OKX exchange: a Maltese MiCA licence and a $505m guilty plea

The OKX exchange started in 2017 and now sits fourth on CoinGecko's trust score with a perfect 10 and about $2.08bn of daily volume. The exchange runs spot, derivatives and peer-to-peer trading, and its operating entity, Aux Cayes FinTech, is registered in the Seychelles. Our exchange card keeps the products, the regions and the badges in one place.

“One of the first exchanges with a full EU MiCA licence”

— Intokened, Our card on the exchange

What the licence gave

In January 2025 OKX Europe took a full MiCA licence from Malta's financial regulator, among the first major exchanges to hold one. That authorisation opens the European Economic Area through passporting, and the register it joined has since grown to about 365 providers. For a European client that licence decides which products appear in the interface and which disappear.

What the plea cost

In February 2025 the operator pleaded guilty in the United States to running an unlicensed money transmitting business. The settlement came to $504.7m: an $84.4m fine plus $420.3m of forfeited fees.

Prosecutors said the platform served US customers against its own policy from 2018 to early 2024, carrying more than $1tn of their transactions and over $5bn of suspicious funds, and that staff sometimes told clients how to get around the ban. OKX agreed to keep an external compliance consultant until February 2027, which is four months from now.

$504.7m equals 24% of a single day's volume at the current rate. That is the scale a penalty has to beat before it changes how a venue of this size behaves, and the consultant requirement is the part that keeps working after the money is paid.

Where it goes next

OKX and ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, filed this month to run a tokenized US stock venue, a week before the former FTX Europe chief filed for his own. The exchange that paid for operating without a licence is now applying for the newest one going.

For a user in Europe the licence is the practical part: it decides what the exchange may offer and who answers when something breaks. Our exchange ranking measures the volume side, where one venue holds 35.4% of all spot trading. Three things settle from here: whether the consultant mandate ends on schedule in February, whether the tokenized venue opens, and whether the trust score holds at 10 through the next audit cycle.

Informational material, not investment advice. Volumes and rankings were read on 16 October 2026 and change daily; the court settlement and the licence are matters of record.