinFLEX and OPNX, the KYC information and account balance of CoinFLEX users can be directly migrated to OPNX, which brought the first batch of users to OPNX.

（Source: coinflex.com）

Whereas, since it was launched in April, the price of rvUSD has fallen from the peak at more than $0.6 to about $0.145 today. Moreover, since June, the daily trading volume are almost zero, and there is little liquidity around the market price.

On June 1, OPNX enabled claims and transaction services on Celsius, and the credit token was named CELSIUS. Celsius owns a relatively larger scale of creditors, with over 600,000 creditors. Among them, 85% are retail investors with arrears of less than $5,000. They need help to conduct trading through OTC and other channels.

（Source: en.wikipedia.org）

Although OPNX provides a corresponding trading place for Celsius creditors and can bring the first batch of users to the exchange, the current price of CELSIUS on OPNX is $0.215. Like rvUSD, there is also no trading volume in CELSIUS for a long time.

It seems that creditors are still on the sidelines to claim their debts, or it is because OPNX has not made vigorous promotions. Strictly speaking, claim methods for rvUSD and CELSIUS are different.

Even though rvUSD and CELSIUS are both credit tokens, OPNX is not responsible for claims because rvUSD is issued by other companies and listed on OPNX. The credit tokens including CLESIUS and the subsequent FTX are collected directly on the OPNX exchange.

To claim debts on the OPNX platform, users must register with OPNX and complete KYC. Then, they have to provide their credit details and submit a credit transfer application. After signing the credit transfer agreement, they can trade claims to obtain liquidity.

Currently, however, almost all of the trading volume on the OPNX platform are from perpetual contracts. OPNX is a crypto exchange. It enabled spot and futures transactions for mainstream cryptocurrencies such as BTC and ETH and supports trading tokenized credits.

Unlike credit tokens which almost contribute no trading volume, OPNX’s perpetual contract has been on the rise in its trading volume since its launch. In the last month, OPNX gained $10-20 million in total daily trading volume.

Although credit tokens also contribute their trading volume to spot trading, most of the spot trading volume on OPNX comes from mainstream currencies such as BTC and FLEX. rvUSD and CELSIUS almost gained no transactions for a long time.

At present, OPNX has yet to develop into a cryptocurrency claims exchange as it was first advertised, but it is more like a traditional centralized exchange. Most of the trading volume is from the perpetual contract transactions in mainstream cryptocurrencies such as BTC, and most of the spot trading volume also comes from mainstream currencies.

No one shows any interest in the credit tokens issued by OPNX. It seems that its earliest promotion is just a gimmick.

Governance token $OX and its economic model

The OPNX is associated with CoinFLEX, and most early users are CoinFLEX users, making it possible to migrate CoinFLEX user information and account balances to OPNX directly.

As a result, OPNX used CoinFLEX’s governance token $FLEX as the platform currency at the beginning. $FLEX, then, became a new governance token on OPNX when its native exchange was on the verge of bankruptcy, and its price also rose rapidly in a short period of time.

However, it didn’t last for too long. OPNX could not be a successor to CoinFLEX. On May 31, OPNX re-issued its governance token $OX, and launched the staking platform, The Herd, at the same time. Although $FLEX will gradually not be used as a governance token, its holders still enjoy the existing rights and interests.

OPNX claims that the creation of $OX model is inspired by the model of CRV/veCRV on CurveDAO, and the corresponding The Herd is also a platform to establish an economic model under which free transactions are allowed by staking tokens.

With this idea in mind, OPNX launched its first Launchpad project - Raiser (RZR) at the end of June this year, providing all $OX stakers with 10% of the RZR supply.

Raiser provides a permissionless credit market (RaiseR). It introduces a third-party credit assessment and evaluation agency, allowing anyone to borrow based on their credit scores on the chain and social media. Therefore, it achieves an optional staking model.

Moreover, $OX also successively launched platforms such as Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, and Arbitrum in the same period, and the platform began to develop towards a multi-chain platform.

The white paper of $OX shows that its maximum supply is 9.86 billion pieces. This number is calculated by subtracting the 1.4 million burned coins from the total maximum circulation of 100 million $FLEX and multiplying by 100.

Therefore, $FLEX can be exchanged with $OX at a ratio of 1:100. Meanwhile, if users choose to exchange $FLEX for staked $OX, they can exchange at a ratio of 1:125, and the extra part will be paid in OPNX, aiming to expand the application of Herd.

$OX is used as a governance token. Therefore, voting can be used to change the basic functions involved in the transaction. Stakers can also obtain benefits from RWA business provided by OPNX, and enjoy part of the rebate on handling fees when tokenized real assets are generated.

Certainly, it will take time to implement this part of the stake. Seen from the current point of view, the design of $OX’s economic model and stake service still shows some innovative points.

Compared to the governance tokens on other exchanges, $OX’s uniqueness is that its users can obtain the same proportion of free trading quota in OPNX according to the staking ratio, and they only have to pay 50% of the handling fee for the excess part. This return mechanism allows users to earn a certain percentage of free trading quota returns by staking a small amount of $OX. That means enjoying the lowest possible trading fee rate without taking the risk of $OX investment.

About oUSD

Apart from the applications of $OX, OPNX also launched its own platform margin——oUSD, which is used as a credit token on the platform, intending to remove users’ doubt about the platform’s trust and risks, and at the same time meet the users’ demand for mixed asset staking.

Users can use USDT to exchange 1:1 with oUSD, and use oUSD to make payments or to earn income and make up for losses. $OX stakers will vote to determine the interest rate.

The subsequent application scenarios designed by OPNX for oUSD allow users to deposit EVM-compatible assets into the contract, which is equivalent to the staking value in the platform and can be used without using the OPNX platform. In addition, users can also stake oUSD to earn interest and obtain income from the settlement on collaterals on the OPNX platform.

In the long run, oUSD is designed to provide crypto users with more flexible and secure trading methods, as well as, to a certain extent, effectively avoid the related problems that the previous collapsed exchanges encountered.

Current Status and Debates of OPNX

As a newly-launched exchange, OPNX has some intrinsic problems. It claims to be located in Dubai, but the Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority issued a written reprimand to OPNX’s co-founder and CEO on April 18, accusing them of operating and promoting OPNX without a local license.

Although some start-up projects are often faced with this kind of regulatory issue, OPNX, which claims to be committed to cryptocurrency claims trading, may suffer a bad impact in terms of the user experience.

OPNX is more like a double-dealer than a claims trading platform. Although it has enabled claims transactions such as trading claims from Celsius, its trading volume mainly comes from perpetual contract trading in mainstream currencies. On the contrary, debt tokens contribute trading volume only for a short time.

In June, though the trading volume on OPNX showed an upward trend on the whole, we really can’t say that the high trading volume of $10 million per day is good.

The two founders of OPNX—Kyle Davies and Su Zhu—seem to have no worries, even though the company was also affected by the collapse of Three Arrows Capital and many creditors had claimed their assets.

However, Kyle Davies once stated on his personal Twitter that they will repay the creditors of Three Arrows Capital with the proceeds of OPNX, provided that they are willing to promote the development of OPNX in the future.

Of course, his speech is full of oriental philosophy:

“We very much believe that if we do good and we say to creditors who lost money, they have a way to make more back. If we do bad and they do well, then that’s great. And that’s good karma, or whatever you want to call it.“

We understand he persuaded creditors to “just do good deeds and not worry about the future”. Although this response is indescribable from creditors’ perspective, they have few choices but to believe that OPNX can thrive because there is no effective solution.

Conclusion

The launch of OPNX attracted lots of attention initially, and many cryptocurrencies involved deeply in the crisis of collapsed exchanges have great expectations for this project. However, it is difficult to deal with this kind of cryptocurrency claims, and it is not easy to transfer the lost digital assets at a price that satisfies users in a short period of time.

This may be the key intrinsic reason why OPNX’s business in cryptocurrency claims has come to a standstill. However, along with the growth of the platform’s own business, $OX demonstrates its value as a governance token, and OPNX will also take more effective measures to implement its debt business.

Next, OPNX aims to offer more claim categories. The current staking rate data of $OX is relatively good, with a price of around $0.029. In this case, not a few investors in the crypto market are pleased to witness the project’s sound development.

After all, only a few exchanges in the market are capable of engaging in cryptocurrency claims. If OPNX wants to live up to the users’ expectations, it needs to effectively expand its business scale to promote the claims trading services more effectively and successfully. This may explain why OPNX focuses more on developing businesses in mainstream cryptocurrencies.