OKX founder and CEO Star said the company is evolving beyond its roots as a cryptocurrency exchange and is positioning itself as a global fintech platform, speaking at the OKX NOW global product and ecosystem conference in Singapore on Oct. 6.
In the keynote, Star said OKX is building around four areas: how users hold funds, how they pay, how they invest and how they grow wealth. He also said AI now sits inside core functions at the company, including engineering, customer service, anti-fraud and compliance.
Star disclosed that roughly 95% of OKX’s engineering pull requests now have their primary development work completed through AI workflows. He added that the company’s AI bill paid to large language model providers reached $10 million last month.
According to the WuBlockchain summary, the statements on OKX’s business lines, regulatory standing, equity investment and AI adoption all came from Star’s speech.
From exchange origins to a broader fintech platform
Star said OKX started 13 years ago as a crypto exchange, but its ambition is now much larger. In his view, the internet changed how information moves, crypto is changing how value moves, and AI is making intelligence scalable. He said those three technologies are coming together and reshaping the next generation of financial services.
He argued that people already live in a real-time world while financial infrastructure is still catching up. Messages can reach the other side of the world in a second, rides can arrive within minutes through Uber, and live content from other countries is available in real time through TikTok or YouTube. Yet much of finance, he said, still runs on infrastructure and assumptions built decades ago.
Star said domestic payments can still carry fees of 0.5% or 1%, while cross-border payments often cost several percentage points. He pointed to overseas workers sending a few hundred dollars home each month to support parents, spouses and children, saying the total cost on some small remittances can approach 10%.
He also said traditional finance is still bound by business hours. Many transfers cannot be processed normally at night or on weekends, and traditional stocks can only be traded during set market sessions. Most people keep money in ordinary bank accounts with little to no yield, while personalized private banking services are mainly designed for wealthy clients.
How Star described crypto’s development
Star said the crypto sector began as one of the most important social experiments of his generation. From roughly 2008 to 2013, he said, it was mostly explored by geeks, cryptographers and engineers trying to answer a radical question: can money exist natively on the internet?
From 2013 to 2017, he said, the financial industry began taking crypto assets seriously. Exchanges developed, liquidity improved and crypto became a real financial market.
He described the 2018 to 2022 period as the ICO and DeFi phase, marked by extensive experimentation around smart contracts, stablecoins and decentralized finance, while also acknowledging bubbles, failures and bad actors.
From 2022 to 2024, he said, the industry moved into a stage focused on compliance capabilities, where licensing, governance, consumer protection, risk management and institutional-grade infrastructure became critical. Starting in 2025, he said, crypto is entering a mainstream phase and is becoming part of the global financial system.
Star said OKX has been involved since the sector’s early years. The company began with a simple spot exchange for crypto assets, then expanded into derivatives, built what he described as one of the industry’s largest Web3 wallets, entered payments and gradually connected users to broader markets, including crypto assets, tokenized stocks, stock perpetuals, commodity perpetuals and other financial products where regulation allows.
For that reason, he said, describing OKX only as a cryptocurrency exchange is no longer accurate. The exchange was the starting point, not the endpoint.
Four areas of focus: funds, payments, investing and wealth
Star framed OKX’s long-term plan as building financial services for the next generation. He said it should not be taken for granted that future users, including the next generation, will still walk into a JPMorgan or HSBC branch to open an account.
He broke the idea into four parts.
- Holding funds: users should be able to choose how their money is held, whether in a regulated exchange account or in a self-custody wallet. Some future services may also take the form of next-generation digital banking.
- Payments: sending money to friends or paying merchants should be as simple as sending a message, with global reach, instant completion and low cost.
- Investing: users should not need many separate apps to invest across asset classes. Crypto, stocks, commodities and other markets, he said, are likely to come together in a unified digital experience.
- Wealth management: Star said this is where AI could matter deeply. Traditional private banking has been expensive because banks only had an economic reason to assign relationship managers and investment professionals to high-net-worth clients.
AI changes that cost structure, he said. In the future, ordinary users may have their own private banking adviser in the form of an AI agent that understands their assets, cash flow, risk preferences and financial goals.
He summed up the vision this way: hold money, use it to pay, use it to invest and grow wealth.
Building global financial services requires more than technology
Star said technology alone is not enough to build global financial services. Trust matters. Regulation matters. Governance matters. Local accountability matters too.
He said OKX has spent the past several years investing heavily in regulated infrastructure around the world. According to Star, the company has obtained licenses or is operating under regulation in major markets including the U.S., Europe, the UAE, Singapore, Australia, Brazil and Turkey, as well as in a number of other countries and regions.
He also said OKX was one of the earlier major global crypto exchanges to make proof of reserves a regular transparency mechanism, adding that he sees it as an industry standard today.
On auditing, Star said OKX may be one of the few international exchanges currently using a Big Four accounting firm as its global auditor. He said Deloitte has become OKX’s global audit firm.
The company’s goal, he said, is to combine crypto-native technology with the standards people expect from global financial institutions.
Crypto finance and traditional finance are converging
Star said a major shift is underway in how crypto finance and traditional finance relate to each other. For years, he said, they were discussed as if they were two opposing worlds. That is changing quickly.
He said large global financial institutions are making equity investments in OKX. He said those institutions come from exchanges, banking, stablecoins, payments and quantitative finance, and named ICE and the New York Stock Exchange, Standard Chartered, Ripple, Circle and other institutions.
For Star, the importance of that development goes well beyond capital. He said it shows that the boundary between crypto finance and traditional finance is fading.
In his view, the future will not be defined by crypto finance versus traditional finance. Crypto companies will expand into traditional finance, and traditional financial firms will invest in crypto. The two are moving toward integration.
He said crypto brings 24/7 infrastructure, programmable money, global settlement and self-custody, while traditional finance brings deep liquidity, regulatory experience, financial infrastructure and institutional trust. Those two worlds, he said, are becoming one financial system.
AI as core infrastructure inside OKX
Star also spent a large part of the speech on how AI is changing OKX internally. He said AI is no longer a side experiment outside the business. It has become core infrastructure.
According to Star, OKX has built its own internal AI platform. Around 95% of engineering pull requests now have their primary development work completed through AI workflows, while engineers remain responsible for review, testing and final approval.
He said the shift may be even more visible in customer service. Today, when people hear “AI customer service,” they often think of clumsy chatbots that do not understand the question. That is not the future he described. He said future AI support systems should be able to instantly understand a user’s account, trades, issue and the relevant policies, respond around the clock and in many cases eventually outperform human support on certain types of questions.
He added that AI can also be used for anti-fraud and user protection. Instead of waiting for suspicious activity to be discovered manually, AI can continuously analyze millions of signals and step in faster.
Compliance, in his view, may be the biggest opportunity. Global financial institutions operate across multiple countries, face different regulatory requirements and rely on large teams to carry out compliance work. Different people may interpret the same policy differently. AI can structure that information, he said, and help compliance staff execute more consistently while keeping a global baseline and adapting to local regulatory requirements.
Star said the use of AI at OKX has already reached significant scale. He added that while he has long encouraged teams to use AI, he later found that the company’s monthly bill to large model providers had reached $10 million, which led to a push for more disciplined use.
That, he said, shows something important: AI is no longer a concept on presentation slides for OKX. It is live infrastructure operating at scale inside the company.
Star’s view of the next decade
To close the speech, Star said the next decade of financial services will be shaped by the convergence of three technologies. The internet made information global and instant. Crypto makes value global and programmable. AI makes intelligence scalable and personalized.
When those three come together, he said, financial services could change at a basic level. Money can move globally around the clock, markets can become easier to access, payments can become cheaper and financial products can become more personalized. Services once available only to wealthy consumers may open up to everyone.
Star repeated that OKX began 13 years ago as a cryptocurrency exchange, but its vision is now broader. The company wants to build a global, real-time, AI-driven fintech platform for the next generation, one where users can hold money, make payments, invest and grow wealth in a smarter way.