Star Speech Transcript: OKX's Long-Term Vision, AI Development Progress, and Industry Judgments for the Next Decade

Compiled by: ChainCatcher

On October 6, the OKX NOW Global Products and Ecosystem Conference was held in Singapore. OKX founder and CEO Star delivered the opening speech, reflecting on the journey of the cryptocurrency industry from a geek experiment to mainstream acceptance, stating that OKX has surpassed its positioning as an exchange and is expanding into a global fintech platform. He also elaborated on the long-term vision of building fintech services for the next generation and his industry judgment on the convergence of the three technological lines of the internet, cryptography, and AI.

The following is the full text of the speech, compiled by ChainCatcher:

Financial Infrastructure Still Chasing the Real-Time World

Today, I want to take this opportunity at OKX NOW to discuss where we are today and a more important question: Where do we believe financial services are headed?

Thirteen years ago, OKX started as a cryptocurrency exchange. But today, our vision goes far beyond that.

The internet has changed the way information flows, cryptographic technology is changing the way value flows, and AI is enabling intelligence to be applied at scale. We believe these three technologies are converging to reshape financial services for the next generation.

Look at our daily lives. Today, we can send messages to someone on the other side of the planet in a second; open Uber and have a car pick us up within minutes; watch live broadcasts from another country in real-time through TikTok or YouTube.

Almost all major consumer technology services have achieved global connectivity, instant response, and 24/7 operation. However, a significant part of today's financial system is still built on infrastructure and concepts from decades ago.

We live in a real-time digital world, yet financial infrastructure is still catching up. This gap imposes real costs on ordinary people.

Domestic payments may still incur fees of 0.5% or 1%, while cross-border payment fees often reach several percentage points. The people most affected may be those who can least afford these costs.

Think about those workers overseas. They are far from home, working hard, sending a few hundred dollars back home each month to support their parents, spouses, and children. For some small cross-border remittances, the total cost can approach 10%. As part of the financial industry, we should feel ashamed in the face of such remittance costs.

At the same time, traditional finance is still constrained by business hours. Many transfers cannot be processed at night or on weekends, and traditional stocks can only be traded during specific hours. Most people keep their money in regular bank accounts, earning negligible returns; personalized private banking services are mainly aimed at the wealthy.

Technology has made communication and information accessible, but financial services have not achieved the same level of accessibility.

The Cryptocurrency Industry Has Entered the Mainstream Financial Stage by 2025

The cryptocurrency industry is one of the most important social experiments of our generation.

From around 2008 to 2013, the industry was primarily driven by a group of geeks, cryptographers, and engineers. They attempted to answer a very bold question: Can currency exist natively on the internet?

From 2013 to 2017, the financial industry began to take cryptocurrencies seriously. As exchanges developed and liquidity improved, cryptocurrencies gradually formed a real financial market.

From around 2018 to 2022, the industry entered a phase of exploration with ICOs and DeFi. Numerous attempts emerged around smart contracts, stablecoins, and decentralized finance. Of course, this process was also accompanied by bubbles, failures, and bad actors.

Then, from around 2022 to 2024, the industry entered another important phase: building compliance capabilities. Licensing, governance, consumer protection, risk management, and institutional-level infrastructure became key to the industry's development.

Starting in 2025, we are entering the mainstream phase. Cryptographic technology is increasingly being integrated into the global financial system.

OKX has been involved since the early days of the industry and has now been around for 13 years. Today, I see many old friends and meet many new friends.

What we initially did was very simple: a cryptocurrency spot trading exchange. I believe many people still remember the first version and product we launched in 2013.

Since then, we have expanded our derivatives business, built one of the largest Web3 wallets in the industry, entered the payment sector, and gradually helped users connect to a broader market. Within the regulatory framework, these markets cover cryptocurrencies, tokenized stocks, perpetual contracts for stocks, perpetual contracts for commodities, and other financial products.

Therefore, it is no longer sufficient to simply define OKX as a cryptocurrency exchange.

The exchange is our starting point, but not our endpoint. We are evolving into a global fintech platform with a broader business scope.

OKX's Long-Term Vision: Building Fintech Services for the Next Generation from Four Aspects

This also leads to our long-term vision: to build fintech services for the younger generation.

I often say that we cannot take for granted that our children will still walk into a JPMorgan or HSBC branch in the future to open an account.

For future financial services, I mainly think from four aspects.

First, how to hold funds.

Users should be able to choose how to store their funds: in a regulated exchange account or in their own self-custody wallet. In the future, some services may also take the form of next-generation digital banks.

Second, payments.

Transferring money to friends or paying merchants should be as simple as sending a message, able to cross regions, completed instantly, and at a low cost.

Third, investments.

Why must investing in different asset classes require many different applications? Cryptocurrencies, stocks, commodities, and other markets will increasingly be integrated into a unified digital experience.

Fourth, wealth management. This is also an area where AI can play an important role.

In the past, the cost of private banking services was very high. Banks could only afford to assign dedicated account managers and investment professionals to high-net-worth clients.

AI is changing this cost structure. In the future, every ordinary person may have their own private banking advisor—an AI entity that understands their asset situation, cash flow, risk preferences, and financial goals.

So, our vision is simple: to enable users to hold funds, make payments conveniently, invest, and grow their wealth.

Global Financial Services Require Trust and Long-Term Construction

But to build global financial services, technology alone is not enough.

Trust, regulation, governance, and the ability to take responsibility locally are all crucial.

In recent years, OKX has continuously invested in building regulatory-compliant infrastructure globally. Currently, we have obtained licenses or are under regulation in major markets such as the United States, Europe, the UAE, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Turkey, and several other countries and regions.

We are also one of the first major cryptocurrency exchanges to normalize the proof of reserves as a transparency mechanism. I believe it has now become an industry standard.

Additionally, we may also be one of the few international exchanges currently employing one of the Big Four accounting firms as our global auditing body. Deloitte has become OKX's global auditing firm.

Our goal is to combine crypto-native technology with the standards that people expect from global financial institutions.

The Boundaries Between Crypto Finance and Traditional Finance Are Disappearing

At the same time, an important change is happening around us.

For many years, when people talked about crypto finance and traditional finance, they always viewed them as two opposing worlds. Now, this situation is changing rapidly.

Large global financial institutions are making equity investments in OKX. These institutions come from exchanges, banks, stablecoins, payments, and quantitative finance, including ICE, the New York Stock Exchange, Standard Chartered Bank, Ripple, Circle, and others.

In my view, the significance of this goes far beyond the funds themselves. It indicates that the boundaries between crypto finance and traditional finance are gradually disappearing.

In the future, crypto finance and traditional finance will converge. Every crypto company will expand into traditional finance, and every traditional finance company will invest in the crypto space.

Cryptographic technology brings 24/7 operating infrastructure, programmable money, global settlement, and self-custody; traditional finance brings massive liquidity, regulatory experience, financial infrastructure, and institutional trust.

These two worlds are converging into the same financial system.

AI Has Become the Core Infrastructure of OKX

Another transformation happening within OKX is AI. Perhaps I should call it SI, or Super Intelligence.

I believe that while cryptographic technology has changed the field of currency, AI will change the way entire financial institutions operate.

For OKX, AI has become core infrastructure and is deeply integrated into daily operations.

We have built our own internal AI platform. Currently, about 95% of engineering code merge requests, or PRs, have been primarily developed through AI workflows.

Engineers are still responsible for reviewing, testing, and approving the final output, but the actual development process has fundamentally changed.

The changes in customer service will be even more significant.

Today, when people mention "AI customer service," many still think of those clumsy chatbots that cannot understand questions. Future AI customer service will be completely different.

It will be able to instantly understand users' accounts, transactions, problems encountered, and relevant policies, providing responses 24/7. For many types of inquiries, it may ultimately perform better than human customer service.

AI can also be used for fraud prevention and user protection. In the past, we had to wait for manual identification of suspicious activities; AI can continuously analyze millions of signals, detect problems faster, and intervene.

I believe compliance is also one of the areas where AI has the most potential applications.

Global financial institutions operate in multiple countries, facing different regulatory requirements, and rely on a large workforce for compliance work. In this process, different people may interpret the same policy differently.

AI can structure this information, maintaining a globally unified compliance standard while integrating local regulatory requirements, helping compliance teams execute their work more consistently.

Currently, our AI applications have reached a considerable scale.

I have always encouraged the OKX team to use AI, but later found that last month our AI bill to large model companies reached 10 million dollars. So, we started to push everyone to use AI more reasonably.

This shows that AI has already become a part of our internal large-scale operations, not just a concept in presentations.

The Next Decade: The Convergence of Three Technologies May Fundamentally Change Financial Services

Looking ahead to the next decade, I see the convergence of the internet, cryptographic technology, and AI.

The internet allows information to flow instantly around the world; encryption technology enables value to cross regions and possess programmability; AI allows intelligence to be applied at scale and provides personalized services.

When these three technologies come together, fundamental changes in financial services are possible.

Funds can flow globally around the clock, more people can conveniently participate in the market, payment costs can be further reduced, and financial products can be more tailored to individual needs. Services that were previously aimed primarily at the wealthy have the opportunity to benefit every ordinary person.

13 years ago, OKX started as a cryptocurrency exchange. Today, we hope to do more.

We aim to build a global, real-time, AI-driven fintech platform for the next generation, enabling users to hold funds, make convenient payments, invest, and grow wealth in a smarter way.