BNB, OKB, FTT, HT Just Printed New Records: "Exchange Coins" Season?

An extremely rare event has occurred on crypto markets this morning. At around 9 a.m. (UTC), four "exchange tokens" of the top-league exchanges—Binance Coin (BNB), OKEx Coin (OKB), FTX Token (FTT) and Huobi Token (HT)—reached new all-time-high levels simultaneously.

"Exchange coins" are back

Today, Feb. 18, 2021, the corner of "exchange coins"—core native utility assets of centralized crypto exchanges—witnessed an unparalleled rally. Four of its representatives set new records at the same time.

Binance Coin reached the breathtaking $194 level, expanding its parabolic rally. The BNB price increased sixfold in the last five weeks. Meanwhile, OKEX Coin (OKB) smashed the $10 level for the first time in its history.

Huobi Token (HT), the native token of crypto services ecosystem Huobi Global, did the same thing with the $15 level. Since Jan. 1, 2021, its value has more than tripled. Finally, FTT, a native crypto token of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX, has left in the dust the psychologically important mark of $25.

As covered by U.Today previously, "exchange coins" were out of the spotlight during the previous cryptocurrency market run. Binance Coin (BNB) became the first competitor of the crypto veterans in 2019.

In 2019-2020, exchange coins had evolved into the top performers of the "crypto winter" before they were replaced by "DeFi tokens," the native governance assets of decentralized financial protocols.

Has this ever happened before?

The majority of modern "exchange tokens" did not exist during the 2017 euphoria. Meanwhile, the market saw a similar day for the majority of altcoins.

In early January 2018, the three top altcoins, namely XRP, Cardano (ADA) and Stellar Lumens (XLM), printed all-time highs almost simultaneously. Meanwhile, none of them managed to do it in 15 minutes.

Also, the second cryptocurrency, Ethereum (ETH), set a three-year high on Jan. 13, 2018. It was surpassed only recently. At press time, Ether (ETH) is trying to find support over $1,900.