We wrote a book titled "The OK Life" for Star Xu

Because of a line in Changpeng Zhao's (CZ) autobiography about "reporting Li Lin," Xu Mingxing (Star) and Changpeng Zhao have started a new round of social media sparring, even placing a $1 billion bet.

In the cryptocurrency industry, the life stories of entrepreneurs who have made it this far are all worth reading. Even though the internet has various interpretations of Xu Mingxing's many maneuvers, his journey to this point contains a story no less compelling than CZ's. Of course, a single article cannot cover the entirety of "The OK Life," but we hope it can give more readers insight into his entrepreneurial story.

Dropping Out to Start a Business

One night in 2006, in a graduate student dormitory at Renmin University of China, a TV was on.

Jack Ma, on the stage of "Win in China," shouted with full vigor: "If someone like me, who took the college entrance exam three times, can succeed, then 80% of the people in the world can succeed."

This bowl of motivational soup had been mocked by many, but the graduate student named Xu Mingxing in front of the screen believed it.

The next day, he went to drop out. His father cursed over the phone, his advisor tried to persuade him to stay, but nothing could stop him.

Later, this episode was recounted as an inspirational story, but Xu Mingxing himself has described the reality of those days.

In the graduate dorm of Renmin University's Mathematics Department, he was either attending classes or lying in bed playing games, having mastered Minesweeper to the highest level. The reason Jack Ma's words struck him was that he simply couldn't bear to look at that dorm room for one more second.

Rewind a bit. In Hongze County, Huaian, northern Jiangsu, an ordinary pair of parents gave their child a not-so-ordinary name: Xu Mingxing.

The meaning was straightforward: they hoped this child would shine like a star in the future.

As a child, he was the kind of "other people's child." He tested his way from Hongze Middle School into the Applied Physics Department at the University of Science and Technology Beijing, graduated with a bachelor's degree, and then tested into the Mathematics Department master's program at Renmin University of China, becoming the only student his advisor took that year. Physics from USTB plus Mathematics from Renmin University—in China in 2006, this was a solid elite script.

After dropping out, he truly entered Beijing. Without the identity of a Renmin University graduate student, without the halo of being a top student from Hongze, he was just an outsider with no degree, no background, and no way back.

Xu Mingxing later repeatedly said one thing: "I have to work harder than others to survive in Beijing."

His first entrepreneurial venture was betting on group buying, partnering to create a small, rudimentary site called Wantuan.com. At the time, it was still a few years before the smoke of the "Hundred Regiments War" officially ignited, but he was crushed before the battle even began. He later described this experience with one word: a complete and utter failure.

After losing everything, he went back to work to save up chips. Xu Mingxing joined Yahoo China to work on search engine technology. This former Silicon Valley giant was already showing signs of decline in China, but he couldn't afford to care about that.

Here, Xu Mingxing completed the most important "talent pickup" of his life: he met Lin Yaocheng. In 2007, the two partnered to found DouDing.com, with him serving as CTO. He was 22 that year.

DouDing.com took off quickly. Launched in January 2008, it reached over 500,000 users in two months. A few years later, that number grew to 40 million, making it one of China's largest C2C document-sharing communities. Xu Mingxing had touched the edge of a trend for the first time.

The cruelest plot twists in China's internet are often hidden in one phrase: Baidu is coming. Baidu Wenku stomped in, and DouDing.com's revenue space was slowly squeezed dry.

Looking at the backend data, Xu Mingxing made a veteran's judgment: retreat. Two failures taught him one thing: you can't dance with the elephants.

If the story ended here, he would be a respectable middle-aged man. But he refused. At the end of 2012, he scraped together a few million and charged into the餐饮 O2O sector.

A few months later, the few million were completely lost. He later admitted: "I made a directional error in judging the market." Translated, that means: the house was gone, the money was gone, and the dream was gone. He was 27 that year. He had dropped out, failed three times, and sold his house.

But he was more unwilling to stop than anyone. Someone who has never won and someone who feels they have never won have the same behavioral pattern: they won't stop. Mai Gang, DouDing.com's angel investor, later used one word to describe his climb from programmer to CTO: an underdog's triumph.

So, on a certain night in 2011, when he was curled up on the sofa watching the American TV show "The Good Wife" and heard someone on screen casually say, "Bitcoin is the future," you have to put all of the above together to understand why he was struck.

It was a small-town youth who had lost three times, lost the 2 million yuan from selling his Beijing house, and always felt on the verge of being spit out by Beijing, encountering on screen a legendary thing that supposedly no one could take away.

The next day, he started researching Bitcoin and, when the price was less than $20, bought a few hundred.

At that moment, he didn't know this was the fourth time he had sat down at the card table, and the first time in his life he had been dealt a truly good hand.

Starting as One of the Big Three

At that time, most trading platforms were simple assemblies of wallets and order systems, lacking even basic user protection mechanisms and matching engines. So, leveraging his previous experience and technical skills as a technical director at DouDing.com, Xu Mingxing founded the OKCoin trading platform in Beijing in 2013.

The name harbored a not-so-subtle ambition: "OK," everything will be OK.

Within just three months of its launch, OKCoin jumped to the top of China's Bitcoin trading volume rankings with its "zero transaction fee" strategy, subsequently securing a Series A funding round of tens of millions of dollars led by Ceyuan Ventures. Furthermore, OKCoin luckily caught a wave of Bitcoin bull market, with trading volume once approaching 1 billion RMB.

The speed was almost too fast to react to.

In the following years, OKCoin gradually grew, becoming one of the "Big Three" trading platforms alongside Huobi and BTCC. During this period, it also did another thing: it mass-produced key figures for the entire crypto circle in the future.

Changpeng Zhao, He Yi, Li Shufei, Chen Xin... these later influential names were all once employees of OKCoin. OKCoin was thus jokingly called the "Whampoa Military Academy of the crypto circle."

But Whampoa producing talent also meant internal tensions were constantly accumulating. In 2014, He Yi poached Changpeng Zhao from a digital wallet provider to serve as technical director. In less than a year, the relationship between Xu Mingxing and Changpeng Zhao had become tense.

Ultimately, in early 2015, Changpeng Zhao chose to leave OKCoin, ending his less-than-one-year tenure as CTO at OK.

Two years later, Changpeng Zhao founded Binance. This split would be repeatedly referenced in the crypto circle for years to come.

From OKEx to OKX

September 4, 2017, is a nightmare difficult for people in the crypto circle to forget.

On this day, the People's Bank of China and six other ministries jointly issued the "Announcement on Preventing Risks from Token Issuance Financing," completely halting ICOs. The business window for fiat-to-cryptocurrency exchange subsequently closed. For trading platforms targeting Chinese users, this was equivalent to having their lifeline cut. BTCC, China's first Bitcoin trading platform, faded out from the scene.

Xu Mingxing's choice was to leave. OKCoin shut down its domestic business, claiming to transform into a blockchain technology development platform; while OKCoin's international station underwent a makeover, upgrading to OKEx, registered overseas, continuing to surf the cryptocurrency market. After completing these maneuvers, the official stance was: Xu Mingxing had "no relationship" with OKEx.

After leaving, OKEx completed a key product leap. In September 2017, the platform launched futures contract trading, becoming one of the earlier trading platforms to offer cryptocurrency derivatives trading. The following year, OKEx launched perpetual swap products, further expanding its derivatives business. These two steps were spot-on—futures and perpetual swaps were the products Chinese-speaking traders most desired at the time.

In 2018, OKEx captured 21% of the global market share in derivatives trading volume. In the Chinese-speaking region, the contract market was almost entirely dominated by them. By trading volume, OKEx, Binance, and Huobi ranked second, third, and fourth globally, respectively. This was OKEx's brightest moment and also the period when Xu Mingxing was most confident.

The rapidly growing data at OKCoin had already left the company's engineers with no time to sleep. While delighted, Xu Mingxing felt uneasy about the sudden massive wealth and immediately redesigned the security mechanisms. The reason was a dream where someone kidnapped him and forced him to hand over Bitcoin. "Now, even if I were kidnapped, they couldn't withdraw the company's Bitcoin. Even if something happened to me, the company's Bitcoin wouldn't be compromised."

But that year was also the year Xu Mingxing faced the most protests. Protesters against OKEx surged towards the Haidian Qunying Technology Park like a tide. There was even an anecdote circulating online: protesters blocking the police station bought steamed buns for Xu Mingxing, who had no money for lunch. Of course, Xu Mingxing strongly denied this, calling it "a dramatized article written by a financial fiction writer hired by a competitor." After 2018, Xu Mingxing began traveling with bodyguards.

By 2019, the fated showdown between Xu Mingxing and Changpeng Zhao officially began.

Binance's perpetual swap products went into full force. Changpeng Zhao's tactics were more aggressive than Xu Mingxing's—lower fees, faster product iteration, and more aggressive marketing. Chinese-speaking contract users began migrating to Binance on a large scale. The derivatives landscape once dominated by OKEx was completely rewritten within a single year.

The feud between the two was not limited to the product level. On Weibo and in communities, the mutual attacks between the two camps dragged on, and the outcome of this war was already written in the data: OKEx's dominant position in the Chinese-speaking contract market was gradually eroded bite by bite.

Pivoting to Wallets

On October 16, 2020, OKEx suddenly issued an announcement.

The announcement was restrained in tone and plain in wording, but it caused an earthquake across the entire crypto circle: "Recently, some private key custodians of the company are cooperating with public security authorities in an investigation and are currently out of contact, resulting in the inability to complete authorization." The mentioned custodian was Xu Mingxing.

There were many versions about the real reason for the "detention," while the official statement remained cryptic. Informed sources revealed that the real reason for Xu Mingxing's detention might be related to OK Group's backdoor listing in Hong Kong the previous year: at that time, a sum of money for buying the shell company was channeled through an underground bank in Shanxi, which was already under police investigation.

The suspension of withdrawals lasted for over a month. On November 20, Xu Mingxing posted on his WeChat Moments: "Currently, judicial authorities have clarified the facts and cleared my name." Immediately afterward, OKEx announced: "The platform's withdrawal function was suspended for a period. The issue has now been resolved, and the relevant personnel have returned to work."

This Shanxi incident was a heavy blow to Xu Mingxing, but also an epiphany.

The core problems of centralized exchanges (CEXs)—centralized private keys, regulatory risks, user assets completely reliant on platform credit—were all laid bare in this incident. For him, it was a signal: the competition of the next era is not in centralized exchanges, but in wallets, on-chain, in the direction of users autonomously controlling their assets.

Thus, OKX Wallet was launched as a core strategic product. OKX Wallet supports multi-chain asset management, integrates with 130+ blockchains and over 10,000 DApps, and also integrates popular Memecoin and NFT markets, allowing seamless DeFi and on-chain interactions from a single wallet.

In January 2022, OKEx officially rebranded as OKX. This was not just a brand upgrade but a declaration of a systematic strategic shift. From a trading platform to a multi-chain ecosystem platform, from centralized custody to supporting user self-custody, OKX attempted to redefine itself as an infrastructure gateway to the crypto world.

At a time when several major wallets monopolized the market with first-mover advantage but offered poor user experience, OKX Wallet was indeed the wallet with the best experience at that time, which was also one of OKX's brightest moments. Taking advantage of the rare market trend in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the community had a very positive perception of the OKX wallet experience—easier to use, lower barriers to entry, more convenient mobile usage, with high praise for the OKX wallet on social media and in reviews. So good that even He Yi later acknowledged it.

Unfortunately, fate played a trick. The hacker who stole $1.5 billion from Bybit, committing the largest theft in human history, used OKX Wallet's routing when laundering the funds. Regulatory authorities required the OKX wallet to suspend operations, which gave other wallets time. The first-mover advantage was essentially gone.

US Listing

In 2024, OKX faced joint pursuit by the US Department of Justice and the CFTC, ultimately reaching a settlement in early 2025 by paying over $500 million in fines, admitting to violations, and exiting illegal business activities.

A "ticket" costing over $500 million sounds expensive, but it was exceptionally cost-effective compared to Binance's $4 billion fine.

Thereafter, OKX restructured, registered as a legal MSB in the US, established a headquarters in California, launched a compliant spot trading platform and Web3 wallet, emphasizing the construction of compliance systems like KYC and AML.

Xu Mingxing described this as "a blank sheet of paper": starting over in the US, building thoughtfully, engaging in constructive interactions with regulators and relevant institutions.

The next part of the story is known to all. In March 2026, this layout received its most symbolic endorsement to date.

OKX secured a minority equity investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, with this round valuing OKX at $25 billion. ICE will gain a board seat at OKX and jointly launch US-regulated crypto futures products with OKX; OKX will become a distributor for ICE's US futures market and the NYSE's tokenized stock market, reaching over 120 million users globally.

Complete compliance—there could be no more ideal outcome.

The growth path of Xu Mingxing and OKX certainly had many episodes, but it remains a good story.

It is still the story of a Chinese entrepreneur, just 41 years old this year, who founded the company in 2013, underwent three brand transformations, grew so large that it faced regulation from multiple countries, had to pay a $500 million fine to the US Department of Justice, and ultimately rang the bell in the US—a good story.