Bitcoin Forum

The Chinese audits carried out on most if not all of the Digital currency exchanges based in China are coming near to an end. For some exchanges, these audits were carried out by the Ripple Labs CTO, Stefan Thomas. He recently completed the audit for the OKCoin exchange which is one of the major exchange platforms in China accounting for more than 50% of trading activity in the country according to recent figures.

Read the full story exclusively @ http://coinfinance.com/news/okcoin-audit-proves-104-of-btc-reserve-along-with-other-major-chinese-exchanges

Does Stefan Thomas have any stake on Okcoin exchange?

And where is the final audit report?

I would still hesitate to put my BTC in this exchange to trade with. I understand that there is now some level of evidence that they have sufficient reserves to pay all their BTC deposit holders (I didn't see anything about fiat based reserves), however it still does not explain how they are able to charge 0 fees but still remain in business.

They are trying to gain market share first. Doing it this way is cheaper than spending a lot of money on marketing and giving "red pocket" like the HK exchange.

Once they reach certain size, I am pretty sure they will start charging fee.

If they raise their fee once they have a large market share, why would their customers not just take their business elsewhere? Most of the expense involved in a customer's account is in the opening of the account and if an account is opened but does not generate any revenue then the exchange will lose money.

I'm fairly certain they do charge fees - just not for trades (or deposits). My Chinese is non-existent, but running Google Translate on OKCoin's China homepage (https://www.okcoin.cn/) you can see they mention trades and deposits (no fee), but not withdrawals. This site (http://bestcoinexchange.com/exchanges/okcoin-review/) says (withdrawal) fees start at 0.1%.

The main issue with exchange is lack of liquidity.

They can charge 0.1-0.2% fee after gaining enough volume and still remain competitive compare to other exchanges.

Why would they not just do that now? If an exchange were to offer lower/competitive prices now when compared to other exchanges then more people would likely trade there because there would not be the hanging question of is the exchange going to run away with their money.

Well an exchange will have a lot of liquidity when it is charging 0 fees, however I think much of that liquidity would dry up once the exchange would start to charge any kind of fee at all. I think a lot of traders will only trade because of 0 fees (they can earn money instantly with only a very small change in price in their favor).