Due to a line in Zhao Changpeng's (CZ) autobiography saying "Report Li Lin," Xu Mingxing (Star) and Zhao Changpeng have once again engaged in a new round of verbal warfare 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 by the internet community, his journey to this point also holds a remarkable story not inferior to CZ's. Of course, one article cannot encompass Xu Mingxing's entire "OK life," but 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 dormitory at Renmin University of China, the TV was on.

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

Many people have mocked this motivational speech, but the graduate student named Xu Mingxing in front of the screen believed it.

The next day, he went to drop out of school. Neither his father's scolding over the phone nor his advisor's persuasion could stop him.

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

In the graduate student dormitory at Renmin, he either attended classes or lay on his bed playing games, mastering Minesweeper. The reason why Jack Ma's words struck him so hard was that he couldn't bear to look at that dorm room any longer.

Going back a bit. In Hongze County, Subei, ordinary parents gave their child a less ordinary name: Xu Mingxing.

The meaning was straightforward, hoping that this child would shine brightly like a star in the future.

He was the "other people's child" when he was young. From Hongze Middle School all the way to Beijing University of Science and Technology's Applied Physics department, then graduating and entering Renmin University of China's Mathematics department for his master's, he was even the only child mentored by his advisor. The combination of BUST and RUC Math in China in 2006 was a surefire elite script.

After dropping out of school, he truly entered Beijing. No longer a graduate student at Renmin, no longer the shining star of Hongze, he was just an outsider with no degree, no background, and no way back.

Xu Mingxing later repeated a sentence: "I have to work harder than others to survive in Beijing."

His first entrepreneurial bet was on group buying, partnering to create a small site called Wantuannet. At that time, it was still a few years before the Hundred Regiments War, but he was even beaten before the war broke out. 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 giant 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 co-founded Docin.com, with him serving as CTO at the age of 22.

Docin.com took off quickly. Launched in January 2008, the user base exceeded 500,000 within two months. Years later, this number rose to 40 million, making it one of China's largest C2C document sharing communities. Xu Mingxing touched the edge of a trend for the first time.

The cruelest twist of the Chinese internet often lies in one sentence: Baidu showed up. When Baidu Wenku entered the scene, Docin.com's revenue potential was gradually squeezed out.

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

If the story ended here, he would be a respectable middle-aged man. But he refused to do so. At the end of 2012, he scraped together millions and plunged into the food and beverage O2O sector.

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

But he was more determined than anyone to not give up. The behavior pattern of someone who has never won and someone who always feels like they haven't won is the same — neither will stop. Docin.com's angel investor Mai Gang later used a word to describe his journey from a programmer to CTO: a comeback.

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

It was a young man from a small town who had lost three times, lost 2 million when the Beijing house was sold, and always felt like he was about to be spat out by Beijing, encountering something on the screen that was said to be untouchable.

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 truly good hand.

The Opening Move is one of the Three Major Strategies

At that time, most trading platforms were nothing more than a simple assembly of wallets and order systems, lacking basic user protection mechanisms and matching engines. So Xu Mingxing, armed with his technical expertise from his previous role as CTO at Douguo.com, founded the OKCoin exchange platform in Beijing in 2013.

Embedded in this name was a somewhat ambitious vision: "OK," everything will be OK.

Just three months after its launch, OKCoin surged to the top of the Chinese Bitcoin trading volume rankings with a "zero fee" strategy, subsequently receiving a multimillion-dollar Series A investment led by VenturesLab. Additionally, OKCoin was fortunate to catch a wave of Bitcoin's bull market, with trading volume at one point nearing 1 billion CNY.

The speed of this growth was so fast that it was almost overwhelming.

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

Zhao Changpeng, He Yi, Li Shufei, Chen Xin... these later influential names were all former OKCoin employees. OKCoin was thus jokingly referred to as the "West Point Military Academy of the crypto industry."

However, producing such talent also meant that internal tensions were constantly accumulating. In 2014, He Yi poached Zhao Changpeng from a digital wallet provider to serve as CTO. In less than a year, the relationship between Xu Mingxing and Zhao Changpeng had become extremely tense.

Ultimately, in early 2015, Zhao Changpeng chose to leave OKCoin, ending his less-than-a-year tenure as CTO.

Two years later, Zhao Changpeng founded Binance. This split was later repeatedly referenced in the crypto community.

From OKEx to OKX

September 4, 2017, was a nightmare that many in the crypto community will never forget.

On that day, the People's Bank of China and six other agencies jointly issued the "Announcement on Preventing the Risks of Fundraising Through Coin Offerings," leading to a comprehensive ban on ICOs and the closure of fiat-to-cryptocurrency exchanges. For exchanges serving Chinese users, this was akin to having their lifeline severed. BTCC, China's first Bitcoin exchange, sadly exited the industry.

Xu Mingxing's choice was to leave. OKCoin shut down its domestic operations, claiming to transition into a blockchain technology development platform. Meanwhile, the OKCoin international platform rebranded as OKEx, registered overseas, and continued to operate in the cryptocurrency market. After these transformations, the official stance was that Xu Mingxing had "no relationship whatsoever" with OKEx.

After the Exodus, 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 introduced 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 entirely 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 spirited stage.

The rapidly growing data at OKcoin had already deprived the company's engineers of sleep. While delighted, Xu Mingxing also felt uneasy about the sudden massive wealth and immediately redesigned the security mechanism. The reason was that he dreamed someone kidnapped him and forced him to hand over the bitcoins. "Even if I were kidnapped now, the company's bitcoins cannot be withdrawn. Even if something happens to me, the company's bitcoins will not be at risk."

However, that year was also the year Xu Mingxing faced the most numerous instances of rights protection. Protesters against OKex surged into the Haidian Quying Technology Park, and a "good story" even circulated online: protesters trapped at the police station bought buns for Xu Mingxing, who had no money to eat lunch. Of course, Xu Mingxing vehemently denied this, calling it a "dramatic article written by a financial novel writer at the request of a rival company." After 2018, Xu Mingxing started traveling with bodyguards.

Fast forward to 2019, the destined showdown between Xu Mingxing and 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 iterations, and more aggressive marketing. Contract users in the Chinese-speaking region began to migrate in large numbers to Binance. The derivative landscape once dominated by OKEx was completely rewritten in just one year.

Their conflict was not limited to the product level. On Weibo and in communities, the two camps engaged in a prolonged back-and-forth, and the result of this war was already written in the data: OKEx's dominant position in the Chinese-speaking contract market was gradually eroded.

Transition to Wallets

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

The announcement was restrained in tone and mild in wording, yet it caused a seismic disturbance in the entire crypto community: "Recently, some of the company's private key holders are assisting in a public security investigation and are currently in a state of unavailability, making it impossible to complete the authorization." The person mentioned as the key holder was Xu Mingxing.

There are many rumors about the true reason behind the "being taken away," and the official explanation remains elusive. Insiders revealed that the real reason Xu Mingxing was taken away for investigation may be related to OK Group's backdoor listing in Hong Kong last year: at that time, the acquisition fund took a detour through an underground bank in Shanxi that is now under police investigation.

The suspension of withdrawals lasted for a full month. On November 20, Xu Mingxing posted on his Moments: "Currently, the judicial authorities have clarified the facts and restored my innocence." Subsequently, OKEx released a statement saying, "The platform's withdrawal function has been suspended for a period of time, and the issue has now been resolved, with relevant personnel returning to their positions."

The Shanxi incident was a blow to Xu Mingxing, but also an awakening.

The core issues of centralized exchanges—key centralization, regulatory risks, and user assets relying entirely on platform credit—were thoroughly exposed in this incident. To him, this was a signal: the competition of the next era lies not in centralized exchanges but in wallets, on-chain, in the direction of users controlling assets autonomously.

As a result, OKX Wallet was launched as a core strategic product. OKX Wallet supports multi-chain asset management, integrates with 130+ blockchains and 10,000+ DApps, integrates with popular Memecoin and NFT markets, enabling seamless DeFi and on-chain interactions in one wallet.

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

At a time when the major wallets dominated the market through a first-mover advantage but had poor user experiences, OKX Wallet was indeed the best wallet experience at that time, marking one of OKX's brightest moments. Leveraging the rare bullish trend in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the community had a very positive experience with the OKX Wallet, finding it easy to use, with low barriers to entry, convenient mobile use, and receiving high praise on social media and in reviews. Even He Yi acknowledged it.

Unfortunately, fate played its hand. The hacker who stole $1.5 billion from Bybit, committing the largest hack in human history, used the OKX Wallet's routing when laundering the funds. Regulators demanded the suspension of the OKX Wallet, giving other wallets an opportunity. The first-mover advantage was essentially lost.

U.S. Listing

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

A "ticket" as high as 500 million USD may sound expensive, but compared to Binance's 4 billion fine, it's exceptionally cost-effective.

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

Star Xu described this as a "blank slate": starting afresh in the US, thoughtfully building up, and engaging in constructive interactions with regulatory and related bodies.

The rest of the story, everyone knows. In March 2026, this strategy received its most symbolic endorsement to date.

OKX received a minority equity investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, with this investment valuing OKX at 25 billion USD. ICE will obtain a seat on OKX's board and jointly launch regulated crypto futures products with OKX; OKX will become ICE's distributor in the US futures market and NYSE tokenized stock market, reaching over 1.2 billion users globally.
Complete compliance; there couldn't have been a more ideal outcome.

Star Xu and OKX's growth journey certainly had many twists and turns, but it remains a great story.

Still a Chinese entrepreneur who has just turned 41 this year, founded in 2013, underwent three rebrandings, expanded the business to be regulated by multiple countries, had to pay a 500 million USD fine to the US Department of Justice, and ultimately ended up with a success story in the US.