The battle of the five major exchange platform coins: Who will come out on top this time?

Recent moves by major crypto exchanges highlight a strategic push to boost their native platform tokens through expanded utility and ecosystem integration. Key developments include OKX aggressively promoting $OKB to activate its X Layer public chain, and Bitget merging wallet token $BWB into $BGB while designating it as the native token for its Morph blockchain. Binance's $BNB remains the dominant player with the broadest use cases across Launchpad, wallet services, and gas fees on BSC, maintaining a market cap exceeding $100 billion.

$BNB (Binance): Already industry-leading with extensive utility in IPO participation, wallet features, and gas fees. Continues to drive ecosystem growth and value accumulation.
$OKB (OKX): Facing strong competition, OKX is pushing $OKB to energize its X Layer public chain, leveraging its successful Web3 wallet to attract projects.
$BGB (Bitget): Recently integrated with Morph blockchain and merged with wallet token $BWB. Actively building a connected ecosystem between exchange, wallet, and chain.
$MNT (Bybit): Not an official platform token but linked to Mantle chain (formerly BitDAO). Compliance-driven structure has limited direct business integration, resulting in weaker performance.
$GT (Gate.io): Contender with solid exchange volume and own public chain (GateChain), though on-chain ecosystem lags behind leaders.

Exchanges are universally focusing on creating deflationary mechanisms and cross-platform utility for their tokens to boost prices and enhance public chain activity. While Binance's ecosystem is well-established, others are playing catch-up. Market caps aside from $BNB hover around $5 billion, suggesting significant growth potential if ecosystem strategies succeed. The competition centers on which exchange can most effectively leverage its token to activate and scale its blockchain ecosystem.

In recent times, major exchanges have been active. First, OKX strongly pushed up $OKB, and then Bitget used $BGB as the Morph public chain token.

Why have exchanges been making moves on exchange platform coins recently?

On the one hand, due to the relaxation of US regulatory authorities, everyone should seize the current window of opportunity to empower platform coins and pave the way for the future;

On the other hand, due to the trend of currency-stock integration, the exchange's platform currency can be said to be one of the few truly valuable assets in the currency circle. It is supported by real business, and the value of the platform currency is being repriced by the market.

Let’s take a closer look at the top five players in this exchange token war to gain a comprehensive understanding of the overall situation.

1️⃣ Binance’s $BNB

Binance started empowering BNB very early, and BNB's application scenarios are also the widest among all exchanges.

From the exchange's Launchpad/Launchpool IPOs, to the wallet's Alpha IPOs, to the BSC chain's on-chain gas fees, BNB carries the value accumulation and flow of multiple business lines in the Binance ecosystem.

This is also why BNB has already exceeded a market value of 100 billion and is one of the top three tokens in the entire blockchain industry by market value.

In the future, Binance will continue to move step by step to the forefront of the chain and the forefront of asset issuance, and BNB will be an extremely important pioneer and value connection tool.

2️⃣ OKX’s $OKB

OKX's exchange business and wallet business should be viewed separately.

OKX's exchange business is its foundation, but it has always been suppressed by Binance. Not only has it failed to make a breakthrough, but it has also encountered many problems in listing coins and has been criticized by the community.

However, OKX took a different approach and laid out its on-chain business early on. Its Web3 wallet can be said to be far ahead and has already occupied the traffic entrance of the Web3 world.

Unfortunately, OKX's public chain ecosystem has always been lacking and is far inferior to the BSC ecosystem.

This in turn leads to a shortcoming in the empowerment of $OKB, which is not as good as the wealth effect of $BNB.

OKX has also recognized this problem, and has therefore recently begun to aggressively push up $OKB to activate the X Layer public chain ecosystem through the price of the coin.

Therefore, we can also see that many projects have emerged in the X Layer public chain ecosystem by taking advantage of the popularity.

In the long run, $OKB is very important to OKX's strategic positioning and will not be easily abandoned. There is definitely still room for improvement.

3️⃣ Bitget’s $BGB

Bitget has been integrating its own ecosystem. First, it merged Bitget Wallet's wallet currency $BWB into $BGB, and now it uses $BGB as the Morph public chain token.

Bitget and OKX are actually somewhat similar: they are both very strong in the wallet business, having previously overtaken the competition in the wallet business through the acquisition of Bitkeep; however, they have shortcomings in the public chain business.

Previously, Bitget supported Morph, a public chain within its own ecosystem, but it has always had problems. Now, it has taken matters into its own hands, directly connecting its exchange business, wallet business, and public chain business through $BGB.

In general, Bitget is also a very strong exchange. $BGB has been pulled up a while ago, and it is now constantly releasing positive news. It is definitely a strong competitor in this exchange platform currency war.

4️⃣ Bybit’s $MNT

Bybit actually does not have an official platform coin. $MNT is the public chain coin of Mantle, a public chain supported by Bybit.

But Bybit and Mantle have a deep connection:

In 2021, Bybit capitalized on the DAO hype by establishing its own DAO, called BitDAO. This DAO aimed to build a crypto treasury, and Bybit invested hundreds of millions of dollars in it.

BitDAO's native token is BIT, and Bybit holds a large number of BIT tokens.

Why establish DAO?

In fact, it is still a compliance issue. Attracting community participation through the DAO form can avoid potential legal issues of centralized platform coins.

However, solving the compliance issue actually caused many problems: Bybit could not directly integrate its own business through BIT tokens, could not directly empower others, and lost a weapon to compete with other exchanges.

Therefore, in 2023, BitDAO transformed into Mantle Network and converted BIT tokens into MNT tokens at a 1:1 ratio.

Today, the Mantle chain has become even quieter, and the price of the MNT token is hard to describe.

In short, among all the leading exchanges, Bybit’s platform coin is the weakest, but Bybit may also make moves in the future, and it can be regarded as a value trough.

5️⃣ Gate’s $GT

First of all, is Gate considered one of the top five exchanges?

This point is still controversial. As we all know, there are actually ten exchanges that are generally known as the top five.

However, Gate has also been very strong in this cycle, with a huge voice in the community, and its contract trading volume is indeed ranked among the top five.

Compared with OKX and Bitget, Gate's on-chain business is not as impressive, but it is also very strong: it has its own public chain GateChain, and its Gate Wallet business is also developing continuously.

To sum up

From the perspective of the use scenarios of platform coins, the leading exchanges have the same direction: integrating multiple business lines, empowering platform coins, and achieving artificial deflation through methods such as destruction, thereby raising coin prices and further activating their own public chain ecosystem.

Aside from Binance, the public chain ecosystems of several other leading exchanges are not very good, but they are all working hard:

The most powerful one is OKX, which is empowering the X Layer;

Next is Bitget, which changed its leadership and integrated Morph;

Next up is Bybit, which has Mantle but is lukewarm.

The last one is Gate, whose public chain business and wallet business did not achieve outstanding results.

Judging from the market value of platform coins, Binance's BNB is the only one with a market value of over 100 billion US dollars, while the platform coins of other exchanges are around 5 billion US dollars, so there is still a lot of room for growth.

Who will become the next platform coin with a market value of tens of billions in this round?

Let's wait and see.