How to open an OKX account: sign-up, verification and first deposit

An exchange account is plumbing rather than a destination. Worth doing carefully anyway: the first few minutes settle a country or region and a referral code, and OKX's pages treat the code as unfixable once sign-up ends and identity information as locked once verification completes.

The order is not ours to choose

On OKX's deposit page verification is a precondition rather than a chore: an account that has not finished it cannot deposit at all. Its beginner's guide meets the same wall from the other side, telling you crypto has to reach the account before any trading can start. So the order below is OKX's dependency, not our teaching order. Our guide to cashing stablecoins out to a bank account picks up where this one stops.

Signing up, step by step

Five steps, in the order OKX's registration article puts them. Your screen may word them differently; the dependencies will not move.

Pick the country or region you actually live in

The first screen asks for a country or region, and the Next button starts out disabled — nothing moves until one is chosen. What OKX wants in that field is the place you live in now and normally live in, which it sets apart from three near misses: the passport you hold, the country that issued it, and wherever you happen to be travelling this month. Citizenship on its own, it adds, is not necessarily what decides the outcome; residence and the local rules carry more weight. That problem in general is our guide to opening an account as a non-resident nomad.

Open the sign-up page and enter your email address

If you want to follow along, one place to start is this OKX sign-up link, which carries our invite code. Whether the code arrives filled in depends on how you get there, and OKX says so itself: its referral FAQ blames a separately downloaded app, an earlier channel link that already took the attribution, or private-browsing and cache behaviour. Its own remedy is to reopen the link — and if the code still is not filled in for you, type OK69812 into the optional referral code field before you finish signing up. Use an email address you expect to keep: OKX sends notices and verification messages there, asks for anything further it needs there, and treats it as the way back in when a password or the account itself has to be recovered.

Referral link. That OKX link is a referral link and the only commercial link on this page. If you open an account through it we may earn a commission, and you normally pay no more for having used it. Whether any fee discount applies to you, and how much, is whatever OKX's own current page shows when you look. We are not OKX and we are not affiliated with it.

Enter the referral code before sign-up is finished

OKX describes the field as sitting inside the sign-up flow, collapsed by default and labelled optional. That description is OKX's rather than a screenshot of ours, and where the field sits on screen changes nothing anyway: what decides the outcome is timing, which is the next section.

Set a password and bind the contact details the page asks for

OKX's security guide sets out what the password has to be built from, so take the requirements from there rather than from habit. The awkward bit comes next. One and the same OKX article treats binding a mobile number and an inbox as something every new account does, then answers a question further down by making the mobile number conditional on the options its page happens to be offering. We are not choosing one of those for OKX; the fields in front of you settle it.

Agree to the documents the page links, then create the account

Creating the account means ticking one mandatory consent box, not pre-ticked, which links several separate documents rather than a single set of terms. Which documents appear follows the country you chose, so the set on your page is the set that binds you. There is an age floor here too: OKX puts it at 18, or at the minimum legal age its own registration page shows you, and says that parental consent, money or any other personal circumstance buys no exception.

Where the referral code goes, and why it cannot wait

OKX makes the mechanism plain across two of its pages: what registers the relationship is the code itself, so a link you merely opened and then wandered away from attributes nothing. They part company on afterwards. One answer is flat — once you have finished creating the account, the code can no longer go in. Another, on the same page, softens that to usually not addable and not changeable. One is absolute, one is hedged, and we are not deleting the hedge or inventing the exception it might imply. No page we read describes a route to adding a code later, and OKX is explicit that wiping the account and starting over reconnects you to nothing.

Verification is layers, not levels

We went looking for an official verification-tier table in the English help pages we read on 23 September 2026, and there isn't one. What OKX publishes instead is a process it calls continuous — identity verification, customer due diligence, enhanced due diligence, ongoing monitoring, a KYC refresh and periodic review — stages you pass through depending on activity, region and risk, not a ladder with a number you can quote.

OKX's verification page asks for four groups: basic details, an identity document, a selfie or live facial check, and a proof of address marked if applicable. That qualifier does real work, because address proof is not on everyone's list; when it lands on yours and nothing arrives with your name on it, that is the subject of our guide to proof of address with no fixed address. Two OKX pages give two different windows for how recent the document has to be, so we quote neither.

Once the documents are in, OKX's instruction is to watch three places: the verification page itself, the account home page and the inbox you registered with. While that page shows the review in progress and hands you no new task, leave it alone — sending the same information again is the one move OKX explicitly tells you not to make.

Notice where these pages stop short. On document types OKX names examples, then says the list on your own verification page is the definitive one; on limits it says verification raises your ceilings, then hands the daily withdrawal figure to your fee tier. A separate request, about how you use the account and where the money came from, is not identity verification and does not by itself mean you did anything wrong — and the evidence side of it is our guide to proving self-employed income.

What OKX says goes wrong

Its failure pages are specific, and better read before you submit than after. The causes OKX groups together: the document has run out, or is not one your page accepts; the images are cut off or too soft to read; what you typed does not line up with what the document says; the face check does not clear; you are under the age it asks for; or that identity is already attached to a different account.

Below that sit the details about the documents themselves. Copies do not stand in for the real thing: not a photocopy, not a screenshot, not your ID held up on a second screen, not the digital version living inside some other app. The only exception OKX allows is your own page explicitly inviting that kind of submission. Colour images, all four corners, front and back where there is a back. If your document is in a script the checks do not support, OKX's instruction is one in Latin characters or an international passport. A proof of address in someone else's name is refused outright.

The first deposit: crypto in from somewhere else

In OKX's vocabulary a deposit means moving crypto you already hold somewhere else — a different exchange, a different platform — across into your OKX account, and its own analogy for that is a bank transfer. That is the only route this guide covers. The coin and the network have to match exactly on both sides; a token or network you cannot find listed on the deposit screen is one OKX does not take, and sending it anyway can cost you the coins. Some coins generate a tag or memo, and those need the address and that string together. How little you can send, how many confirmations it waits for and which contract address applies are printed on the deposit screen itself, which is where to read them.

Arrival is not the end of it. Assets land in your Funding account and have to be moved to the Trading account before you can trade, and in some regions the Travel Rule applies, which OKX says may require extra information before a deposit is unlocked. If client payments are the reason you are here, getting paid in stablecoins covers that side.

The settings worth turning on while you keep moving

OKX's security page gathers the features in one place — an authenticator app, email verification, a passkey, face verification, an anti-phishing code, mobile verification and the login password underneath all of them — and then counts them badly: a few paragraphs down, the same page says there are six, announces four more and lists five. Work from the names, not from a total.

If you do one thing from that list, we would make it the anti-phishing code, because of what it changes about every message that follows. Once you have set a code, OKX says the mail it sends you carries that code, so a message arriving without it is not from OKX. Its page names the addresses it sends from, noreply@mailer1.okx.com and noreply@mailer2.okx.com, and advises typing the site address by hand rather than arriving through a search result. Support staff, it says, never open private chats.

Offline Mode is why this guide exists in a nomad publication at all. It blocks withdrawal requests during a protection window you set, whatever the amount — and the window uses your device's timezone as it was when you set it up. Change the device timezone later and the window stays on the original one until you go back and update the setting. Fly two zones east and your overnight lockout is no longer overnight. You cannot switch the feature off from inside an active window either.

An allowlist narrows where money can go at all: switch it on and a withdrawal can only reach an address already saved in your address book. Housekeeping on the security settings themselves has a price, though. Swap your authenticator app, or change the phone number or email address on the account, and OKX blocks withdrawals for a while afterwards; removing a passkey, it says, may do the same. These are not one rule with one scope — what counts as a withdrawal differs between them, with P2P selling, gifts and plain transfers inside some of those blocks and not others — so check the item you are about to touch, and do this kind of work on a day you are not waiting on money.

What we could not verify in this version

Where this article stops, as of 23 September 2026:

• We did not open an account or walk the flow. This is a read of OKX's own English help pages.
• The referral code field itself. We did not see it, so we make no claim about where it sits.
• Signing up with Telegram, Apple or Google. OKX lists these in one sentence; no help page we read walks those flows.
• Any limit, threshold or minimum. We deliberately did not pull the fees table OKX points to.
• How recent a proof of address must be, and what happens after a refusal. Two OKX pages disagree on the first; on the second it says to fix the stated reason and resubmit or contact support, and publishes no appeal procedure.
• Arrival times, confirmations, bank-funded deposits and getting P2P going. Not checked here; the P2P selling side is in our off-ramp guide.
• Which edition of each help page you see. OKX serves regional editions; for the registration article we compared several English ones and found the same text.

Frequently asked questions

Read on 23 September 2026 from OKX's help articles on registering an account, the referral programme, verifying an individual account, what KYC involves, why a verification fails, making a deposit, securing an account and Offline Mode. Requirements change; confirm the current version on OKX's own pages before you act. We re-check our guides on a rolling schedule — see how we test and update. General information, not financial, tax or legal advice.

Section：Accounts & Paperwork