Odaily Interview with OKX Planet: Exchanges Building Communities Aim to Solve Far More Than Just Information Problems

During the OKX New Year's Eve dinner, Odaily conducted an on-site interview with the OKX Orbit community product team. The discussion revolved around the project initiation background of OKX Orbit, its content and recommendation logic, creator incentive mechanisms, and the overall philosophy of the exchange in community building. Jason, the head of the OKX Orbit community product, and product manager Damon shared the team's judgments and trade-offs.

The following content is compiled from the on-site recording, with necessary editing and structural organization.

1. From Exploration to Project Initiation: How OKX Orbit Takes Community Seriously

Odaily: Before officially initiating the Orbit project, the OKX team had already made numerous attempts. How did you gradually arrive at the direction of "community"?

Jason:

Over the past year, the team has conducted various explorations related to content, including directions like candlestick dynamics, AI summaries, and chat groups. The overall approach wasn't initially aimed at "creating a community product" from the start. Instead, it was through different forms of experimentation that we gradually built an understanding of the community track.

OKX has always emphasized prudence internally, so we tend to enter the formal project initiation phase only after gaining relatively clear understanding. We finalized the product form of the Orbit community in October 2025. From project initiation to launch, the overall product development and iteration have been very rapid.

In terms of team composition, members have backgrounds ranging from traditional financial communities to long-term, deeply involved practitioners in the crypto industry, providing insights into crypto community culture, dynamics, opportunities, and general product capabilities.

Odaily: Many people believe that communities are strongly correlated with market cycles, being more important in bull markets and losing value in bear markets. How do you view this issue?

Jason:

From our assessment, a community is not a product form that strongly depends on bull or bear cycles.

During market downturns, users still need emotional outlets and spaces for communication. When the market is active, communities naturally become high-frequency venues for discussing information, opinions, and opportunities. Regardless of the market condition, a community is not a dispensable accessory.

Based on this judgment, OKX Orbit does not aim to be just another homogeneous information feed product. Instead, we hope to gradually integrate more deeply with OKX's overall ecosystem, allowing the community to play a role in new user conversion, user retention, and trading decision-making processes.

Odaily: Both creators and users are very concerned about traffic distribution mechanisms. How is Orbit currently considering recommendations and operations?

Damon:

Looking at the industry's current state, a core variable in crypto content remains "trust." Many users' trading behaviors are essentially based on long-term trust in certain KOLs or traders, combined with their own judgment.

In our previous analysis of industry content, we noticed that content related to real portfolios and trade showcases consistently performed well in terms of clicks. Before 2025, the supply of such content was relatively insufficient. However, as more creators joined, the supply increased significantly, yet user attention remained at a high level.

Simultaneously, the industry itself is constantly evolving. Whether it's on-chain asset strategies, automation tools, or AI-related directions, investment methods are gradually diversifying. In the short term, content development needs to respect users' current preferences. From a longer-term perspective, the platform also has a responsibility to guide the emergence of more methodological and tool-oriented content.

Regarding the recommendation mechanism, on one hand, it will be based on users' behavioral preferences within the trading platform to form relatively clear user profiles. On the other hand, the content side will utilize models to generate multi-dimensional tags for more precise matching. The overall direction is not set in stone but will be continuously adjusted as the industry changes.

Odaily: If traffic were allocated solely based on interaction metrics, real portfolio content would often have an advantage. How does Orbit balance different types of content creators?

Damon:

If we only look at likes, comments, and shares, real portfolio and trading-related content indeed tends to have an easier advantage. However, this can easily lead to a homogeneous content structure, which is not favorable for content with long-term value.

Therefore, in the mechanism design, the platform will give additional weight to content that is currently relatively scarce but more important for industry development, such as beginner-friendly educational content, interpretations of new asset forms and strategies, etc. These weightings are not fixed; they will be dynamically adjusted based on content supply and overall quality.

From the long-term vision of the team and the exchange, the crypto industry cannot be reduced to just trading itself. Community content also needs to continuously expand its boundaries alongside industry development.

Odaily: Monetization is a key concern for many creators. How is the current incentive mechanism for Orbit designed?

Jason:OKX Orbit Community will establish a long-term, weekly-settled incentive mechanism. The evaluation dimensions not only include page views but also focus on high-value users' effective interaction behaviors, such as likes, comments, shares, follows, and clicks on trading-related components, while also considering users' dwell time within the community.

Based on this, the actual contribution of content creators is calculated through anti-cheating logic, and then distributed from the overall reward pool according to the contribution ratio. The original intention of the mechanism design is to allow creators of different scales and stages to have the opportunity to receive positive feedback.

In addition to basic incentives, the community will gradually introduce more tools and scenarios, such as trading-related activities, live stream tipping, reward-based Q&A, membership-based groups, etc. At this stage, the platform will not take a cut from creators' earnings; the more important task is to first cultivate the community ecosystem.

Odaily: What is Orbit's positioning within the OKX App, and what is the overall launch timeline?

Jason:

In terms of product form, OKX Orbit has become one of the important sections within the OKX App. According to current plans, the Chinese region and some global markets will accelerate their opening before the Spring Festival.

There is strong synergy potential between exchange-level activities and community scenarios. When platform-level activities enter the community, they are more likely to generate discussion and dissemination, which is also one of the directions for future exploration.

2. The "Inside Stories" of OKX Orbit That Users Are Particularly Interested In

Odaily: The outside world often compares Orbit with Binance Square, or even X's crypto content ecosystem. What are your thoughts on this?

Jason:

In terms of mindset, we will always remain humble and open. The market already has relatively mature products and a large number of professional community creators, providing ample learning opportunities for newcomers. Through continuous observation, learning, and active communication, we can better judge the direction of the track.

From an industry perspective, it's a positive development that large platforms continue to focus on the crypto space. For Chinese users, having a stable, low-barrier community experience within the trading platform itself also holds certain advantages.

Damon:

Large-scale platforms like X often leave space for vertical niches. As more users enter the industry, the demand for professional content and tools will actually become more segmented. Communities focused on trading scenarios and user decision-making chains still have room to play.

Odaily: Finally, a relatively light-hearted question: How was the name "OKX Orbit" determined?

Jason:

During early discussions, the team indeed tried different options, and the English name also went through adjustments, eventually finalized as "Orbit" to convey the meaning of a "social circle." The Chinese name retained "OKX 星球" (OKX Planet/Orbit). On one hand, it's easy to spread, and on the other hand, it facilitates the future extension of community identities and activity systems.

For example, creators at different stages within the community will correspond to different identity titles, and subsequent activity naming can also revolve around the OKX Orbit concept. Such a unified setup is beneficial for the long-term operation of the community.

Odaily: If you look back at the OKX Orbit product a year from now, what kind of evaluation would you most hope the outside world gives?

Damon:

I hope people feel that OKX Orbit has found a new direction for Crypto content.

Jason:

From a longer-term perspective, I hope that when new events or opportunities emerge in the industry, users will naturally think of checking if there are related discussions on OKX Orbit. If such usage habits can gradually form, that would already be a good outcome.

Conclusion

From this exchange, it's evident that OKX Orbit is not hastily packaging a short-term narrative with "community." Instead, it attempts to integrate content information, product ecosystem, trading investment, and user conversion into the same product system for long-term, continuous refinement. This approach itself has already surpassed the traditional positioning of a community as an "auxiliary function."

In fact, trading platforms building communities is not a new proposition. What's truly worth paying attention to is not "whether to do it," but "how to approach it." When a community is viewed as a long-term capability rather than a阶段性 tool, its role also changes accordingly—it is no longer just a hub for information or a buffer for emotions, but gradually evolves into an important node connecting content, tools, and user decisions.

How far a community can ultimately go still depends on the platform's judgment of the product direction and its control over the execution pace. For community products still in their early stages, time remains the most important, yet most difficult variable to accelerate.

Whether OKX Orbit can truly validate this logic remains to be seen over time. However, what is certain is that the relationship between trading platforms and communities is undergoing a structural shift. The endpoint of this change may not lie in the final form the community takes, but rather in whether trading platforms can re-understand and reconstruct users' decision-making processes.