Because of a line "report Li Lin" in Zhao Changpeng (CZ)'s autobiography, Xu Mingxing (Star) and Zhao Changpeng started a new round of verbal warfare on social media, even making a $1 billion bet.
In the cryptocurrency industry, the entrepreneurs who have made it this far all have compelling life stories. Even though internet people have various interpretations of Xu Mingxing's operations, he has an equally fascinating story that is on par with CZ's. Of course, one article cannot cover the entire "OK life," but we hope to let more readers learn about his entrepreneurial journey.

Dropping Out to Start a Business

One night in 2006, in the graduate dormitory of Renmin University of China, the TV was on.

Jack Ma energetically shouted that line on the stage of "Win in China": "Someone like me who failed the college entrance exam three times can succeed, 80% of the people in the world can succeed."

This bowl of chicken soup was laughed at by many, but the graduate student named Xu Mingxing believed it.

The next day, he went to withdraw from school. His father scolded on the phone, and his advisor tried to persuade him, but could not stop him.

Later, this part became an inspirational segment, but Xu Mingxing himself has talked about the real situation of those days.

In the dormitory of the Mathematics Department at Renmin University, he either attended classes or lay on the bed playing games, reaching the highest level in Minesweeper. Jack Ma's words struck him because he really couldn't stand to look at that dorm room any longer.

Let's rewind a bit. In Hongze County, Huai'an, Jiangsu, an ordinary pair of parents named their child an unusual name: Xu Mingxing.

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

As a child, he was the kind of "other people's kid." He got into Beijing University of Science and Technology's applied physics department from Hongze High School, graduated with a bachelor's degree, and then got into the master's program of Renmin University’s mathematics department, still the only outstanding student from his advisor’s cohort. Physics from BUST and Mathematics from Renmin University were a solid elite script in China in 2006.

After dropping out, he truly entered Beijing. Without the identity of a graduate student from Renmin University, and without the halo of being an excellent student from Hongze, he was just an outsider without a degree, background, or way out.

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

In his first entrepreneurial venture, he bet on group buying, co-founding a small site called Wantuan.com. At that time, it was still a few years away from the official outbreak of the group buying war, but he didn’t even last until it started and was shut down. He later described this experience with just one word: complete failure.

Having lost everything, he went back to work to save up. Xu Mingxing joined Yahoo China to work on search engine technology. This once Silicon Valley giant had already shown signs of decline in China, but he didn't care about that.

Here, Xu Mingxing had the most important "pickup" of his life: he met Lin Yaocheng. In 2007, the two co-founded Douyin.com, and he became the CTO at the age of 22.

Douyin.com took off quickly. Launched in January 2008, it reached over 500,000 users within two months. A few years later, this number grew to 40 million, becoming one of China's largest C2C document sharing communities. For the first time, Xu Mingxing touched the edge of the windfall.

The most brutal narrative in China's internet often hides in one line: Baidu arrived. When Baidu Wenku stepped in, Douyin.com's revenue space was gradually squeezed dry.

Xu Mingxing looked at the backend data and made a veteran's judgment: withdraw. Two failures taught him one thing: do not dance with elephants.

If the story ended here, he would be a respectable middle-aged man. But he didn't want that. At the end of 2012, he gathered several million and jumped into the restaurant O2O sector.

Months later, he lost millions. He later admitted: "I made a directional judgment error about the market." Translated, it means he lost his house, lost his money, and lost his dream. That year, he was 27 years old. He had dropped out, failed three times, and sold his house.

But he was unwilling to stop. A person who had never won and a person who always felt he hadn’t won share the same behavior pattern; neither will stop. Douyin.com's angel investor, Mai Gang, later described his ascension from programmer to CTO as: a reversal.

So when on a certain night in 2011, he curled up on the sofa watching the American drama "The Good Wife" and heard a character casually utter "Bitcoin is the future," you must piece all this together to understand why he was struck.

That was a young man from a small town who had lost three times, sold his Beijing house, and had lost 2 million, feeling like he was about to be expelled from Beijing, encountering something on the screen that no one could take away.

The next day, he began studying Bitcoin, buying hundreds when the price was less than $20.

At that moment, he did not know that this was the fourth time he sat at the poker table and also the first time in his life to touch a real winning hand.

Starting with One of the Three Big Ones

Most trading platforms at that time were just simple combinations of wallets and order systems, not even talking about basic user protection mechanisms and matching engines. So, armed with the technology and experience from his previous position as technical director at Douyin.com, Xu Mingxing founded the OKCoin trading platform in Beijing in 2013.

This name harbors a not-so-low-profile ambition: "OK," everything will be OK.

OKCoin went online and after just three months, it jumped to the top of China's Bitcoin trading volume chart with the strategy of "zero fees," subsequently obtaining tens of millions in A-round financing led by Chaoyuan Ventures. In addition, OKCoin was also fortuitously riding on a wave of Bitcoin's bull market, with trading volumes once approaching 1 billion RMB.

The speed was so fast that it was almost breathtaking.

In the following years, OKCoin gradually grew large, becoming one of the "three big" trading platforms alongside Huobi and BTCC. During this time, it also did another thing: it produced a large number of key figures in the entire crypto circle.

Zhao Changpeng, He Yi, Li Shufei, Chen Xin... these names that later became influential figures were once employees of OKCoin. As a result, OKCoin was humorously referred to as the "Huangpu Military Academy of the Crypto World."

However, the Huangpu Military Academy produced talent, which also meant that internal tensions were constantly building. In 2014, He Yi brought Zhao Changpeng over from a digital wallet provider to become the technical director. In less than a year, the relationship between Xu Mingxing and Zhao Changpeng had become increasingly strained.

Ultimately, at the beginning of 2015, Zhao Changpeng chose to leave OKCoin, ending his less-than-one-year tenure as CTO there.

Two years later, Zhao Changpeng founded Binance. This split has been repeatedly referenced in the crypto circle since.

From OKEx to OKX

September 4, 2017, was a nightmare that people in the crypto circle find hard to forget.

On this day, the People's Bank of China and six other ministries jointly released the "Announcement on Preventing Risks of Token Issuance Financing," effectively halting all ICOs, and the window for fiat currency exchanges with cryptocurrencies was quickly closed. For trading platforms targeting Chinese users, this was akin to having their lifeline severed. BTCC, China's first Bitcoin trading platform, thus quietly withdrew.

Xu Mingxing's choice was to escape. OKCoin shut down its domestic operations, claiming to transition into a blockchain technology development platform, while the international site of OKCoin was rebranded as OKEx, registered overseas, continuing to surf in the cryptocurrency market. After completing all these operations, the external statement was: Xu Mingxing had "no connection whatsoever" with OKEx.

After the escape, OKEx made a key product leap. In September 2017, the platform launched futures trading, becoming one of the earlier platforms to offer cryptocurrency derivatives trading. The following year, OKEx launched perpetual contract products, further expanding its derivatives business. These two moves were very accurate — futures and perpetual contracts were the products most desired by Chinese traders at that time.

In 2018, OKEx's derivatives trading volume captured 21% of the global market share. In the Chinese-speaking regions, the contract market was almost dominated by them alone. In terms of trading volume, OKEx, Binance, and Huobi ranked second, third, and fourth globally. This was OKEx's most glorious moment, as well as Xu Mingxing's most spirited phase.

The rapidly increasing data of OKCoin had already left the company's engineers with no time to even sleep; while feeling delighted, Xu Mingxing felt anxious about the sudden massive wealth, so he immediately redesigned the security mechanism. The reason was that he dreamed someone was kidnapping him, forcing him to hand over Bitcoin. "Now, even if I'm kidnapped, they can't withdraw the company's Bitcoin. Even if something happens to me, the company's Bitcoin won't have issues."

But that year was also the year Xu Mingxing faced the most rights protection incidents, with claimants against OKEx flooding into the Haidian Qunying Technology Park, even giving rise to an online "legend": Rights protectors blocking the police station bought buns for Xu Mingxing, who had no money for lunch. Of course, this was strongly denied by Xu Mingxing, calling it "a dramatized article written by competitors’ financial novelists." After 2018, Xu Mingxing began traveling with bodyguards.

Time moved to 2019, and the fateful confrontation between Xu Mingxing and Zhao Changpeng officially began.

Binance's perpetual contract products took full swing. Zhao Changpeng's strategy was more aggressive than Xu Mingxing's—lower fees, faster product iteration, and fiercer marketing. Users of contracts in the Chinese-speaking regions began to migrate to Binance en masse. The derivatives landscape, once dominated by OKEx, was thoroughly rewritten in just one year.

The clashes between the two were not limited to products. On Weibo and in communities, the mutual attacks between their camps dragged on for a long time, and the results of this war were already reflected in the data: OKEx's dominance in the Chinese-speaking contract market was slowly being eaten away.

Shifting to Wallets

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

The tone of the announcement was restrained, the wording plain, yet it triggered an earthquake in the whole crypto circle: "Recently, some responsible personnel for private keys at the company are cooperating with public security investigations and are currently uncontactable, leading to the inability to complete authorization." The person mentioned is Xu Mingxing.

The true reason for being "taken away" has many versions in the market, while the official statement remains vague. Insiders revealed that the real reason for Xu Mingxing being investigated could be related to OK Group's shell listing in Hong Kong last year: At that time, a sum of shell-buying funds had passed through an underworld money house in Shanxi, which has already been investigated by the police.

The suspension of withdrawal lasted for over a month. On November 20, Xu Mingxing posted on his friend circle: "Currently, the judicial authorities have clarified the facts and restored my innocence." Soon, OKEx issued an announcement stating: "The platform's withdrawal function was suspended for a period; the issues have been resolved, and relevant personnel have returned to their positions."

This Shanxi incident was a severe blow for Xu Mingxing, but it was also an epiphany.

The core issues of centralized trading platforms — concentration of private keys, regulatory risks, and complete reliance on platform credit for user assets — were thoroughly exposed in this incident. For him, this was a signal: the next era of competition would not be in centralized trading platforms, but in wallets, on-chain, in the direction where users have autonomous control of their assets.

Thus, OKX Wallet was launched as a core strategic product. OKX Wallet supports multi-chain asset management, integrates over 130 blockchains and more than 10,000 Dapps, and also incorporates popular Memecoins and NFT markets, allowing seamless interaction with DeFi and on-chain activities through one wallet.

In January 2022, OKEx officially rebranded to OK; this was not just a brand upgrade action, but a systematic strategic turn statement. From a trading platform to a multi-chain ecological platform, from centralized custody to supporting user self-custody, OKX attempted to redefine itself as an infrastructure entry point in the crypto world.

At that moment, when several major wallets monopolized the market with a first-mover advantage but provided a very poor experience, OKX Wallet truly offered the best experience. It was also one of OKX’s brightest moments. Riding on the rare Bitcoin market condition, the community had a very positive experience with the OKX Wallet, which was easier to use, had a lower entry threshold, and was more convenient to use on mobile devices, receiving high praise on social media and in comments. It was so good that even He Yi later acknowledged it.

Unfortunately, fate had its way, as a hacker stole $1.5 billion from Bybit, committing the largest theft in human history, using the routing of OKX Wallet during the money transfer. Regulators demanded that OKX Wallet cease operations, giving other wallets time. The first-mover advantage basically disappeared.

US Listing

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

A "ticket" worth $500 million sounds a bit expensive, yet it is remarkably inexpensive compared to Binance's $4 billion fine.

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

Xu Mingxing described this as "a blank sheet": starting anew in the US, thoughtfully constructing, and engaging in constructive interactions with regulatory bodies and relevant institutions.

The rest of the story, everyone already knows. In March 2026, this layout received its most symbolically significant endorsement to date.

OKX secured a minority equity investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, with a valuation reaching $25 billion. ICE will receive a board seat from OKX and jointly launch US-regulated cryptocurrency futures products; OKX will then become a distributor for the US futures market and the NYSE's tokenized stock market, reaching over 120 million global users.
Complete compliance, there is no better outcome than this.

The growth journey of Xu Mingxing and OKX has certainly had many twists and turns, but it remains a good story.

He is still a Chinese entrepreneur who just turned 41 this year, founded in 2013, having gone through three brand transformations, operating on a scale that drew regulatory scrutiny from several countries, forced to pay $500 million in fines to the US Department of Justice, ultimately ringing the bell in the US; a good story.

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