Understanding OPNX- what does this new exchange see for the future of crypto?

The fall of FTX was a monumental event. A company that was regarded as a cornerstone of the crypto exchange industry went bankrupt in little more than a week, and it began with a tweet suggesting that the company was insolvent.

Now, SBF is embroiled in a court case, and FTX creditors have formed a committee in an attempt to get a seat at the table while FTX settles its bankruptcy.

Yet, this situation is all too common when it comes to crypto companies filing for bankruptcies.

After Celsius declared bankruptcy, its customers were declared as unsecured creditors, and were forced to sit through a long and drawn out restructuring process for the company.

Unfortunately, these stories are not difficult to find, and customers are often left holding the bag when crypto companies collapse.

Now, however, there seems to be a solution taking shape- in the form of a new type of crypto exchange.

Tokenising humanity

The new crypto exchange, known as Open Exchange (OPNX), aims to ‘tokenise humanity’, according to its CEO Leslie Lamb.

Certainly, this is a strange term. After all, what does it mean to tokenise something as nebulous as humanity?

To begin, let’s look at what OPNX is concretely aiming to do.

Firstly, Lamb points out that as the world begins to adopt blockchain technology, there has been an increasing focus on using tokenising real-world assets. And one area where blockchain technology can help is in bankruptcy claims.

When a crypto company goes bankrupt, it is not only the founders and investors who lose out. Quite often the collapse of a large crypto company can be more than just a financial event. For those who invested their life savings into the company, this collapse often has an emotional impact as well.

These customers, often unsecured creditors, will then have to wait for years before they can even get any money back, either through a court case and subsequent liquidation or through a company restructuring.

In this way, assets such as crypto deposits, which were supposed to be liquid, suddenly become extremely illiquid because they are turned into claims against the company rather than crypto itself.

Rectifying incentives

Lamb also pointed out that in the current landscape of engagement farming, it can be easy for truth to be obfuscated in a sea of sensationalist but not necessarily accurate headlines.

Additionally, defamation and false accusation is not always properly dealt with in the crypto space. As such, OPNX is creating something known as Justice Tokens, which can be distributed to communities harmed by misinformation. Thus far, OPNX has already committed some of their justice tokens to the Milady community, citing the long term defamation that the community has suffered and their promotion of moral virtue.

The purpose of these tokens is to “restore some sense of justice and hold bad actors accountable for their actions”.

Concluding her speech, Lamb outlined her vision for the future- and what OPNX could do to contribute to that future.

“We want to steer social media towards the truth instead of engagement farming, and we want to create an ecosystem that truly fuses utility with culture. OPNX aims to be the change that we want to see in crypto. So when I talk about tokenising humanity, I mean it in a very literal sense.”