What's Driving Token Prices? November 15, 2023

OKB (+5.1%) - Centralized exchange, OKX, is following in the footsteps of Coinbase and Kraken by announcing plans for their own L2 which will be built on Polygon. Although the success of Layer-2 plays for exchanges is yet to be determined, this announcement led to an increase in price because OKX is still the second largest exchange by market share after Binance capturing 24.85% of the market. As the solid number 2 exchange, OKX has managed to stay clear of any public regulatory spats compared with Binance and HTX (fka Huobi) however, they are still less transparent in their operations than Coinbase.
OP (+21%) - Layer-2 protocol, Optimism, announced on Monday that Ryan Watkins, formerly the President of competing Layer-2, Polygon, joined the company as Chief Growth Officer. Watkins has been credited with assisting in developing Polygon’s biggest partnerships including Starbucks, Nike, Mastercard, Disney, Meta and more.
MNT/FTT (+6.1%/+160%) - Over the weekend, the bankrupt FTX estate announced that it was suing the ByBit exchange to claw back $1B in assets by claiming that the assets were gained in a “fraudulent scheme”. The lawsuit alleges that ByBit used its VIP status to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars of assets from the FTX exchange on the day before the collapse using the accounts of ByBit related entities and senior executives. In addition, the suit alleges that ByBit held $125M in assets owned by FTX and has refused to hand them over to the bankruptcy estate. The third accusation relates to a token swap in late 2021 between FTX and BitDAO (the decentralized governance group spun out of ByBit) where FTT was exchanged for BIT tokens. Earlier this year, BitDAO rebranded to Mantle and shifted its focus to building a Layer-2 blockchain and opened a token swap to convert BIT into the new MNT tokens. According to the lawsuit, Mantle/ByBit tried to reverse the original transaction from 2021 since the value of the FTT tokens were worth $4M versus the $50M worth in BIT tokens. Once the FTX estate tried to swap their tokens through the online portal, Mantle paused the swap contract and began a vote to block FTX from converting to the new token.

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