加密交易所的核心权力，正被OKX亲手交出去

Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Wenser (@wenser 2010 )

The divide between old and new investment markets is accelerating: on one side, U.S. stocks, Korean indices, and Japan's Nikkei are surging simultaneously, with numerous popular sectors and individual stocks hitting new highs; on the other side, mainstream cryptocurrencies are oscillating downwards, with BTC spot trading volume down over 80% since October last year.

Despair spreads among crypto investors as capital flees; meanwhile, builders persistently seek new answers—Hyperliquid, initially positioned as a Perp DEX, has expanded its ecosystem to traditional financial assets, with RWA asset trading volume experiencing exponential growth; prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have begun warming up for the World Cup, posting record monthly trading volumes. These are the "only two bright spots" in the crypto market, narratives that have passed initial tests.

What about CEXs, the industry's liquidity centers? Leading players are actively connecting with traditional financial markets and expanding crypto market boundaries. This includes introducing RWA asset trading channels and adding prediction market gateways. The common goal of these initiatives is to address industry-wide issues such as fragmented liquidity, disjointed user experiences, and low capital efficiency in the crypto market.

Listing new assets and adding gateways are essential parts of industry development, but some seek alternative paths to forge a new way forward. Recently, OKX's launch of Exchange OS presents a new possibility: activating the industry ecosystem by redefining the "right to create markets."

As Crypto Narratives Dry Up, CEXs Proactively Adapt

Let's detail several structural challenges currently facing the crypto market:

First, the crypto market has run out of new stories. Narratives from previous cycles—L1 blockchains, NFTs, DAOs—have been successively disproven. DeFi incidents are frequent, the BTC ecosystem has fallen quiet, Meme coins and AI Agent concept coins are languishing. The Desci concept, the x402 payment protocol, and even the recent Uniswap V4 Hook ecosystem failed to generate sustainable momentum.

Second, liquidity fragmentation in the crypto market. Users are trapped in closed DApps and protocol silos, helpless against the complex and high friction costs between different chains, platforms, applications, and protocols.

Third, the crypto market's "self-contained ecosystem." Although BTC ETFs and DAT have opened channels between crypto and traditional finance, both the capital capacity and the high risk, high volatility nature of crypto assets further hinder efficient, convenient exchange and circulation. The crypto market is increasingly trapped in an awkward state of industry insiders talking to themselves.

Over the past decade-plus, the crypto industry achieved decentralized value transfer through Bitcoin, decentralized asset issuance through Ethereum, and decentralized financial liquidity through AMM protocols. But old answers clearly cannot be directly applied to new stages.

Consequently, new industry models are emerging: on-chain Perp DEXs like Hyperliquid and Aster have pushed the ceiling for derivative cross-chain assets; Polymarket and Kalshi have scaled the social act of "prediction" into financial pricing systems; RWA platforms like Ondo go a step further by packaging traditional on-chain assets into derivative products.

Facing the impact of these new markets, various industry players have made different choices: Binance recently launched "Event Rush"; Bitget introduced its self-developed RWA protocol product, Reality, directly connecting to U.S. stock liquidity with dividend support; Bybit listed perpetual contracts like CSCO and RKLB, and launched various airdrop campaigns. But while most platforms focus on listing more RWAs (including pre-market U.S. stocks) to maintain traffic, OKX has taken a series of markedly different actions. Judging by its product release cadence in recent months, its role has gradually evolved from a singular "product builder" to a "system explorer":

1. Agent Trade Kit：Aims to solve the "machine trading" problem of the AI era, allowing users to connect AI Agents to on-chain execution systems via a native AI trading suite.

2. Agent Payments Protocol： Aims to define a chain-agnostic payment standard for AI Agents, freeing crypto asset flow from complex wallet operations, scaling AI Agent payments into business processes, and supporting multiple payment modes.

3. Exchange OS： An open trading protocol built on X Layer, enabling the "protocolization" of capabilities like matching, clearing, settlement, and unified accounts. It supports user-deployed markets for spot, perpetual contracts, and predictions, covering both CEX assets and Web3 on-chain markets.

If Agent Trade Kit represents an effort at the infrastructure and tooling level, the launches of the Agent Payments Protocol and Exchange OS reveal OKX's greater ambition. As a top-tier exchange, instead of a "single-point breakthrough" at the asset level, OKX has targeted a "holistic strategy" integrating tactics and strategy. The launch of Exchange OS, in particular, signifies the CEX bypassing the old question of "which assets to list," instead contemplating the critical proposition: "Who is the creator of new markets?"

OKX is opening up the core "trading black box" of a crypto exchange, lowering it to the protocol layer, and nudging the crypto industry from a centralized structure back towards an active state of decentralized order.

Leveraging the protocol-layer capabilities of Exchange OS, the vision of on-chain equalization becomes achievable, further unleashing users' "right to create markets." Quant teams could open perpetual markets based on arbitrage spreads; RWA institutions could package assets like stocks, private fund shares, or pre-IPO equity into on-chain assets; individual users could launch verifiable social events as prediction market contracts.

Simultaneously, cross-market unified accounts will integrate fragmented liquidity, improving capital efficiency. In terms of fund security and mechanism guarantees, "code-level collateral" ensures funds are locked in protocol contracts, preventing market creators from installing backdoors or self-dealing. The design where OKX's proprietary market and external markets follow the same protocol rules sets a precedent for on-chain equalization.

OKX CEO Star also expressed great hope for the Exchange OS vision, stating: "The next chapter of on-chain finance shouldn't be written by any single platform. It should be written by everyone who wants to build a market."

New Industry Coordinates: The "Crypto App Store" Takes Shape

In the past, powers over asset types, varieties, and pricing were held by CEX platforms. Users and institutions could only abide by platform rules, unable to provide feedback or push for changes. Now, with the deep coupling of TradFi, CeFi, and DeFi assets, asset types and issuance models are no longer scarce resources. The true barrier is whether the "right to create markets" can be distributed to various participants.

Now, theoretically, any verifiable event can be transformed into an independent event market via the Exchange OS protocol, systematically reshaping financial participation barriers and market pricing power.

Just as iOS activated the vibrant App Store developer ecosystem, Exchange OS's underlying trading operating system holds the potential to unlock the creativity of quant teams, RWA institutions, developers, and even ordinary individual users. It solves not just the "who creates the market" problem, but is a crucial step towards further expanding the boundaries of the crypto market and breaking through the operational ceiling of past CEX platforms.

Based on this transformation, the production relations of the crypto market will also be reshaped.

From "Investment for All" to "Production for All"

The main evolutionary path of the crypto market is a leap from changes in productive forces to changes in production relations.

In the industry's early days, blockchain technology solved the productive force issue of "How to Launch a Token."

In the second phase, various crypto ETFs emerged, transforming cryptocurrencies into intermediary currencies bridging "traditional financial assets." Productive forces were further unleashed, but production relations regressed from the decentralized era back to a stage controlled by centralized institutions.

In the third phase, the emergence of U.S. stock assets, commodities, and event contracts enriched asset types and investment options. However, the problem the crypto industry needed to solve shifted to "how to efficiently establish market organizational forms."

Against this backdrop, market participants—including retail traders, CEX platform users, and crypto investors—inevitably undergo a "role upgrade." They need to evolve from "traders" passively accepting and investing in platform assets, to "producers" defining market rules and innovating market mechanisms. Composite asset markets like prediction markets, RWA assets, and pre-market U.S. stocks will rapidly emerge through various "market-oriented APIs."

However, opportunities come with challenges. OKX's attempt to expand the crypto industry's boundaries and explore the future of on-chain finance inevitably faces a series of tests. For the Exchange OS protocol and OKX's entire product suite to become the "App Store of the crypto world," several bottlenecks must be overcome:

● First, the liquidity challenge. In the early market ecosystem, can the activation of liquidity create synergistic effects, building an economic loop based on spontaneous trading demand within the ecosystem?

● Second, the performance ceiling. Despite technical foundations like millisecond matching latency, unified settlement, and throughput up to 300,000 TPS, how can the X Layer ecosystem sustainably support a massive number of "financial applications" and remain stable?

● Third, the commercial revenue loop. Creating an internal economic loop similar to "Apple App Store - Apple Apps - Apple Tax" is difficult. Can the Exchange OS ecosystem form an effective feedback mechanism akin to "Hyperliquid - HLP Vault - HYPE Buyback - HYPE Price Support"?

Of course, the existence of these challenges validates the necessity of industry development. Many problems often find new solutions precisely by confronting challenges head-on. Even if there are short-term setbacks, the firm steps taken in the right direction are commendable. Based on OKX's established brand, market position, technical strength, and product capabilities, the long-term vision of a "market for everything" is undoubtedly promising.

A Courageous Industry Experiment, A Ticket to a New Era

As industry participants with massive user bases, the various attempts by leading platforms like OKX, in today's market environment, seem somewhat "thankless"—succeed, and no praise follows, it's considered just business; fail, and they face ridicule and criticism. The cold remarks about intra-industry competition can also chill the spirits of innovators.

Narratives always fade, but some people must walk a different path, taking on the responsibility of "driving the industry forward" outside the spotlight, exploring, experimenting, and taking risks without expecting returns.

I believe the future of the crypto space lies far beyond how many new tokens are listed. It hinges on how many barriers to financial investment it flattens, how many efficient, fair, and open trading markets it creates. The future direction industry players should explore is not just chasing the next hotspot or grabbing headlines, but building a foundational trading operating system that accommodates asset flow and enables financial autonomy.

Exchange OS and other industry experiments represent a forward-looking attempt to transform production relations in the crypto world. In a sense, it's a ticket to the era of "market for everything," and a bold return to the core crypto ethos of "decentralization, openness, and libertarianism."

Whoever defines the new trading coordinate system will win the future dominance of the crypto market, and even global finance.