The Mild Mild West, Crypto's Future State - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Let's just start by talking about those narratives. I'm curious how you how you think about the next several months and next couple years and what those narratives could look like. Uh look, I think the convergence of AI and crypto is going to, you know, be top of mind for everyone. But I think the the key behavior I see that's a bit troubling is we have this like sort of addictive cycle of speculative tokens and creation of speculative tokens and listing. I think for us at least you know when we're looking at our products and our roadmap there's a lot of focus on how do we get the industry all of us away from some of that now naturally some of that needs to exist in our industry to accelerate development but when you look at our products and services for a you know core exchange business you'll notice that we're actually diversifying at a pretty fast pace because we think we have a responsibility to get people away from that addictive cycle and more towards like real world utility.

Okay. And uh how do you balance this idea that you want to get away from speculation and we want to move away from financialization, but you're also the CMO of one of the largest exchanges in the world where you make money from speculation. Uh I think you know if you look back like 5 years ago, we definitely were just an exchange and I think in 2022 we launched our web 3 wallet. It was really a big question mark for most people in the industry. They they looked at us and said, "Well, you really have a core exchange business.

Why would you even go into web 3 which is really hard to monetize and nobody's really figured out how to monetize other than maybe charge transactional fees? Uh what we felt was inherently it was really important for us to diversify and get out of that uh core business because how many tokens can you eventually create and list and you know have launchpads for and eventually the retail demand we feel is going to run out is going to dry out. So it's really important give people the choice and we did that with our web 3 wallet. It's a purely self-custody wallet. It grew about 20x over the last two three years.

I believe it's the largest crypto wallet today in our industry. It's got a 130 plus chains. And the key thing that we try to solve there is I think you and I have spoken about this. When you look at your device 3 years ago during the DeFi wave u you found yourself having three to five maybe six different wallet apps. And we noticed that fragmentation and what we did was consolidated it into one wallet app strategy and that way you don't have to bridge.

You've got a integration of 130 plus chains and it really brings people together to access everything in one platform. So again you know I think the the point of our road map is that we continue to get away from just the core centralized exchange business. take us into the maybe the room like the executive meetings and stuff when you're saying because you're basically what you're doing is you're maybe sacrificing some revenue in the short term to be the gateway to to open up everyone in this room to the consumer opportunities of crypto. How do you guys like make that balance? How do you think about that?

I think it's a really tough decision because when you think about it, you've got this huge opportunity to capture revenue, capture user growth and this industry is extremely extremely competitive. So you don't want to lose out on that growth. But on the other side, maybe we were slow in growing our exchange for the right reasons. When you look at our self-custody or our decentralized products, they've actually grown quite exponentially. Maybe we'll figure out how to monetize it one day, but you know, people really focus on trading volume.

And fast forward 5 years from now, I just don't think that's going to be the metric that we hold oursel accountable for. Yeah. So when you look at the consumer apps like something like a poly market or something about uh stable coins and payments will you guys start to own those applications? Will you build them in house? Will you be the will you be the gateway to those things?

I think our core core purpose is to always be the ultimate gateway the central point where people can discover and access these applications including DAPs. I think we have a large really really large DAP ecosystem now in a search engine. So for us, you know, would OKX go and build its own stable coin network? Probably not. That's not how we view the world.

We see that as a conflict of interest for us at least as a business. I think we're going to focus on real world applications. I know some of the speakers were talking about, well, where do the next, you know, billion people come from? And I think at OKX, our focus is how do we get away from the core exchange business, go into decentralized products, go into payment products, work with companies like Mastercard and Stripe, and bring a billion people with real world utility. Maybe let me pivot a little bit into more of a controversial sensitive topic, which is kind of the underbelly of the industry.

So, as the CMO of one of the largest exchanges in the world, I think you're probably privy to information that not all of us in the room are privy to. Maybe I don't know how much you can share, but I'd love to hear just what's going on in kind of the underbelly of the industry. What are some of the activity maybe at the maybe at other exchanges, maybe it's just the rest of the industry that starts to kind of concern you? I don't know how much you can share, but uh gosh uh well, look, I think it's natural everyone here, our industry is very competitive. I think the underbelly I would probably point to is you can compete with each other.

There's probably developers here competing with each other, you know, on networks, but there's a way to compete. I think the right way to compete is to compete on technology, not by throwing rocks at your competitors and what have you. Uh I think that's very important. And that's what we typically see is when others in our industry will see OKX achieve big milestones um licenses, banking relationships, what have you. I think rather than out competing us, we see some, you know, really nefarious behavior where um they will try to hurt us.

And I don't think that's good. And I'm not suggesting every, you know, company in our category does it. I think you look at a company like Coinbase, very clean, their founders grade, and you know, they play really well with all of us. uh but I can't say that for everyone else and I I hope people you know have their eyes wide open at that type of behavior. So the so the message maybe is compete on product don't compete on regulatory capture backdoor dealings.

Well think about like the chip manufacturing industry or software industry you know there were these like dirty competitive games. Yeah. Who are the winners? You know you can kind of clearly see the people who focused on tech and ultimately competed on tech are the ultimate winners. I think that's what OKX is going to do.

We don't get distracted by this. It's it's certainly distracting at, you know, at points, but we have confidence. I think we're a technology first company. The proof is in the pudding. And I think that's how we're going to compete and we're hoping that the other industry players would compete that way.

Now, you ask me about the underbelly. I think the one other thing I would call out is, you know, as a CMO, I receive nine out of 10 inquiries that I get from journalists are typically about like hysterical investigative like gossip column stuff. And I wish it wasn't that way, you know, and I'm sure not every journalist thinks that way, but I think the metrics for journalism are are very different. It's really optimized towards clicks and eyeballs versus quality editorial. I I wish I could tell you that all the good stuff OKX does, I wish, you know, nine out of 10 journalists were reaching out to inquire about that, but it's typically not that.

It's mostly about like, you know, gossip stuff or it's about like speculation on whether we were getting investigated or somebody else is getting investig and it doesn't build up the industry. It's sort of like it's a conflict because, you know, even the journalists are are in our industry. they should be they should be supporting the industry and often times it doesn't feel that way. You mentioned the you mentioned journalists, you mentioned other other exchanges. What what's the hardest thing that you deal with on a day-to-day basis?

I think the hardest thing for us is again compromising on short-term user growth. So when there are, you know, new tokens that are highly speculative, there's a big community, there's a lot of energy, how do you make the tough decision of not giving community what they're demanding? Cuz these communities, what will happen is, you know, you'll go on X and they'll demand you to list these things. So there comes a point where you you kind of have to list it. But I think that's the key challenge is how do we sort of continue to diversify, get away from that stuff and really focus on applications.

You look at OKX Pay, that's our take at bringing self-custody into a more practical mode where you actually don't let get to, you know, there's not a high probability of you losing your keys and losing your crypto. So, I think that's that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to shift even our internal culture to a place where we just don't have that dependency on the core exchange business. Will that start to show up in the product decisions and go to market decisions that you guys make? For example, uh one way that you could make a lot of money really quickly is listing every new token.

You could be the first to list every token. You're going to make more money than the other exchanges. You can make a conscious decision to pull back on that, right? Which would be more in line with the ethos that you're talking about, but you're going to sacrifice revenue. Well, look, if you look at our exchange today, I can confidently say we're two to three years ahead of every other platform in terms of compliance and regulations.

We're licensed. We're licensed by, you know, the Singapore regulator in UAE. We're we've got a complete license with banking partnerships. That happens because regulators have confidence in our compliance controls and that will continue to limit us and others in how we list tokens and how we think about tokens. So I think it's really important 5 years from now I don't think the industry will look like what it looks like today.

Yeah. um you just ran the whole redes I think you were in charge of the whole redesign um for the the entire UI UX of the OKX wallet. What was that process like? And maybe differently asked. I heard someone talking yesterday about nobody in crypto knows how to find product market fit right there.

No, the product people really aren't in the industry yet. Um I'm curious how you guys thought about finding product market fit for this. How you went about this full full redesign. I I think the the philosophy for us is consensus kills all great ideas. It's unfortunate, but that's just the way it works and we've learned from that.

So I think for the redesign in particular, what we said is look, we're going to identify three people at the company. We're going to create a small squad team. We're going to move fast, no surveys. We use what we have, the data we have, and what we learn from our customers and execute really fast so we can put something out there and get recall. So I think the biggest learning from that redesign has been is one it's really important that if we're going to make crypto part of our daily lives that design user experience ultimately is prioritized and number two execute in small teams.

You actually don't need a large team to do great things. Yeah. Um maybe as we think about wrapping this up you guys just had this huge reveal. I mean this I' I'd like to hear why this fireside chat is called Mild Mild West, right? And for those who don't know, you had a big premiere of your film.

Um, and I've gotten to know you over the years and you've been spending a lot of time and energy on this film. Um, I think let's talk about the film. I'd love to hear why you spend so much energy on it. I think we wanted to change the narrative of the crypto industry. And I think when you talk to your friends and family members who are not in crypto, they often, you know, you'll hear, "Oh, crypto is the wild wild west."

And I think it becomes a point where that becomes annoying. And, you know, that's not always the truth. There's a lot of optimism in this room. There are a lot of great developers building great stuff. So in order for us to change the public opinion, we felt we needed to create a content piece that would actually counter that narrative.

And that narrative can then not just be used externally with with all of you guys, but also the way we um change our thinking. Now you can imagine when we onboard new people into our company, we have 5,000 employees globally. They get to watch this piece of creative. They know where our heads are at and where our character is that we don't want to stand for this addictive cycle of speculation or you know scammers, snipers, rug pullers. We just want to get away from that.

And I think this content piece, this short film is a nod to how do we all come together, own and govern the narrative and don't let the scammers identify who we are and what we stand for. Amazing. Yeah, I think we all resonate with that. Can we can we watch the film? Well, we can watch the trailer.

I think we might have enough time for the cool. Yes. Let's play the trailer then. Thank you folks. Yeah, appreciate it.

[Music] Smells like gold. Let me tell you a little story. I'm tire this. Okay. Where's the gold?

Enough. No gold. You're the only one who's not having fun. It's a fair trade. Better be good.