Octa, formerly OctaFX, is a forex and CFD broker popular across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. It holds a CySEC licence in Europe, but its bonus-taking clients are served by an offshore entity in the Comoros, which is a meaningful trust consideration. Its deposit bonus is margin credit that becomes withdrawable only after heavy lot volume.
Risk warning: Trading carries a high risk of losing money, especially with leveraged products such as CFDs. A bonus does not reduce that risk. Only deposit what you can afford to lose.
Octa
Octa adds 50% of every deposit as a bonus you can use as margin. The bonus itself becomes withdrawable only after you trade a volume of lots tied to its size.
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Octa started life as OctaFX in 2011, launching with an MT4 platform, and dropped the FX from its name in September 2023 after adding stocks, cryptocurrencies and its own OctaTrader platform. It says it has opened more than 40 million trading accounts and serves clients in over 100 countries, with its heaviest usage across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In Indonesia specifically, the local entity Octa Investama Berjangka is registered with Bappebti, the commodity futures regulator.
Octa is not one company but a group of separately licensed entities that share a brand. Octa Markets Cyprus Ltd holds a CySEC license (372/18) and serves EU clients from Limassol. Uni Fin Invest holds an FSC Mauritius investment dealer license, Orinoco Capital (Pty) Ltd is authorized by South Africa's FSCA, and Octa Markets Incorporated is registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Clients are onboarded by whichever entity covers their region, and each entity is legally separate from the others.
Most bonus-eligible clients, including anyone outside the EU, UK, US, Canada and a handful of other restricted markets, are serviced by Octa Markets Ltd, licensed by the Mwali International Services Authority (MISA) in the Comoros. This is worth being direct about: MISA is a light-oversight offshore registration, and in 2022 the Central Bank of Comoros publicly stated that approvals issued by island-level bodies including MISA have no legal effect within the Union of the Comoros for financial-institution activity. That does not mean Octa is a scam; the group's CySEC and FSCA entities are real and independently supervised. But the entity that actually pays out deposit bonuses to most traders sits under a license that the country's own central bank does not recognize as valid authority to run a financial business. Treat any bonus offer here as coming from a lightly regulated offshore book, not from the CySEC-licensed side of the company.
Octa offers three account types built around its platforms: OctaTrader (a proprietary web and mobile platform launched in 2022), MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5. All three carry a $25 minimum deposit, spreads advertised from 0.6 pips with no separate commission, and leverage up to 1:1000 on forex (capped lower on crypto). Instrument range differs by platform: MT5 has the widest selection, while OctaTrader covers forex, CFDs on 25-plus cryptocurrencies and around 150 stocks. Octa also runs a built-in copy-trading service and a loyalty tier system (Gold, Platinum) that reduces the trading volume needed to unlock bonus withdrawals.
Octa's standing offer is a 50% deposit bonus, credited after a qualifying deposit, with larger percentages sometimes run during promotional periods. The bonus is not cash sitting in your account: it counts toward your equity and free margin, which lets you support larger positions, but it is not immediately withdrawable. To unlock it for withdrawal you need to trade a lot volume equal to half the bonus amount in standard lots, so a $50 bonus on a $100 deposit requires 25 standard lots of trading before that bonus becomes withdrawable (Gold and Platinum status clients need less volume).
If your account equity drops below the bonus amount, the bonus is cancelled outright, and withdrawing your original deposit before the volume requirement is met also cancels the unearned bonus. In practice the bonus functions as extra margin cushion for active traders rather than free money, and a losing account can lose the bonus before ever touching it.
The deposit bonus is only offered through Octa's non-EU entities. Octa's CySEC-regulated Cyprus arm does not offer bonuses at all, because ESMA and CySEC rules ban CFD brokers from using deposit matches or similar inducements to attract retail clients in the EU. The bonus is aimed at, and mostly claimed by, traders in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America onboarded through the offshore entity. It is explicitly not available to residents of the US, UK, EU, Canada, UAE and some other restricted markets.
Octa also runs a refer-a-friend program paying $1 per standard lot traded by a referred client, credited daily and withdrawable without a volume hurdle of its own, separate from the referred client's own deposit bonus.
Verification (ID plus proof of address) is required before withdrawal, and withdrawals are paid back to the original deposit method up to the amount deposited, with only profit above that routed elsewhere; mixing methods can trigger manual review and slow things down. Confirm which legal entity your account sits under before depositing, since bonus terms, dispute rights and regulatory protection differ sharply between the CySEC entity and the offshore ones. Read the live bonus terms in your account before opting in: the lot-volume requirement, the equity-floor cancellation rule and the loss-of-bonus-on-early-withdrawal rule are the three most common reasons traders end up with nothing to show for a bonus they thought was already theirs.
Parts of it are. Octa Markets Cyprus Ltd is CySEC-regulated (372/18), a Mauritius entity holds an FSC investment dealer license, and Orinoco Capital (Pty) Ltd is FSCA-authorized in South Africa. But most bonus-eligible clients are onboarded through Octa Markets Ltd, licensed by MISA in the Comoros, a light offshore registration that the Comoros central bank has publicly said carries no recognized legal authority over financial businesses.
Deposit and the bonus is added as extra equity and margin, not withdrawable cash. To be able to withdraw it, you must trade a lot volume equal to half the bonus amount in standard lots. If your equity drops below the bonus amount, or you withdraw your original deposit before hitting that volume target, the bonus is cancelled.
Yes. The bonus is cancelled if account equity falls below the bonus size, if you withdraw the underlying deposit before completing the required trading volume, or if you stop trading the account. It is designed to support margin during active trading, not to sit as guaranteed profit.
No. It is excluded for residents of the US, UK, EU, Canada, UAE and some other regulated markets. Octa's own CySEC-licensed EU entity does not offer bonuses at all, since EU rules ban deposit-match promotions for retail CFD clients. The bonus mainly targets clients in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America served by Octa's offshore entities.
$25 across its OctaTrader, MT4 and MT5 account types, per Octa's own account comparison page.
Withdrawals are returned to the original funding method up to the amount you deposited; only profit beyond that can go to a different verified method. Verification (ID and proof of address) is required first, and switching withdrawal methods can trigger extra manual compliance checks.