OKX founder and CEO Star used the opening keynote at the OKX NOW Global Product and Ecosystem Conference in Singapore on Oct. 6 to outline a broader ambition for the company: moving beyond its origins as a crypto exchange and building what he described as a global fintech platform for the next generation of users.
His speech focused on the convergence of three forces — the internet, crypto technology and AI. In Star’s telling, the internet changed how information moves, crypto is changing how value moves, and AI is making intelligence scalable. He said those technologies are now coming together and reshaping financial services.
Finance is still catching up with a real-time world
Star said everyday digital services already operate on a global, instant and around-the-clock basis, while much of finance still runs on infrastructure and assumptions built decades ago. He contrasted modern communication, ride-hailing and online video with payment and banking systems that still impose high costs, limited service windows and slow settlement.
He said domestic payments can still carry fees of 0.5% or 1%, while cross-border transfers often cost several percentage points. For some small remittances, he said, the total cost can approach 10%. He pointed in particular to overseas workers sending a few hundred dollars home each month to support parents, spouses and children, arguing that these costs fall hardest on people least able to absorb them.
He also said traditional finance remains constrained by business hours. Many transfers still cannot be processed overnight or on weekends, and traditional stocks trade only during fixed sessions. Most people keep money in regular bank accounts and earn very little, while personalized private banking services are generally reserved for wealthy clients.
From industry experiment to mainstream finance
Star described crypto as “one of the most important social experiments of our generation.” He broke the sector’s development into several stages.
From roughly 2008 to 2013, he said, the industry was driven mainly by geeks, cryptographers and engineers trying to answer a basic question: whether money could exist natively on the internet.
From 2013 to 2017, financial institutions began paying serious attention to crypto assets. As exchanges developed and liquidity improved, crypto started to form a real financial market.
He said the 2018 to 2022 period was marked by experimentation around ICOs and DeFi, with a wave of activity focused on smart contracts, stablecoins and decentralized finance. That stage also included bubbles, failures and bad actors.
From 2022 to 2024, he said, the industry moved into a phase centered on compliance capabilities. Licensing, governance, consumer protection, risk management and institutional-grade infrastructure became central. Starting in 2025, he argued, crypto is entering a mainstream phase and becoming increasingly integrated into the global financial system.
OKX no longer sees itself only as an exchange
Star said OKX has been part of the sector for almost the entire journey and has now been operating for 13 years. The company started as a spot crypto exchange, and he noted that many in the audience would still remember the first version of its first product launched in 2013.
Since then, he said, OKX has expanded into derivatives, built one of the largest Web3 wallets in the industry, entered payments and gradually connected users to a wider set of markets. Subject to what regulators allow, those markets include crypto assets, tokenized stocks, stock perpetuals, commodity perpetuals and other financial products.
Because of that expansion, Star said, calling OKX only a crypto exchange no longer captures what the company is doing. The exchange business was the starting point, he said, not the endpoint. OKX is developing into a broader global fintech platform.
A four-part vision for the next generation
Star framed the company’s long-term direction as building financial technology services for younger users and broke that vision into four areas.
How people hold money
Users should be able to choose how their funds are held, he said — whether in regulated exchange accounts or in self-custody wallets. In the future, some 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, he said: cross-border, instant and low-cost.
Investing
Star questioned why users need multiple apps to access different asset classes. In his view, crypto, equities, commodities and other markets will increasingly sit inside one unified digital experience.
Wealth management
He said wealth management is one of the areas where AI can matter most. Private banking has historically been expensive because banks could only justify dedicated relationship managers and investment professionals for high-net-worth clients. AI, he said, is changing that cost structure. Over time, ordinary users may have access to 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 company’s vision in simple terms: helping users hold money, make payments, invest and grow wealth.
Trust, regulation and governance remain central
Star said technology alone is not enough to build global financial services. Trust, regulation, governance and the ability to take responsibility locally all matter.
He said OKX has spent the past several years building infrastructure that meets regulatory requirements around the world. According to Star, the company has obtained licenses or is regulated in major markets including the United States, Europe, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Australia, Brazil and Turkey, along with multiple other countries and regions.
He also said OKX was among the earlier major global crypto exchanges to make proof of reserves a routine transparency mechanism, which he said has now become an industry standard. In addition, he said OKX may be one of the few international exchanges currently using a Big Four accounting firm as its global auditor, with Deloitte now serving in that role.
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 moving together
Star said the long-standing view of crypto finance and traditional finance as opposing camps is changing quickly.
He said large global financial institutions are making equity investments in OKX. Those investors come from exchanges, banking, stablecoins, payments and quantitative finance, and include ICE and the New York Stock Exchange, Standard Chartered, Ripple, Circle and other institutions.
For Star, the point is larger than the capital itself. He said it shows that the boundary between crypto finance and traditional finance is fading. In his view, crypto companies will keep expanding toward traditional finance, and traditional financial firms will keep investing in crypto.
He described the two sides as bringing different strengths: crypto offers 24/7 infrastructure, programmable money, global settlement and self-custody, while traditional finance brings deep liquidity, regulatory experience, financial infrastructure and institutional trust. He said both are converging into the same financial system.
AI has become core infrastructure inside OKX
Star also devoted a substantial part of the speech to AI. He said AI has already become core infrastructure at OKX and is embedded deeply in day-to-day operations.
The company has built its own internal AI platform, he said. At present, about 95% of engineering code merge requests, or PRs, have their main development work completed through AI workflows. Engineers still review, test and approve the final output, but he said the development process itself has changed in a fundamental way.
He argued that customer service could change even more dramatically. Today, many people still associate “AI customer service” with clumsy chatbots that fail to understand questions. The next version, he said, will be very different: systems that can instantly understand a user’s account, trading activity, issue history and relevant policies, then respond around the clock. On many categories of issues, he said, AI may eventually outperform human support.
Star added that AI can also be used for fraud prevention and user protection. Instead of waiting for staff to identify suspicious activity manually, AI can continuously analyze millions of signals, detect problems faster and intervene earlier.
He also identified compliance as one of AI’s most promising applications. Global financial institutions operate across multiple jurisdictions and face different regulatory requirements, often relying on large teams to execute compliance work. Different people can interpret the same policy in different ways, he said. AI can structure that information, maintain a consistent global compliance baseline and at the same time reflect local regulatory requirements, helping compliance teams apply rules more consistently.
Star said OKX’s AI usage is already operating at considerable scale. He noted that he had encouraged the team to use AI broadly, only to discover later that the company’s bill to large-model providers reached $10 million last month. He said that prompted OKX to push for more disciplined usage. To him, that was proof that AI inside the company is no longer a presentation concept but part of large-scale day-to-day operations.
A global, real-time and AI-driven financial future
Looking ahead over the next decade, Star said he sees the internet, crypto and AI moving closer together. The internet enables information to move instantly across the world. Crypto allows value to move across borders and makes that value programmable. AI makes intelligence scalable and personalized.
When those three technologies are combined, he said, financial services can change at a fundamental level. Money can move globally on a 24/7 basis, more people can access markets more easily, payment costs can fall and financial products can better match individual needs. Services once aimed mainly at wealthy clients may become available to ordinary users as well.
Star closed by returning to the company’s arc. OKX began 13 years ago as a crypto exchange, he said. Today, it wants to build a global, real-time, AI-driven fintech platform that lets users hold money, make payments, invest and grow wealth in a smarter way.