OKX’s global product and ecosystem conference, OKX NOW, concluded in Singapore on Oct. 6, with founder Star and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivering the opening talks and product leaders from the company’s trading, on-chain, AI and payments divisions presenting their latest updates. The event also brought together Governor Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York and a member of the OKX board, Mastercard Executive Vice President for Blockchain and Digital Assets Raj Dhamodharan, and executives from DBS, JPMorgan, Standard Chartered and Western Alliance Bank.
Discussions throughout the day centered on the next financial system, round-the-clock market liquidity, digital asset banking and on-chain security in the AI era.
Star says OKX is expanding beyond the exchange model
In his opening remarks, Star started with what he described as a gap between consumer technology and financial infrastructure. Consumer tech, he said, has already become global, instant and always on, while finance still runs on infrastructure built decades ago.
He divided the development of the crypto industry into four stages: early hacker exploration, the formation of financial markets, ICO and DeFi experimentation, and compliance building. In his view, the sector entered a mainstream phase starting in 2025.
From there, Star said OKX has moved past the positioning of a pure exchange and is expanding into a global fintech platform. He described four areas where the company wants to reshape financial services for younger users: allowing users to choose how their funds are held, enabling instant low-cost payments, offering a unified investment gateway across multiple asset classes, and building AI-driven wealth management.
“The future will not be a confrontation between crypto finance and traditional finance. Every crypto company will expand into traditional finance, and every traditional finance company will invest in crypto. These two worlds are becoming one financial system,” he said.
Star also said AI is no longer a pilot project inside OKX but part of its core infrastructure. About 95% of engineering code merge requests now primarily go through AI workflows, with engineers still reviewing and approving them. He added that OKX paid $10 million to large model providers last month.
Looking out over the next decade, Star said the internet, crypto technology and AI are converging, and that the combination could fundamentally change financial services.
Vitalik Buterin focuses on AI, cryptography and security
Vitalik Buterin opened from the same starting point of financial infrastructure pain points, then shifted to the intersection of AI and cryptography.
He said AI is both the biggest opportunity and the biggest risk facing the industry right now. As the sector moves beyond the “blockchain plus programmable value” narrative, “programmable data” enabled by zero-knowledge proofs is beginning to emerge. Privacy protocols on Ethereum, he said, are likely to mature quickly, and within the next two years most people may end up using these technologies without even noticing.
Security was the side he stressed most. Vitalik said AI has already shown the ability to break out of sandboxes, attack websites and uncover software vulnerabilities. “Anything that has a vulnerability, GPT-7, Claude 7, DeepSeek 7 will find it,” he said. In that environment, higher security standards stop being optional.
At the same time, he said AI is helping the Ethereum protocol find bugs and carry out complex cryptography and formal verification.
Vitalik also argued that AI is becoming a new user interface. He expects direct execution of complex on-chain actions through AI to become normal over time, while also introducing new issues tied to AI’s own security. “We are in a fascinating but challenging transition period,” he said.
Trading unit shares RWA volume figures and previews AI Bot
After the opening talks, OKX’s core product teams took the stage one by one to present recent results and product plans.
The trading team said tokenized stocks and other real-world asset markets on the platform are seeing about $3 billion in average daily trading volume, with peak volume reaching $9 billion. The team also said it plans to launch underlying options and its own tokenized stock product, xRWA, in the coming months.
It also disclosed for the first time an AI Bot that is still in testing. Users will be able to generate trading strategies in natural language, then backtest and deploy them.
On-chain team highlights DEX terminal, Exchange OS and X Layer growth
The on-chain team demonstrated a newly launched DEX trading terminal that combines hot token screening, on-chain fund flow tracking, social sentiment monitoring and one-click instant trading. Users can also customize their workspace.
The team shared several data points. Combined decentralized perpetual and spot trading volume exceeded $1 trillion over the past 30 days. The size of tokenized RWA on-chain has grown from about $2 billion to nearly $40 billion. X Layer’s DeFi total value locked has increased by about 11 times this year and hit an all-time high in September.
OKX also introduced Exchange OS for builders, opening up its exchange infrastructure for the creation of on-chain markets.
AI team lays out tools for agent-based execution
The AI team described its core idea as “AI and finance start with the user.” In that framework, AI needs to understand user intent, respect user-defined boundaries and hand decisions back to the user when human judgment is required.
Based on that approach, the team said it has built a full set of capabilities to help AI agents move from intelligence to action at scale. Those products include Agent Trade Kit, which connects user AI agents directly to OKX exchange data and lets them execute trades; On-chain OS, which supports natural-language interaction with on-chain assets; Agentic Wallet, which lets users allocate funds to agents within preset guardrails; an OKX AI agent marketplace, where users can subscribe to signals from professional trading agents and authorize copy trading; and the AI Builder program, which allows developers to list and monetize their own models.
Payments team says OKX Money is live in more than 30 countries
The payments team said OKX Money, a stablecoin savings and payments app, is now available in more than 30 countries. The product is aimed mainly at non-traders and users who are not crypto-native. Accounts are built on self-custodial smart accounts and run on the X Layer wallet network.
For users in Europe, the Pay Boost feature allows balances to keep earning yield. Spending is deducted directly from the yield-bearing balance, while the remaining funds continue to grow.
On stage, the team demonstrated a transfer from Singapore to Venezuela that arrived within seconds. It also said OKX Money will support AI agents, with user authorization, to create investment strategies and carry out small trades inside the app.
Panel: OKX and ICE have submitted notice to the SEC for a tokenized securities venue
One of the most closely watched compliance updates came during the panel titled “Global vision, local markets,” which featured Cuomo alongside OKX Brazil CEO Guilherme Sacamone, Regional CEO for Singapore and Australasia Gracie Lin, and General Manager for Western Europe Roy Van Krimpen.
During the session, OKX said it and ICE have submitted notice to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a tokenized securities trading venue. Eligible OKX clients can already trade crude oil perpetuals referencing ICE Brent and WTI benchmarks.
Cuomo said the venue is expected to operate under the SEC’s “innovation exemption” mechanism and could go live in about 30 days. He added that the SEC has set limits on the number of tradable stocks and on trading volume.
He said the development shows traditional finance and crypto fintech moving “from competition to cooperation and integration.”
Panel: payment rails alone are not enough
The session titled “Who builds the next financial system?” brought together Nine Blocks Capital co-founder and managing partner Henri Arslanian, Mastercard’s Raj Dhamodharan and OKX Global Managing Partner Haider Rafique.
Raj said the underlying rails for payments will change over the next decade and that technologies such as stablecoins will increasingly operate behind the scenes, while simplicity and trust in the user experience will remain unchanged. He added that “near-zero-cost transfers” are only the surface layer of stablecoin payments, because cross-border payments still require local liquidity and compliance systems. “Payment rails are only one of the raw ingredients,” he said.
Haider shared two industry figures: the global stablecoin market is about $250 billion, and the number of crypto users has surpassed 700 million. He also said OKX Card uses the Mastercard network exclusively in markets including Europe, and that the two companies are also exploring cooperation in payments, collections and AI-agent commerce.
Panel: the challenge in 24/7 markets is operational
The panel on round-the-clock markets featured Thomas Eaton, head of digital assets at QRT, Ludisia Chief Investment Officer Jeremi Long, Selini Capital Head of Research Adam Smith and algorithmic trading lead Aleksandr Rashkhodchikov.
The main point of agreement was that the biggest obstacle for traditional institutions moving into 24/7 markets is operational rather than strategic. The speakers also said complexity itself can create an operational edge, and that price discovery is shifting toward crypto venues.
Panel: banks and exchanges are complementary
The session on the future of digital asset banking brought together one of the strongest traditional banking lineups of the day: DBS Managing Director for Digital Assets Evy Theunis, JPMorgan Head of Technology and Digital Economy for Asia-Pacific Amy Tan, Standard Chartered Global Head of Fintech Client Coverage Luke Boland and Western Alliance Bank Senior Managing Director for Blockchain and Digital Assets David Fragale.
The shared view in that discussion was that banks and exchanges complement each other rather than replace each other. The speakers said tokenization is still held back by three factors: trust, liquidity and settlement.
They also said the biggest future opportunities lie in real estate tokenization and identity tokenization, while bitcoin-backed financing could see progress early next year.
A one-day event that tied strategy, products and institutional dialogue together
Held ahead of Token2049 Singapore, OKX NOW compressed the company’s strategic positioning, long-term vision and product updates into a single day, while also putting the convergence of the internet, crypto and AI at the center of the conversation.
From product rollout to discussions with traditional financial institutions, the event sketched out not just a set of isolated launches, but a broader path for OKX as it pushes toward becoming global fintech infrastructure.