OKX's tokenized stocks and TradFi perpetual contracts reach $3 billion in average daily trading volume, accelerating the convergence of traditional finance and crypto markets. From tokenized US stocks to AI trading assistants, OKX is transforming into a global fintech platform, expanding into Pre-IPO, options, and on-chain payments to reshape the next generation of financial infrastructure.
Author: Jae, PANews
Tokenized stocks and TradFi perpetual contracts are becoming one of the fastest-growing new narratives in the crypto market. According to OKX, the average daily trading volume of its tokenized stocks and TradFi perpetual contracts has reached about $3 billion, with a peak once exceeding $9 billion. The signal sent by this figure is far more important than the growth in trading scale itself: the high wall that once stood between the crypto market and TradFi assets is accelerating its dissolution.
OKX founder and CEO Star Xu's judgment gets straight to the essence: the future will not be one of crypto and TradFi competing with each other; the two will gradually merge to form an entirely new financial system.
OKX, founded 13 years ago, is proactively tearing off the "cryptocurrency exchange" label. Starting from crypto asset trading, it is gradually extending its footprint into traditional financial assets, intelligent trading, on-chain infrastructure, and everyday consumption, accelerating its evolution into a global fintech platform covering fund custody, payments, investment, and wealth management.
This on-chain migration driven by tokenization is, under the dual impetus of capital and regulation, sketching the prototype of the next generation of global financial infrastructure.
Connecting with TradFi assets, building a full-category on-chain trading market
For a long time, cryptocurrency exchanges and traditional Wall Street institutions seemed by default to stand at opposite ends of the financial world. However, the list of investors in OKX's latest strategic funding round broke that stereotype.
In this funding round at a $25 billion valuation, the investors included not only crypto-native players such as stablecoin giant Circle and global payment network Ripple, but also traditional financial institutions such as Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), quantitative financial institution QRT, and SC Ventures, the venture capital arm of Standard Chartered.
For OKX, this cross-sector collaboration not only means capital support, but also provides new possibilities for it to further expand into traditional financial assets, trading mechanisms, and compliant infrastructure
Bringing US stocks into a 24/7 on-chain market
On October 5, OKX's cooperation with ICE drew market attention. Their joint venture OKXICE has submitted an application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), seeking to launch a tokenized securities venue (TSV) and explore the possibility of all-weather trading of US stocks. If approved, OKX will provide its users with access to ICE US futures and the New York Stock Exchange tokenized stock market.
According to Andrew Cuomo, former Governor of New York, member of OKX's global board of directors, and co-chair of OKXICE, the first batch of proposed listings covers 63 mainstream US stock targets, including Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Coinbase, and SpaceX.
The significance of this layout is not only extending the trading hours of traditional assets, but also exploring the connection between traditional securities markets and on-chain infrastructure.
From tokenized stocks to Pre-IPO, expanding asset boundaries
Beyond TSV, OKX has built a TradFi product matrix spanning both primary and secondary markets.
To address the pain point of fragmented liquidity in tokenized stocks, OKX launched the xStocks Unified Token Stocks system, which consolidates stock tokens from different issuers and different wrapping formats under a unified trading ticker, eliminating liquidity islands between different protocols.
If tokenized stocks attempt to bring mature assets from traditional markets onto the chain, then Pre-IPO perpetual contracts point to earlier-stage assets: allowing the valuations of companies that have not yet gone public to also participate in all-weather trading. Users can trade in advance the pricing expectations of leading unicorns such as OpenAI and Anthropic, bringing the valuation game of the primary market into an all-weather on-chain trading environment.
In terms of trading methods, OKX's layout is no longer limited to spot and perpetual contracts. The transformation on the derivatives side aims at "dimensionality reduction." In traditional markets, selling put options is a classic strategy used by value investors such as Warren Buffett and Duan Yongping to lock in purchase costs and earn premiums, but it involves complex operations such as strike price selection, volatility measurement, and expiration management, making it difficult for ordinary investors to replicate.
OKX has packaged such strategies into standardized "Dual Investment" and "Fixed Coupon Note" products. Users only need to preset a target price and lock-up period to execute the corresponding strategy.
In late October, OKX will also launch US stock options products, supporting four-way combinations of calls and puts. Compared with the capital threshold of 100 shares per lot at traditional US stock brokerages, OKX will achieve "investment starting from 1 share, one-price premium, and all-weather trading," lowering the threshold for hedging tools to a level ordinary investors can also access.
It should be noted that holding xStocks is not equivalent to directly holding traditional stocks. It mainly provides price exposure to the relevant stocks or ETFs, but does not grant investors actual stock ownership, voting rights, or other shareholder rights.
TradFi perpetual contracts, meanwhile, are based on an independent order book and index pricing mechanism. When traditional markets are closed, price discovery, insufficient liquidity, and price deviation may all be potential risks.
From tokenized stocks, Pre-IPO perpetual contracts, to structured yield products and options, OKX is trying to bring more asset classes and trading methods onto the same platform.
No longer just chatting, handing the trading workflow to AI Agents
If the TradFi layout broadens the asset boundaries OKX can trade, then the introduction of AI Agents is attempting to change the way users obtain information, formulate strategies, and execute trades.
Star Xu proposed that the internet changed the way information flows, crypto changed the way value flows, and AI is now changing the way intelligence scales.
This judgment also corresponds to the changing role of AI in finance. AI's role in finance long remained that of an "auxiliary tool": reading financial reports, interpreting market conditions, and producing research reports to help users analyze information, but it could not touch the trade button. In OKX's product system, however, AI is upgrading from an information analysis tool to a trading partner with practical execution capabilities.
Agent Trade Kit is the centerpiece of this upgrade. It not only provides market interpretation, but also deeply integrates into the entire trading process:
Before trading, it can monitor in real time data indicators such as order book depth, funding rates, open interest, and even the sentiment of 30,000 KOLs, and supports strategy backtesting in natural language, thereby deploying live trading;
After trading, it can also read users' historical orders and position records, automatically calculate win rates, profit and loss performance, and trading time distribution, and identify potential trading discipline issues.
This is equivalent to compressing the entire trading workflow of a professional quantitative team into a natural language interaction interface. Traders no longer need to repeatedly switch between market software, quantitative tools, Excel spreadsheets, and trading journals. Repetitive monitoring, calculation, and execution work can all be left to AI.
Of course, an upgrade in capabilities does not mean the elimination of risk. What AI lowers is the operational threshold, not the replacement of users' strategic judgment. Historical backtesting does not represent future returns, and the risks of model bias and market volatility always exist.
In the long run, there is also a certain synergy between AI trading and the expansion of TradFi assets. As stocks, commodities, and crypto assets gradually converge onto the same platform, the data dimensions investors need to process grow exponentially, and AI will become an important tool connecting different asset classes, trading strategies, and risk control mechanisms. As Star Xu said, in the future AI may enable ordinary users to also have private-banking-level intelligent financial assistants, helping manage personal assets, cash flow, risk preferences, and financial goals.
From trading to payments, completing the last mile of financial services
The vitality of financial innovation must ultimately land in real payment and circulation scenarios. A trading market alone is not enough. To absorb the massive assets migrating from traditional finance, it is also necessary to open up the "last mile" of everyday circulation.
To this end, OKX has built a capital circulation network from the underlying Layer 2 to consumer-facing applications.
X Layer: the high-speed circulation foundation for on-chain assets
X Layer, a high-performance L2 compatible with Ethereum, is defined as the infrastructure carrying the new currency and DeFi.
Since the beginning of this year, DeFi TVL on X Layer has grown from less than $14 million to $166 million, recording nearly 12x growth. Monthly DEX trading volume has jumped to the $1 billion level, and native on-chain liquidity exceeds $1.6 billion.
Its value has also been verified during the explosion of RWA (real-world assets): just three months after the launch of tokenized stocks, assets under management (AUM) on X Layer surpassed $150 million, and cumulative RWA trading volume in September alone exceeded $1.5 billion. As more TradFi assets go on-chain, X Layer's value as a settlement foundation may continue to amplify.
OKX Money: bringing crypto payments to ordinary peopleIn C-end consumption and everyday payment scenarios, the crypto industry has always faced an awkward reality: the stablecoin market has reached hundreds of billions of dollars in scale, yet ordinary users' use cases are mostly limited to speculative trading and P2P (peer-to-peer) transfers. Barriers such as seed phrase custody, Gas conversion, and address verification keep ordinary people outside of crypto finance.
OKX's standalone consumer app, OKX Money, aims to break through this "glass wall." Every account is built on a self-custodial smart account, and on the premise of ensuring users retain control of their asset private keys, it eliminates cumbersome operations such as private key backups and address verification, further optimizing the crypto payment experience.
Star Xu specifically noted: cross-border migrant workers around the world sending a few hundred dollars home often have to pay nearly 10% in combined remittance fees to traditional correspondent banks and remittance institutions, and it still takes several days for the funds to arrive. This high friction is, in essence, an erosion of the interests of ordinary families. OKX Money will leverage X Layer's second-level confirmation and low network fees to make small-value cross-border transfers as low-cost as sending an instant message—this is the most tangible embodiment of financial inclusion.
Next stop: advancing toward a global fintech platform
From traditional financial asset trading, to AI-driven trade execution, to on-chain infrastructure and everyday payments, OKX is attempting to expand the business boundaries of a crypto exchange. Behind this change is a shift in the competitive logic of the entire industry. The expansion of asset classes, changes in trading methods, and the connection between on-chain infrastructure and real-world financial scenarios are becoming the new direction of platform competition.
Star Xu's positioning of OKX's next stage also points to this trend: after 13 years since its founding, OKX will step beyond the category of a cryptocurrency exchange to become a global fintech platform that connects traditional finance and the on-chain world.
For users, in the future it may no longer be necessary to distinguish between a "cryptocurrency exchange" and a "traditional brokerage"; what they may care about more is whether they can complete asset acquisition, investment trading, fund transfers, and risk management through the same service entry point.
The boundary between crypto and TradFi is becoming increasingly blurred. Once, the industry competed over who listed more coins, offered higher leverage, and ran more aggressive campaigns. Now, the focus of competition has become who can more effectively connect global capital, trading channels, financial services, and fund flows, while simultaneously meeting user experience, security, and compliance requirements. For OKX, what truly determines how far this transformation can go is whether it can make on-chain financial capabilities truly serve broader real-world needs.