Choosing an Exchange
How to Sign Up for OKX (and the Four Things That Trip People Up)
OKX needs both a phone number and an email, verification only works in the app, and the country block list is longer than most. What to have ready before you start.
OKX will not let you finish signing up on a laptop. Identity verification runs in the phone app, and there is no web equivalent — so if you sat down at a desk to get this done, the phone is coming out at some point regardless.
That is the first of several small differences from the exchange most guides assume you are using. None of them are hard. All of them stop people who did not expect them.
Where our money comes from: we earn referral commission when someone signs up through our OKX link. Our code is OK0012 and the page is here. It costs you nothing extra. Whether you also get a fee discount depends on whether the referrer has enabled commission sharing — read what the sign-up page shows you at the time, not what an article promises.
Check the country list first, because OKX's is unusually long
Plenty of exchanges restrict a handful of sanctioned jurisdictions. OKX blocks considerably more than that, and some of the entries surprise people: Canada, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia and Nepal are all outside the service, alongside the sanctioned list.
The US is a special case rather than a block. OKX serves American customers through a separate entity, OKX US, a federally registered money services business and state-licensed money transmitter (NMLS ID 1767779). By its own disclosures it has offered spot trading and buy/sell/convert since 2 June 2025, and OKX's other centralised exchange services are not available to US customers. The disclosure page says coverage excludes parts of the country and its territories without listing which, so check your own state before planning around it.
Two practical consequences. If you are in the US, the global sign-up link on this page is not the one you want, and we earn nothing from OKX US. And if you are in the UK, spot trading is available but retail crypto derivatives have been off the table since the FCA ban took effect in January 2021. Australian retail clients go through OKX Australia Financial Pty Ltd (AFSL 379035), where USDT-margined perpetuals are capped at 2x and gated behind a suitability assessment.
The sign-up form wants both a phone number and an email
Not one or the other. OKX's help centre states that registration requires binding a mobile number and an email address, which catches out people who arrive with only an email ready.
The order it asks in:
- Choose your country or region of residence
- Email address, then the six-digit code sent to it
- Phone number, then the six-digit code sent to that
- Set a password
- Accept the terms
Answer the residence question honestly. It determines which products you can access, which funding rails appear, and whether the document in your drawer will be accepted at verification. Getting it changed later is a support ticket, not a settings toggle.
For the password: something you have never used anywhere else. Credential-stuffing attacks work by taking passwords leaked from unrelated sites and trying them against exchange accounts, and they work often enough to be worth an attacker's time.
Verification lives in the app
Open the OKX app, go to the user centre, then identity verification. You photograph both sides of a government ID and complete a face scan.
The rejections are almost always photographic rather than substantive:
Lay the document flat on a dark, plain surface instead of holding it. Kill the flash and light it from the side, so no glare band sits across the printed fields. Keep all four corners inside the frame — cropping an edge to make the text larger fails automatically. Type your name exactly as printed, in the printed order, and read the document number back character by character.
If the face scan is what keeps failing, take off glasses and anything covering your face, stand against a plain wall, and put the light in front of you rather than behind. Backlighting causes more of these failures than anything else. Wipe the front camera lens first.
Verification comes in levels, and each level raises deposit and withdrawal limits. The thresholds shift with regulatory requirements, so the numbers that apply to you are the ones on your account page rather than in any guide, this one included.
The video check nobody warns you about
If you plan to buy through C2C, OKX may ask for a separate video verification on top of the standard KYC. It sits under Buy Crypto → C2C → personal centre → video verification.
The official instruction for that step is specific: turn sound on, open the camera, and do not connect headphones. When a company writes a line that precise into its help text, it is usually because enough people failed the same way to justify it. Disconnect Bluetooth earbuds before you start — they will still be paired from whatever you were listening to, and you will not think about it.
What actually differs from Binance
| OKX | Binance | |
|---|---|---|
| First screen | Choose your country of residence | Email or phone straight away |
| Registration binding | Phone and email | Usually one or the other |
| Where KYC happens | App only | App or web |
| Extra checks | Possible video verification for C2C | No separate video step |
| US customers | Separate OKX US entity, spot only | Separate Binance.US entity |
This is a list of things to plan around, not a scoreboard. If your only device is a laptop, OKX's flow does not complete. If you have never used C2C and do not intend to, the video check never appears.
The first twenty minutes after the account opens
Before any money moves:
Two-factor authentication through an authenticator app, not SMS. SIM-swap and port-out fraud let an attacker take over your phone number by convincing your carrier to move it; most US, UK and Australian carriers will add a port-out PIN if you ring and ask. Save the recovery key on paper, somewhere that is not the phone.
Withdrawal address whitelisting. Once it is on, funds can only leave to addresses you added in advance. It turns a stolen password from a catastrophe into an inconvenience, and it takes two minutes.
A full round trip with an amount you would shrug at. Deposit, buy, sell, withdraw back out. It costs a few dollars and half an hour, and it answers the only question that matters later, which is whether money comes back out at all.
Spot only to begin with. Perpetuals and margin liquidate; spot does not.
Questions people actually ask
Can I do the whole thing on a computer? No. Verification is app-only.
Do I really need to give a phone number? Yes — OKX requires both a phone number and an email at registration.
Can I add a referral code afterwards? Referral relationships are normally set at sign-up. If you want one applied, use the link before you register rather than trying to attach it later.
Where is the real support? Inside the site and the app, and nowhere else. Nobody from OKX will message you first. Anyone who direct-messages you offering to speed up your review is running a script that predates them.
Is a VPN a way around the country list? It gets you an account. It does not get you your money back out — verification and withdrawal are where the mismatch surfaces, and the balance sits still while it is investigated. There is more on that in the eligibility piece.
Everything above describes registration and verification, not whether you should be buying anything. If you are weighing what an account will cost you to use once it is open, the cost breakdown covers the part that is not the headline fee.