OKX used its Oct. 6 OKX NOW global product and ecosystem conference to lay out a broader plan: move from being known primarily as a crypto exchange to operating as a global fintech platform spanning custody of funds, payments, investing and wealth management.
At the event, OKX CEO Star said, 「The exchange is OKX’s starting point, not its destination.」 In the company’s framing, the next stage is not simply a larger exchange business but a wider financial infrastructure built with crypto technology. OKB rose more than 6% on the day.
From trading products to payments and wealth tools
Taken together, the products shown at the conference were presented as one connected system rather than a set of isolated launches, covering investment, trading and the use of funds.
On the trading side, OKX said it has launched gold perpetuals, Pre-IPO perpetuals and unified tokenized stock trading. It also plans to add TradFi options, FX-related products and its own tokenized stock XRWA. Onchain, the company said it is building an open Web3 product system that links exchange functions, wallets and onchain assets. OKX said DeFi TVL on X Layer has grown about 11 times this year and reached a record high in September.
AI was another major thread. OKX demonstrated an upcoming AI Bot that lets users build personalized trading strategies through natural language prompts. Star said about 95% of the engineering team’s pull requests are now largely completed through AI workflows, and that OKX paid $10 million to large-model service providers last month.
OKX Money points to a broader account model
The product that drew the most attention at the conference was OKX Money. Wenbin Wong, general manager of OKX Pay, presented it publicly for the first time. In a live demo, the company sent $100 from Singapore to a user in Caracas, Venezuela. The funds arrived within seconds, and the recipient then used the money to buy a burrito locally.
OKX said OKX Money already covers more than 30 countries. The significance, as presented at the event, is that the company is trying to turn a user’s trading account into a more complete financial account, extending services into holding assets, cross-border transfers, everyday spending and eligible yield scenarios.
That approach also lowers the need for mainstream users to understand the crypto rails underneath. For crypto-native users, trading, wallets and onchain interaction are familiar. For broader consumer groups, the practical questions are how to transfer money, how to pay and how to manage assets, not which blockchain sits underneath.
OKX used Brazil as an example. Guilherme Sacamone, CEO of OKX Brazil, said at the event that local commodity trading in Brazil comes with issues tied to market hours, liquidity and spreads, while offshore accounts also involve costs such as IOF. The local team built products around Pix payments, users’ dollar allocation needs and cross-border spending, and presented those payment services as a separate layer inside OKX Money. In that setup, users do not need to understand the full crypto trading system in order to gain exposure to dollar-related assets and spend abroad.
Compliance was framed as the base layer for expansion
As OKX pushes into payments, wealth management, securities, tokenized assets and institutional financial services, the benchmark for judging the company changes as well. Trading volume, liquidity, breadth of products and technical capacity still matter, but they do not answer the bigger questions: why users would keep funds on OKX, why banks would work with it, and why traditional financial institutions would connect their assets, clients and liquidity to the system.
That is where the company placed compliance. Even though the conference was dense with product announcements, compliance ran through the event as the infrastructure of trust behind the broader product matrix. Star said building global financial services requires more than technology, and that OKX has spent the past several years building infrastructure aligned with regulatory requirements across markets.
According to the conference presentation, OKX has obtained licenses or operates under regulatory supervision in major markets including the U.S., Europe, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Australia, Brazil and Turkey, as well as in multiple other countries and regions. At the same time, a license alone does not create lasting trust. The company paired that point with references to proof of reserves, product reliability and ongoing customer protection.
OKX described itself as one of the earliest major global crypto exchanges to make proof of reserves a regular transparency mechanism and one of the few international exchanges to appoint a Big Four accounting firm, Deloitte, as global auditor. Its account protection program, OKX Shield, has already launched in Europe, combining security measures with compensation for eligible account theft losses.
The company also made clear that its target base is no longer limited to frequent crypto traders. It is trying to serve traditional finance investors and everyday consumers as well. For those groups, custody standards, trading terms, product stability and after-hours responsiveness matter directly. Gracie Lin, regional CEO for Singapore and Australia, said at the event that about 98% of adults in Singapore already have access to banking services, which means OKX needs to offer clearly differentiated value if it wants to win users from the traditional financial system.
Global expansion depends on local execution
As OKX enters more countries and regions, the compliance agenda extends into local operations. In Singapore, the company said it has integrated Singpass and partnered with DBS and Standard Chartered so that some users can open accounts and fund them through workflows that are more familiar locally.
In Europe, MiCA provides a unified regulatory framework, but the 30 markets still differ in payment channels, language, KYC requirements and user habits. OKX said it has set up local teams there to handle fiat rails, identity verification, customer service and community operations on a market-by-market basis.
The message was that OKX is not treating globalization as a simple copy-and-paste exercise. A global financial platform, in this telling, needs a shared technology, risk-control and compliance framework, plus localized execution in each market. The global infrastructure handles efficiency; local teams handle user understanding; compliance defines the perimeter.
Fundraising and traditional finance ties moved in parallel
On the same day, OKX announced that it had completed a financing round at a $25 billion valuation. Participants included Qube Research & Technologies, Circle, Ripple and SC Ventures, the investment arm of Standard Chartered.
Star later said in a post that OKX did not raise funds because it lacked capital. The point, he said, was to bring in strategic partners and work with them on stablecoins, payments, institutional markets and next-generation financial infrastructure.
That push matches a broader backdrop in which crypto finance and traditional finance are moving closer together. The relationship between banks and exchanges, once defined more by competition, has increasingly shifted toward cooperation in recent years.
Star summarized the two sides this way during his speech: 「Crypto technology brings always-on infrastructure, programmable money, global settlement and self-custody, while traditional finance brings liquidity, regulatory experience and institutional trust.」
OKX also disclosed a deeper link with Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. According to the event, OKX and ICE have submitted a notice and plan to launch a tokenized securities trading venue under the SEC’s innovation exemption mechanism.
If traditional assets such as equities can eventually trade for longer hours, or even around the clock, through tokenized securities venues, OKX’s role in that model would extend beyond an exchange front end. It would become part of the infrastructure linking traditional assets, onchain assets, payment networks and global users.
What kind of company is OKX trying to become?
That brings the discussion back to Star’s line that the exchange is only the starting point. The core question raised by the conference was not how many features OKX will add next, but whether crypto technology can move beyond the trading venue and become another way to build global financial infrastructure.
From trading to payments, and from crypto assets to traditional assets, OKX is expanding the radius of its financial services. The larger that radius gets, the more central trust becomes. That helps explain why the conference did not dwell only on products and engineering, but gave equal weight to compliance, local service capability and cooperation with banks and other traditional financial institutions.
In OKX’s own framing, going beyond crypto does not mean leaving crypto behind. It means carrying over programmability, always-on operation and global settlement into a broader financial system. The company’s stated direction is no longer to become a bigger exchange, but to become a global fintech platform connecting traditional assets and onchain assets, payment networks and users worldwide.