Due to a line in Zhao Changpeng's (CZ) autobiography that said "report Li Lin," Xu Mingxing (Star) and Zhao Changpeng have once again engaged in a new round of online battle on social media, even placing a $1 billion bet.

In the cryptocurrency industry, entrepreneurs who have made it this far have life stories worth reading. Despite the various interpretations of Xu Mingxing's many actions on the internet, he has a story just as compelling as CZ's. While one article cannot fully cover Xu Mingxing's entire "OK life," we also hope to let more readers understand his entrepreneurial story.

Dropping Out of School to Start a Business

On a night in 2006, in a graduate student dorm at Renmin University of China, the TV was on.

Jack Ma, on the stage of "Win in China," shouted vigorously, "A person like me who failed the college entrance exam three times can still succeed, and 80% of the world can succeed."

While many people mocked this motivational speech, the graduate student named Xu Mingxing in front of the screen believed it.

The next day, he went to withdraw from school. Despite his father's scolding over the phone and his advisor's attempts to persuade him, he wasn't stopped.

Later, this period was turned into an inspirational story, but Xu Mingxing himself has talked about the true nature of those days.

In the graduate student dormitory of Renmin University, he either attended classes or lay on his bed playing games, reaching the highest level in Minesweeper. The reason why Jack Ma's words hit him so hard was that he couldn't stand to look at that dorm room for another minute.

Going back a bit. In Hongze County, northern Jiangsu, a pair of ordinary parents gave their child an unusual name: Xu Mingxing.

Straightforwardly, they hoped this child would shine like a star in the future.

When he was young, he was the kind of "other people's child." From Hongze Middle School, he made his way to Beijing University of Science and Technology's Applied Physics program, graduated from undergraduate, then went on to Renmin University of China's Mathematics master's program, where he was the only child from his advisor's group. A script of an elite from BUST plus math from Renmin, placed in China in 2006, was a solid elite storyline.

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

Xu Mingxing later repeatedly said, "I must work harder than others to survive in Beijing."

For his first venture, he focused on group buying and co-founded a small, rundown site called Wanto.com. At the time, it was still a few years before the "Battle of a Hundred Groups" officially ignited, but he didn't even last until the battle began before being beaten. He later described this experience with just one word: a complete failure.

When he ran out of money, he went back to work to save up chips. Xu Mingxing joined Yahoo China to work on search engine technology. The former Silicon Valley leader had already shown signs of decline in China, but he didn't care about that.

Here, Xu Mingxing completed the most important "recruitment" of his life: he met Lin Yaocheng. In 2007, the two teamed up to found Docin.com, with him as the CTO at the age of 22.

Docin.com took off quickly. Launched in January 2008, the platform attracted over 500,000 users in two months. Over the years, this number grew to 40 million, making it one of China's largest C2C document-sharing communities. Xu Mingxing felt the wind of opportunity for the first time.

In Chinese internet, the cruelest twist often lies in one sentence: Baidu has entered the chat. When Baidu Wenku entered the scene, Docin.com's revenue potential was slowly squeezed dry.

Looking at the backend data, Xu Mingxing made a veteran's decision: retreat. Two previous failures taught him one thing - he couldn't dance with the elephant.

If the story ended here, he would have been a decent middle-aged man. But he chose otherwise. At the end of 2012, he scraped together a few million and plunged into the food & beverage O2O sector.

However, in just a few months, he lost those millions. He later admitted, "I made a directional misjudgment about the market." In other words, he lost his house, his money, and his dream. That year, he was 27. He dropped out of school, failed three times, and sold his house.

But he was more unwilling to stop than anyone else. The behavior patterns of someone who has never won and someone who always feels like they haven't won are the same - they never stop. Docin.com's angel investor Mai Gang later used a term to describe his journey from a programmer to CTO: a counterattack.

So, on a night in 2011, when he was lounging on the couch watching the American TV series "The Good Wife," and heard someone on screen casually say, "Bitcoin is the future," you have to put everything together to understand why he was struck by it.

It was the moment when a young man from a small town who had lost three times, sold his house in Beijing for a loss of 2 million, and always felt like he was about to be spit out by Beijing, saw something on the screen that no one could take away.

The next day, he started researching Bitcoin and bought hundreds of them when the price was under $20.

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

The Game Starts with One of the Three Elements

At that time, most trading platforms were nothing more than a simple combination of a wallet and order system, lacking even basic user protection mechanisms and matching engines. So, with his technical knowledge and experience as the former CTO of Douguo.com, Xu Mingxing founded the OKCoin exchange platform in Beijing in 2013.

There was a not-so-subtle ambition hidden in this name: "OK," everything will be OK.

Just three months after its launch, OKCoin rose to the top of China's Bitcoin trading volume rankings with a "zero fee" strategy, followed by a multimillion-dollar Series A funding round led by Venture | ZhenFund. In addition, OKCoin also luckily caught the wave of a Bitcoin bull market, with transaction volume once approaching nearly 1 billion RMB.

The speed was so fast that it was almost too fast to react.

Over the next few years, OKCoin gradually grew to become one of the "three major" exchanges alongside Huobi and BTCC. During this time, it also did something else: mass-produced key figures in the future of the entire industry.

Zhao Changpeng, He Yi, Li Shufei, Chen Xin... These names that later became legendary figures were all former OKCoin employees. OKCoin was thus jokingly referred to as the "Whampoa Military Academy of the Coin Circle."

However, the Whampoa Military Academy may produce talent, but it also means that internal tensions are always accumulating. In 2014, He Yi poached Zhao Changpeng from a digital wallet provider to serve as the CTO. In less than a year, the relationship between Xu Mingxing and Zhao Changpeng had become extremely tense.

Eventually, in early 2015, Zhao Changpeng chose to leave OKCoin, ending his CTO career at OK in less than a year.

Two years later, Zhao Changpeng founded Binance. This split would later be repeatedly referenced in the industry.

From OKEx to OKX

September 4, 2017, was a nightmare that people in the industry will never forget.

On this day, the People's Bank of China and six other ministries jointly issued the "Notice on the Prevention of Risks Related to Token Issuance and Financing," completely halting ICOs and closing the fiat-to-cryptocurrency business window. For exchanges catering to Chinese users, this was akin to having their lifeblood cut off. BTCC, China's first Bitcoin exchange, sadly exited the market.

Xu Mingxing's choice was to leave. OKCoin ceased its domestic operations, claiming to transition into a blockchain technology development platform. Meanwhile, the OKCoin international platform underwent a transformation, rebranding to OKEx, registering overseas, and continuing to navigate the cryptocurrency market. After all these changes, the official stance was that Xu Mingxing had "no relationship whatsoever" with OKEx.

After leaving, OKEx completed a key product leap. In September 2017, the platform launched futures contract trading, becoming one of the early exchanges to offer cryptocurrency derivatives trading. The following year, OKEx launched perpetual contract products, further expanding its derivatives business. These two steps — futures and perpetual contracts — were precisely what Chinese-speaking traders were most eager for at the time.

In 2018, OKEx's derivatives trading volume captured a 21% share of the global market. In the Chinese-speaking region, the futures market was almost completely dominated by them. In terms of trading volume, OKEx, Binance, and Huobi ranked second, third, and fourth globally, respectively. This was OKEx's shining moment, and Xu Mingxing's most confident period.

The rapidly growing data of OKcoin had already left the company's engineers with no time to sleep. While delighted, Xu Mingxing also felt uneasy about the sudden huge wealth, prompting him to immediately redesign the security mechanism. The reason was that he dreamt of being kidnapped and forced to hand over the bitcoins. "Even if I were kidnapped now, they can't access the company's bitcoins. Even in case of my accident, the company's bitcoins would not be at risk."

However, that year was also the year Xu Mingxing faced the most instances of rights protection. Protesters against OKex surged towards the Haidian Qunying Technology Park, and there was even a "good story" circulating online: the protesters who had gathered at the police station bought buns for Xu Mingxing, who had no money to buy lunch. Of course, Xu Mingxing strongly denied this, calling it a "dramatized article written by a business competitor-hired financial novelist." After 2018, Xu Mingxing began to travel with bodyguards.

Fast forward to 2019, Xu Mingxing's destined duel with Zhao Changpeng began.

Binance's perpetual contract product made a full-fledged effort. Zhao Changpeng's strategy was more aggressive than Xu Mingxing's — lower fees, faster product iteration, and more aggressive marketing. The contract users in the Chinese-speaking region began to massively migrate to Binance. The derivatives landscape once dominated by OKEx was completely rewritten within a short year.

The conflict between the two was not limited to the product level. On Weibo and in communities, the ongoing back-and-forth between the two camps lasted a long time, and the outcome of this war was already written in the data: OKEx's dominance in the Chinese contract market was slowly eroded.

Transition to Wallets

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

The announcement was restrained in tone and bland in wording but triggered an earthquake in the entire crypto community: "Recently, some of the company's private key holders are assisting in a public security bureau investigation, and the authorization cannot be completed as they are currently unavailable." The person mentioned as the key holder was Xu Mingxing.

The withdrawal suspension lasted for a full month. On November 20, Xu Mingxing posted on his Moments: "Currently, the judicial authorities have established the facts and cleared my name." Subsequently, OKEx announced: "The platform's withdrawal function has been suspended for some time. The issue has now been resolved, and relevant personnel have returned to their positions."

The Shanxi incident was a severe blow to Xu Mingxing, but also a moment of enlightenment.

The core issues of centralized exchanges: centralization of private keys, regulatory risks, user assets fully relying on the platform’s credibility, were all thoroughly exposed in this incident. To him, this was a signal: the next era's competition is not on centralized exchanges but on wallets, on-chain, in the direction where users have autonomous control of their assets.

Therefore, OKX Wallet was launched as a core strategic product. OKX Wallet supports multi-chain asset management, integrates with 130+ blockchains and 10,000+ Dapps, and also integrates with popular Memecoin and NFT markets, allowing a single wallet to seamlessly achieve DeFi and on-chain interactions.

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

During the time when the major wallets monopolized the market due to their first-mover advantage but had extremely poor user experience, OKX Wallet was indeed the best wallet experience at that time, marking one of OKX's brightest moments. Taking advantage of the rare bull market in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the community had a very positive experience with the OKX Wallet, finding it easier to use, with lower entry barriers, convenient mobile usage, and receiving high praise on social media and reviews for the OKX Wallet. It was so good that even He Yi acknowledged it.

Unfortunately, fate had its way, with the hacker stealing $1.5 billion from Bybit, committing the largest hack in human history and using the OKX Wallet's routing when laundering the funds. Regulatory authorities demanded the suspension of the OKX Wallet, giving other wallets an opportunity. The first-mover advantage essentially disappeared.

US Listing

In 2024, OKX faced joint accountability from the US Department of Justice and CFTC, eventually reaching a settlement in early 2025 by paying over $500 million in fines, admitting to regulatory violations, and exiting illegal operations.

A "ticket" as high as $500 million may sound expensive, but compared to Binance's $4 billion fine, it seems quite reasonable.

Subsequently, OKX underwent a major restructuring, registered as a legal MSB in the United States, established its headquarters in California, and launched a compliant version of its spot trading platform and Web3 wallet, emphasizing compliance system development such as KYC and AML.

Xu Mingxing described this as a "blank slate": restarting in the United States, thoughtfully constructing its operations, and engaging in constructive interactions with regulatory and related agencies.

The rest, as they say, is history. In March 2026, this strategic move 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, valuing OKX at $25 billion. ICE gained a board seat in OKX and jointly launched regulated crypto futures products in the United States. OKX, in turn, became a distributor for ICE's U.S. futures market and NYSE tokenized stock market, reaching over 1.2 billion users worldwide.
Full compliance—there couldn't have been a more ideal outcome.

Xu Mingxing and OKX's journey of growth certainly had its share of twists and turns, but it remains a compelling story.

Still a 41-year-old Chinese entrepreneur, he founded the company in 2013, underwent three rebrandings, expanded operations to be regulated by multiple countries, had to pay a $500 million fine to the U.S. Department of Justice, and eventually had a success story to tell in the United States.

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