Only those who are willing to burn money have the opportunity to print new money.

This afternoon, OKX dropped a bombshell in the market—a one-time large-scale destruction of 65.25 million OKB, valued at hundreds of millions of dollars at the current price. After the announcement was made, the price of OKB quickly surged, with a gain of over 100% in a short period of time, making it the center of attention in a relatively lackluster market environment. This kind of volatility gave many investors a sense of déjà vu.

The market's memory quickly reverted to four years ago—2021, the sensational "platform token burn war." At that time, exchanges repurchased and burned their own platform tokens with real money, not only reducing the market circulation supply and creating scarcity but also signaling profitability and business growth to the outside world through this method. It was an intense arms race without gunfire: each destruction announcement drove up the token price and reshuffled the market cap rankings.

Now, as OKB once again initiates a large-scale destruction, the market's emotions and memories are ignited simultaneously. The difference is that the industry environment in 2025 is significantly different from back then—global regulations are stricter, and the competition and ecosystem layout among exchanges have also undergone noticeable changes.

However, this does not prevent us from asking the same question—on today's platform token track, is it still possible to see a tenfold surge like in 2021?

Retrospect on the 2021 Platform Token Burn War

Let's turn the timeline back four years.

From the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2021, the crypto market experienced an epic bull run. Bitcoin broke through the $20,000 mark and continued to rise, Ethereum returned to the thousand-dollar range, and the altcoin sector exploded across the board. A large amount of speculative capital first flowed into low-price, highly volatile altcoins, driving up short-term gains and rapidly igniting market sentiment.

Subsequently, with profit-taking and capital inflow from altcoins, exchange trading volumes and profits were significantly boosted.

At this point, platform tokens possessed the conditions for a "post-pump": the high profits brought by the bull market enabled exchanges to conduct large-scale token buybacks and burns, reducing the circulating supply and creating scarcity; and the demand for market value management made exchanges eager to showcase their strength through burns.

The top platforms keenly seized this opportunity, using burns as a tool for brand competition and investor confidence games.

A "muscle-showing burn" catalyzed by the altcoin craze and bolstered by exchange profits set the stage, as platform tokens completed the transition from "lagging" to "leading" in the market.

In that epic Burn War, no one was willing to be a silent bystander.

The actions of major exchanges, in terms of frequency, scale, and creativity, were almost as exhilarating as the price curve. To secure a higher position on the market cap rankings, they showcased their strength in different ways—some launched a single powerful attack to awe the audience, some chose a steady pace to build trust, some directly confronted the secondary market, while others relied on high-frequency maneuvers to make their presence known.

Eventually, four distinct camps emerged on the battlefield, each representing a unique style of play: BNB, HT, OKB, and FTT. They not only shaped the landscape of platform coins in 2021 but also provided a sample for newcomers to emulate or even improve upon.

In that smoke-filled Burn War, BNB was the first cannon to fire.

In April 2021, Binance burned a staggering 1,099,888 BNB in a single event, amounting to a record-breaking $5.95 billion at the time's price, directly refreshing the history of crypto burn records. This not only significantly reduced the circulating supply but also demonstrated to the market what "speed of profit realization" meant. Following this, CZ threw out an even more aggressive signal—completing the burn target of 100 million tokens ahead of schedule and introducing an automatic burn mechanism, turning this action into a sustainable and anticipated positive development. With such bold moves and a steady pace, BNB surged from $37 to $690 during that year's bull market, propelling its market cap into the global top three.

Similar to BNB, HT's rise was not in the initial wave of leaders but rather followed the rhythm of "Shitcoins rise first—Platform coins rise later." From January to February 2021, funds mainly flowed into hot shitcoins. When these funds returned to exchange profits and platform coins, HT experienced a concentrated surge. Starting from around $4 in early January 2021 to a peak near $39 in May, the price surged nearly 10 times.

OKB chose a more direct route. It eliminated the intermediate buyback step and directly bought and burned on the secondary market. This strategy was akin to firing bullets directly into the price curve, reducing the space for speculators to lay early traps while also creating a significant market impact instantly upon announcement. Throughout 2021, OKB burned nearly 30 million tokens, with the price skyrocketing from single digits to $40, firmly holding its position in the second echelon.

Image Source: CCTV Interview Video

As a rising star, FTT clearly did not want to fall behind its established competitors in terms of pace. FTX chose a high-frequency approach — weekly buyback and burn events, incorporating all revenue from trading fees, leveraged token redemption fees, futures funding rates, among others, into its arsenal. This rhythm allowed FTX to stay at the center of attention throughout the 2021 bull market, with its price soaring to a peak of $85, second only to BNB and OKB. However, this model heavily relied on trading volume, and once the market turned bearish, its firepower dried up. As expected, in 2022, the exchange suffered a meltdown, bringing FTT's story to an abrupt halt, plummeting from stardom to ruin.

The intense buyback and burn battles mainly took place in the first four months of 2021.

From January to April, platforms like BNB, OKB, HT, FTT, almost routinely announced record-breaking buyback and burn figures, often totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in a single event. Coupled with the high trading volumes of the bull market, prices were successively driven to new highs, pushing market sentiment to its peak.

Entering July to September, the burn pace continued, but the scale was reduced compared to the first half of the year. Announcements were more about meeting expectations, and price reactions became more moderate, entering a cooling-off period. By the fourth quarter, as BTC and ETH underwent corrections, exchange trading volumes significantly declined. Burn magnitudes and frequencies decreased, and the news effects could no longer drive the platform tokens strongly upward, causing the hype to rapidly dissipate.

In the end, this nearly year-long burn arms race not only left a steep peak-and-valley pattern on the price chart but also reshaped the landscape of platform tokens. BNB, leveraging the dual advantages of firepower and pace, securely held the top position. OKB, with its robust mechanism and decisive execution, firmly occupied the second tier. While FTT once stood out during the bull market, its downfall in 2022 due to over-reliance on trading volume and external conditions served as a cautionary tale in the history of platform tokens.

The aftermath of this battle continues to this day, providing a clear reminder to newcomers that in the world of platform tokens, the ability to burn brightly must also be accompanied by longevity.

Platform Tokens That Skyrocketed in 2025

The price surge of platform tokens is often not a linear climb but rather a "step-wise" leap: appearing calm at times, once a key event is triggered (massive burn, major product launch, licensing approval, ecosystem expansion), the price can experience a steep incline in a short period, then establish a new price center on a new step.

Over multiple cycles, these "super-surge" platform tokens have almost always followed a common script:

First, lay the groundwork — early preparation in terms of ecosystem, products, compliance, etc.; then ignite — spark the market with a large-scale event, such as BNB's Alpha launch, OKB's massive burn, BGB's dual ecosystem; then expand — continuously release new positive news at the new price highs to maintain momentum and fund inflows.

By 2025, we will see BNB, OKB, and BGB all interpreting this logic in their own way.

1. BNB

Starting from around $250 in early 2023 to surpassing $800 in 2025, BNB achieved a growth of over three times in two years.

The main theme of this round of growth was largely ignited by Binance Alpha.

Over the past six months, Binance Alpha has become the largest liquidity pool in the crypto community. On the Alpha page, users can participate in early project IDOs by completing tasks, staking BNB, and have the opportunity to qualify for token lotteries before the project goes live. The monthly returns that retail investors can obtain from this have far exceeded an average white-collar salary.

However, Alpha is not an isolated product; behind it is the entire on-chain operational scenario on the BNB Chain: Alpha not only provides tasks and lottery opportunities but also guides users to explore on-chain activities deeply on the BNB Chain, serving as a traffic gateway.

Users have shifted from passive "hoarding coins, fee discounts" to "on-chain natives"—learning to swap, provide liquidity, lend, and even meme trade or engage in contracts within various on-chain ecosystems like Binance Wallet, Pancakeswap, turning into true "BNB Chain natives." This shift in operational habits has been a significant driving force behind BNB's growth in this cycle.

Since early 2024, the BNB Chain has not only seen the breakout of core projects like Pancake, Lista, Four.meme, Aster at the protocol level but also witnessed a synchronous rise in network-wide key metrics.

Evolution of each public chain's share in weekly DEX trading volume, where the deep blue area represents the BNB Chain, data source: Dune

From this stacked area chart, we can see that the BNB Chain has risen from a "steady follower" to the public chain with the largest trading volume over the past year. Furthermore, the Maxwell upgrade has brought new breakthroughs, serving as the third core network upgrade of the BNB Chain this year, reducing the block time from 1.5 seconds to 0.75 seconds, resulting in even faster on-chain responsiveness.

To some extent, BNB has completed the evolution of its role from "platform token endorsement" to "ecosystem value carrier," further achieving absolute dominance in a multi-chain environment.

From a broader perspective of the financial market, BNB has also attracted major institutions in the traditional sphere that are converting billions of dollars in strategic bets into on-chain reserves and capital thickening, becoming a significant option for coin hoarding and stockpiling.

This evolution path from platform equity to ecosystem native token, and then to institutional reserve asset, is a key reason for BNB's continuous rise over the past two years.

2. OKB

Over the two years from 2023 to 2025, OKB surged from $28 to $110.

During these two years, OKX's most prominent storylines were twofold: strengthening its global licensing layout and accelerating Web3 tool development, such as the OKX wallet.

In 2023, OKX established a subsidiary in France, set up an office in Turkey, made regulatory strides in Dubai, proactively released reserve proof, and enhanced transparency. As for the years 2024 to 2025, the licensing matrix was rapidly perfected, gaining the Singapore MAS payment institution license, the full operational license from Dubai's VARA, and becoming one of the first cryptocurrency exchanges to receive the MiCA license.

During the same period, OKX transformed its wallet product into a strategic core, transitioning from "platform functionality" to decentralized entry points: in 2022, it launched the Web3 wallet supporting multi-chain asset management, NFT, and DApp features. In 2023, the wallet added "authorization history analysis" functionality, enhancing user security and control. The most substantial growth occurred during the Bitcoin ecosystem boom, making it the core channel for Ordinals trading: in 2023, the trading volume exceeded $1 billion, capturing a 91.7% market share. Subsequently, OKX also introduced the independent OKX Wallet app, supporting 130+ blockchains, with a daily trading volume exceeding $1 billion, adding 500,000 wallets per day, and total assets under custody exceeding $44.5 billion.

In 2025, it was the year of the most significant surge for OKB, especially on the day the "massive OKB burn" was announced. This marked the 29th historical OKB burn and the final burn. The scale of this burn was rarely seen in the crypto space.

On August 13, OKX announced a one-time burn of over 65 million OKB from historical repurchases and reserves and switched to an intelligent contract to automatically burn all future OKBs entering the black hole address, completely ceasing manual burns.

This means that the total supply of OKB will be permanently locked at 21 million, a scarcity setting on par with Bitcoin.

The announcement of the "massive burn" instantly ignited the market. At 14:15, OKB began a rapid surge, reaching $99.27 by 14:40, a 112% increase; in just 25 minutes, the price doubled. Subsequent long and short battles intensified, and OKB continued its advance, reaching a high of $134 around 15:00, with a maximum hourly increase of 186%.

OKB's total of 29 burns

Accompanying the "massive burn" is the X Layer upgrade, which is the "second fuse" in OKX's public chain strategy.

X Layer is its zkEVM Layer 2 network based on Ethereum and supported by the Polygon CDK. The upgraded X Layer will increase throughput to 5000 TPS; reduce Gas costs to near zero; and vastly enhance security and Ethereum mainnet compatibility.

OKB will continue to serve as the sole Gas and native token for X Layer, providing core value support for payment of transaction fees, on-chain governance, ecosystem incentives, and more. This means that OKB's on-chain demand will become further intertwined with external platform value, transitioning from a mere CEX platform token to a decentralized "public chain gas."

This transition can also be seen as sending some subtle signals related to the "OKX US IPO" rumors.

The Trump administration opened up the IPO gateway for the crypto industry, making OKX's consideration of a US IPO a development that was both "unexpected and expected." On June 23, according to Yueqi Yang, a crypto reporter from The Information, cryptocurrency exchange platform OKX, after re-entering the U.S. market in April this year, is considering an initial public offering (IPO) in the US.

Analysts at BiyaPay believe this is a necessary stage in industry development: the era of "rampant growth" is no longer sustainable, and if global financial institutions and users are to trust, regulatory-compliant listing is a rational choice. While interventions by regulatory bodies such as the SEC imply more constraints, they will also drive the entire crypto industry towards transparency, stability, and capitalization.

For OKB, this will be a reshaping of its identity.

To reduce the security token attributes constrained by US stock listing requirements, OKB's path must be as gas at the public chain level, transforming into a part of the decentralized ecosystem, striving to remove its ties to CEX as much as possible.

3. BGB

From $0.20 in early 2023 to reaching $5 in 2025, BGB followed a nearly 25x trajectory over two years.

Bitget's strategy is more similar to OKX. The rise of BGB was not a single event eruption but a continuous accumulation of platform strategy, ecosystem integration, and expansion of use cases.

In 2025, Bitget's main action regarding its platform token was accelerated burning + income repurchase.

The previous BGB burns were mostly done quarterly, but this year they increased the frequency directly and used a portion of the fee income for BGB repurchases, which then entered the burn pool. This transparent, sustainable deflationary mechanism directly links the platform's trading activity to price expectations.

Simultaneously, Bitget launched a dual-mode of Launchpad + Staking Mining. The Launchpad provides early access to projects, where users staking BGB can obtain quotas. Staking Mining combines CEX users' asset retention with on-chain mining rewards, making holding BGB not just for "hodling" but an asset that continuously generates income.

More importantly, Bitget incorporated its own wallet into this ecosystem.

After the upgrade of the Bitget Wallet, BGB and the point system are interoperable, allowing wallet users to earn or spend BGB points directly when swapping on-chain, cross-chain, or participating in DeFi. This step extends BGB's use cases beyond the exchange, anchoring the value of the platform token from a single CEX internally to real on-chain demand.

This "internal and external dual cultivation" strategy has enabled BGB to carve out an independent path among CEX platform tokens:

Internally using Launchpad and staking to lock liquidity, externally using the wallet and on-chain points to create consumption scenarios, supplemented by high-frequency burns to provide value support. Looking at the price curve, BGB did not rely on a one-time positive catalyst for a surge but continuously raised market expectations through new actions landing every quarter.

This seems to be why, among similar platform tokens, BGB can maintain a high Beta in 2025 while steadily rising.

The Platform Token Race Will Not Pause

Looking back at 2021, the "burning war" smashed market capitalization and reshaped the landscape with real money. Four years later, platform tokens are still the sharpest weapon of exchanges — they can create scarcity and FOMO, and also play a real role in ecosystem expansion.

The difference is that by 2025, platform tokens are no longer just fee discount coupons; they are composite assets fighting on three fronts simultaneously: global licenses, on-chain ecosystems, and the capital market. The rising paths of BNB, OKB, and BGB are examples of this evolution.

Could this be the starting point for a new round of CEX "arms race"?

No one can provide a definitive answer. But what is certain is that in this race, there has never been a true ceasefire — whoever can afford to burn, sustain, and run fast will be able to leave their opponents behind in the next market cycle.

After all, in the increasingly insular CEX race, it is not only important to burn circulating supply to boost the token price but also to seize opportunities from competitors.

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