OKX Founder Star Xu: The Exchange is Just the Starting Point for All-Weather Finance
Star Xu, founder and CEO of OKX, stated that OKX started as a cryptocurrency exchange 13 years ago and is now building something larger. He wrote that cryptocurrency has changed how value flows, artificial intelligence will change how financial institutions operate, and the internet connects everything.
This speech took place at the OKX Now Global Product and Ecosystem Conference in Singapore on October 6. He defined the next generation of finance as more open, global, all-weather, intelligent, and increasingly on-chain. Infrastructure, products, and users are changing, and the company's job is to build ahead of these changes. OKX's official recap summarized his words: the internet, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence are converging to rebuild the next generation of finance.
On stage were not only exchange product leaders. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin opened the event, OKX director and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo attended as co-chair of OKXICE, and Mastercard's Executive Vice President of Blockchain and Digital Assets Raj Dhamodharan, along with executives from DBS, JPMorgan, Standard Chartered, and Western Alliance discussed all-weather liquidity and digital asset banking. The four product lines are trading, on-chain, artificial intelligence, and payments.
Features already showcased include OKX Money and upcoming tokenized stocks. Accounts can be turned into on-chain wallets with one click, trading perpetual contracts for cryptocurrencies, stocks, and commodities; after XIP, the same set of tools will be available to market makers. Artificial intelligence can act as a trading co-pilot or operate on-chain within user-defined limits, asking for human judgment when necessary. The Agent Trade Kit connects OKX data and executes trades, OnchainOS operates on-chain assets using natural language, and the Agentic Wallet allocates funds to agents within preset boundaries, while the agent market turns strategies and signals into subscription services. In a live demonstration, a user selected a more conservative option with a 4.95% return and completed the transaction.
He highlighted internal usage separately. About 95% of engineering code merge requests have primarily transitioned to artificial intelligence workflows, while engineers remain responsible for review, testing, and approval. Last month, the bill paid to large model companies reached $10 million. On the compliance side, he announced that Deloitte has been appointed as the global auditor and will continue to provide proof of reserves. The judgment is that cryptocurrency and traditional finance are no longer opposed; both sides will harvest from the same system.
This is an event-driven expansion of product boundaries, not an announcement of trading volume. Buyers are users who want to hold, pay, and invest all-weather, as well as institutions that want to connect on-chain channels to existing banks and card organizations; sellers are OKX, which expands exchange fees into custody, payments, and agency execution. Beneficiaries include model suppliers, tokenized stocks, and those listing agency strategies. Under pressure are exchanges that only sell spot and contracts, as well as traditional entry points that still settle on business days. The $10 million model bill indicates that artificial intelligence here is first a cost, then a customer-facing function.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Star Xu established OKX as a spot and derivatives exchange in 2013, with subsequent public paths involving licenses and proof of reserves, rather than adding another trading pair. Around 2025, the company brought former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo onto the board and established OKXICE, with Mastercard's Raj Dhamodharan appearing on the same stage, effectively endorsing the "beyond exchange" concept with card organization and banking guests. Deloitte's appointment as the global auditor advances proof of reserves from self-disclosure to external audit contracts.
Capital is shifting from fee inventory to four lines. Trading remains the entry point, while the one-click wallet and XIP expand perpetual contracts to stocks and commodities, OKX Money handles payments, and the agency kit rents execution rights to external models. The $10 million monthly model bill is a direct procurement, with 95% of merge requests moving through AI workflows, converting R&D labor hours into model calls. The preset limits of the Agentic Wallet keep funding authority on the user side after agents can place orders, avoiding direct access to the entire balance by the agent market.
The analogy is that Ant Financial and PayPal expanded from payment accounts to wealth and credit, rather than Binance opening another derivatives market. Charles Schwab combines brokerage, banking, and advisory services under a single account, with pricing power residing in the account rather than in individual commissions. OKX is in a transitional phase: spot and derivatives still contribute liquidity, but the new narrative focuses on holding, paying, investing, and wealth management, with tokenized stocks still "coming soon."
Structurally, this represents a reconstruction of the industry chain. Exchanges originally sold matching services, but now aim to integrate matching, wallets, payments, and agency execution into a continuously online account. The mechanism is that traditional finance operates on business days and geographical divisions, while cryptocurrency runs on blocks and global order books, with AI compressing comparisons and micro-trades into minutes. Whoever first possesses accounts, limits, and audits will leave interfaces during the merger of both sides; platforms that only offer trading pairs will have their interfaces in others' wallets and card organizations.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
The exchange is the starting point; the account is the endpoint.
The model bill precedes model functionality, becoming infrastructure.
The pricing power of an all-weather market lies in limits and audits, not in slogans.