To another year of building

A letter from OKX Founder and CEO Star Xu

As the CEO of OKX, and a builder at heart, I'm proud to reflect on an extraordinary year of growth and progress. Despite challenges, 2024 was a year of focus, innovation, and resilience. We expanded and enhanced our products, made significant strides in bringing to market a transparent and regulatory compliant onshore business, and added weight to our already deep global executive bench. Most notably, 2024 marked a turning point for the industry, serving as crypto's "comeback year" after a period of heightened uncertainty.

Through it all, our mission remained clear: "Forward decentralization and make crypto more accessible to the world."

In 2024, we achieved milestones that speak to this accelerating growth - a 122% year-over-year surge in app downloads, a 20x increase in DEX daily trading volume, and a 991% rise in OKX Wallets globally (as of December 5). These numbers aren't just metrics-they're proof of the global shift toward crypto adoption and OKX's role in leading the charge.

Here are a few notable updates that I believe helped improve the way we serve you.

Product modes

This year we prioritized making our apps easier to use, and to make crypto more interoperable when using OKX. We did this by first introducing a new default simple mode in our app. This new mode allows people who use our app to have a simpler view of crypto prices, trends, and easily buy, sell, or transact through this new interface. Previously, this experience was more clunky and designed for "a typical trader" rather than a "casual investor."

Secondly, we rolled out a wave of new cross-chain support to more than 100 chains, which creates, in our view, the ultimate interoperability between chains accessible through our wallet and Web3 ecosystem. Thirdly, we upgraded our app design and modernized the way we want you to experience the OKX app everyday.

Throughout 2024, we welcomed millions of new people onto our platform and introduced approximately 200 new features along with over 800 upgrades across our Centralized Exchange, Wallet and decentralized services. These advancements underscore our commitment to pushing the boundaries of crypto accessibility and usability.

Going onshore

In 2024, we made significant strides in expanding our global footprint, launching seven onshore businesses across Brazil, Singapore, the UAE, Türkiye, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Australia. In these key markets, we established local teams with a focus on growth and enabled seamless fiat onramps, making it easier than ever for customers to access our products. We also secured four major licenses and extensions - in Singapore, the UAE, EEA, and Australia - demonstrating our commitment to building locally established businesses. Through this strategic expansion, we see an increase in trust towards our platform from people who are starting to use our apps and this is apparent in the substantial increase in Assets on Platform (AOP) across these onshore markets. These achievements demonstrate our ability and commitment to continue to bring OKX services to other regulated markets and working closely with regulators and policy makers.

Compliance

This year we continued to bolster our compliance operations with risk-based standards that meet those of the biggest financial services companies. It is the standard of our compliance function that helped us achieve licenses in major capital-markets jurisdictions. This standard helped us achieve licenses in jurisdictions that are known to be tough regulators. Our focus has always been to ensure that our systems are advanced, and continuously improving. A big responsibility we bear is to ensure we run a healthy marketplace and proactively weed out the "bad guys." This year alone, we added 300+ compliance team members, bringing our staff total to nearly 500 specialists globally. We also continuously enhance our compliance capabilities across KYC, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring and anti-money-laundering (AML). This continued investment helps us maintain the highest standards and, as a result, we are proud of our reputation for having a robust and effective compliance program.

Transparency

Many people are still skeptical of centralized exchanges or perhaps any centralized financial institutions. Millions of people saw what can happen when there is a bank run, whether at a digital asset exchange or a bank. In 2022, we committed to publishing a monthly Proof-of-Reserves (PoR) report so people on our platform could see the total amount of assets on our platform each month. Additionally, we decided to launch a "self verification" tool so as a customer you can verify that your funds are backed 1:1 on our platform at any time. To date, more than two million customers have utilized our PoR verification tool. We were among the very first companies to do this in 2022, and since the introduction of this tool, our reserves have doubled demonstrating trust by the public in our platform. Today, we published our industry leading 26th consecutive PoR report, which showed USD 30 billion in primary assets backing customer funds and an over 100% reserve ratio maintained for 22 of our most frequently traded assets.

Adding to the executive team

We also strengthened our global executive bench in 2024, welcoming several exceptional leaders to our team, further reinforcing our commitment to crypto market leadership. These leadership appointments are an important signal towards the strength to scale our services with the highest standards and to position us for sustained growth as we continue to go more onshore.

• February: Mehmet Çamır joined us as Chairman of the Board for OKX Türkiye who previously served in Türkiye’s foremost public and private banking institutions and the Turkish Wealth Fund.

• April: Erald Ghoos stepped in as our Europe CEO in April, with a mission of driving growth across key onshore European markets.

• September: We appointed Gracie Lin as CEO of OKX Singapore. Previously, she held leadership roles at Grab and the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

• October: Yuri Mushkin joined us as Global Chief Risk Officer, formerly of Goldman Sachs and McKinsey Investment Office.

Looking ahead to 2025

I envision OKX becoming as foundational to the crypto economy as Google is to the web.

Our platform is stronger than ever, but we know the work ahead is even bigger. I firmly believe that true decentralization will lead us to Web3 mass adoption, which is the future. Every financial institution will connect with customers through customized decentralized applications (dApps). OKX will be at the heart of this evolution-empowering businesses, developers, and creators to build and scale the next generation of decentralized solutions. We're already laying the groundwork, investing heavily in Web3, so OKX is the preferred gateway for accessing the dApps of tomorrow. And I'm proud to say that this vision is already becoming reality. 2025 isn't just another year, it's the next chapter in defining the future of crypto.

Watch OKX's 2024 video recap here