Crypto exchange OKX looks to turn a new leaf

“What is OKX?” is the tagline behind the Seychelles-based crypto exchange’s latest splashy marketing campaign. It’s a good question, and quite literally the point of debate between two friends on a languid afternoon in OKX’s latest ad.

It’s not a perfume, race car, or one of Pep Guardiola’s fancy football formations, OKX is a cryptocurrency-trading app – one of hundreds, each with varying degrees of reliability.

But this year, crypto’s best-kept secret is finally out. OKX, so far known only to hardcore crypto traders, rebranded itself this year, dropping the “E” from “OKEx,” as it was previously known.

The firm has also secured two major branding partnerships that will see OKX’s brand grace football team Manchester City’s training kits and arrive on the Formula 1 circuit with McLaren Racing. These partnerships reportedly cost OKX US$20 million and “hundreds of millions,” respectively.

Rebranding, a new beginning, a step away from OKX’s checkered past – the exchange’s journey is chock-full of twists and turns, and we have a Q&A with its financial market director, Lennix Lai, to gain further insight into what lies ahead.

What is OKX?

The story of OKX begins with Star Xu, a serial entrepreneur and early Bitcoin adopter in China. Xu’s profile on Baike Baidu states that he was born in 1985, dropped out of graduate school at Renmin University of China to start a group-buying website called Wantuan.com before joining Yahoo China.

He co-founded document-sharing website Douding and served as its CTO between 2007 and 2012 before founding OKCoin, one of the earliest cryptocurrency exchanges in 2013.

In 2017, the Chinese government banned initial coin offerings and prohibited cryptocurrency-trading platforms such as OKCoin from converting fiat currencies to cryptocurrencies and vice versa. This drove Xu to establish another cryptocurrency exchange, OKEx, in Malta, aiming to expand his business beyond Chinese shores.

Unlike OKCoin, OKEx dealt with crypto derivatives – a business that quickly took off. As OKEx did not have a license to offer futures trading in China, it catered only to users outside of China.

The next few years proved to be difficult for Xu as the Chinese government attempted to rein in the cryptocurrency craze. In February 2018, he was reportedly investigated by the Dongguan Public Security Bureau for illegally providing futures trading services on OKEx and potentially being involved in fraud. Xu resigned as OKEx’s CEO shortly after.

Q&A