The originally Hong-Kong based cryptocurrency exchange OKEx, which announced its expansion to Malta in 2018, is one of the biggest exchanges worldwide. With a huge userbase in Asia, OKEx was the worlds largest exchange in may 2018.  

“The depositing of XTZ will be available from 09:00 November 6, 2019 (UTC). XTZ spot trading against USDT and BTC will open at 09:00 November 7, 2019 (UTC). XTZ withdrawal will open from 09:00 November 8, 2019 (UTC).”OKEx will also launch USDT futures trading this month. 

“Tezos is a highly respected project with a robust community, and we’re happy to be able to add the value of the XTZ network to the OKEx ecosystem, where we strive to deliver a one-stop-shop for professional and retail traders,”said Andy Cheung, Head of Operations of OKEx. 

Tezos:

Tezos is a decentralized blockchain and smart contract platform which solves one of the biggest issues in blockchain: a fluent and fast development curve and upgrading protocol without undergoing hard forks while staying decentralized. 

Tezos foundation funding

With the staggering 650 million dollar value of funding in the warchest of the Tezos foundation, the next 10-15 years of funding for the project is safe. And since 61% of that funding is BTC, the dollar value in the next few years could very well be a multiple of what is is today. 

Decentralizing every aspect of the project.

Decentralization is what makes blockchain unique and powerful: this is where you take out the central power, which makes the blockchain itself, the trusted middle man, following only the fixed rules of the blockchain without a central power being able to change the rules at will. 

LiquidPoS: Tezos has currently 422 active bakers. With its LiquidPoS, these bakers are in turn baking for people who have delegated their XTZ to those bakers. Bakers get a percentage of their delegators, which is an extra incentive to bake fully optimized since they will want to keep their delegators using their baking service. 

The development of Tezos is decentralized too. Anyone can create amendments and try to get grands from The Tezos foundation to finance the development of these amendments. To implement these amendments, there is an on-chain voting system. All XTZ holders can influence the voting through the on-chain democratic system. Only people baking XTZ can vote. But the bakers that will be voting for new amendments, will have an economic incentive to listen to their delegators. Bakers should keep the opinion of their delegators in value, since their delegators can switch bakers easily. This way, delegators have influence on the votes of their bakers. For the full, detailed explanation on this process, see this article. 

Decentralized efforts to get exchange listings. The Tezos Commons Foundation (TCF) was chartered by a group of Tezos enthusiasts as a US based non-profit organization with the goal of advancing the Tezos protocol and community. This is a separate initiative from the Tezos community, decentralizing the total efforts that go into the full growth of Tezos on different levels. 

Decentralized marketing. Same goes for marketing, this is also done by the TCF. Why would you take decentralization this far? Could be with SEC regulations in mind. See this article.  

Holders returns of 5.5% through PoS

Liquid PoS gives Tezos (XTZ) holders the option to bake or delegate their XTZ and in return they will receive about 5.5% returns on what they hold. Compare that to PoW, where the miners receive the rewards and we have one of the big advantages for holders to invest in PoS projects. 

Fast growing developers community

According to @AMangiero, there are over 800 Tezos developers who have been trained or are being trained. B9lab is training 500 developers with their Tezos Blockstar Programme. So the number of developers for Tezos should be growing rapidly.

Zk-SNARKs for “fine tuned privacy”

We have zk-SNARKs confirmed as the next protocol amendment, which will provide the “fine-tuned privacy” for enterprise usage of Tezos at entities like the Bank of France (who have already tested a Tezos node on raspberry pi). 

Projects on Tezos:

In the biannual foundation update, it was announced that, in august there were 62 projects in development and 36 new grands for projects were being processed on that date. 

STO’s

With its innovating governance model, Tezos is a very attractive basis for the STO market. STO's are tokenization of stocks, real estate and other financial products. The legal finalization and launch of STO's can be a time consuming process, but Tezos has quite an impressive future lined up in the STO game:

• BTG Pactual and Dalma Capital adopt Tezos for STOs worth $1 billion
• Bonda Vinci Signs Business Agreement with Tezos Korea for Joint Venture of Art and Real Estate Securities Token (STO)  
• Elevated Returns sets to Tokenize Thai Real Estate with a Target of US$100m This Year
• The Fundament Group has developed Germans first real estate crypto token and has just formed a strategic partnership with Tezos.
• The Security Token platform tZERO will Tokenize about $640 million in UK Real Estate. 

DeFi on Tezos

• First major decentralized peer to peer funding platform on Tezos. 
• USD Tez (USDtz) On-Chain Lending — with Tezos. Lending and borrowing USDtz tokens made fair and easy. 
• Checker coin stabilizer

StakerDAO

Inspired by MakerDAO which is build on Ethreum, StakerDAO is developed on Tezos. StakerDAO will manage DeFi application (Decentralized Finance) with the possibility for STKR holders, to vote through decentralized, on-chain governance. More info here.

Digital strategic cardgame

Coase is developing a strategic card game on Tezos. While you wouldn’t think so at first sight, it could be very interesting from an investors perspective. Cards will be traded and there will be a marketplace to auction, trade and even rent cards valued in XTZ. We all remember the CryptoKitties madness.

OKEx and Tezos:

"We are looking forward to a thriving relationship with OKEx, a global leader in the blockchain space, in furthering the Tezos ecosystem together in Asia and throughout the world,” said Corey Soreff, Board of Directors of Tezos Commons Foundation.