June 02, 2025
By Our Correspondent
According to Chief Commercial Officer Lennix Lai, OKX, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world based on trading volume, is getting ready for a boom in blockchain usage in the upcoming years, however plans for the Hong Kong market are still on hold.
The firms outline a promising future for the use of blockchain technology across a wide range of industries, from traditional finance to video gaming, in a research co-produced by OKX and Blockworks Research. Lai proposed that the industry might be at a turning point, even if many of the use cases mentioned in the report—like in-game asset ownership and intellectual property management—have been developing slowly for years.
“The whole fintech industry, along with the traditional finance industry and the asset management sector, which includes the government,” Lai stated, “are beginning to have some kind of footprint in crypto.” “We observe a completely different group of industry participants beginning to construct something associated with cryptocurrency.”
On Thursday, the paper was published under the title “The Future of Blockchain Applications: Reshaping Global Industries.” In addition to predicting rapid growth in the next years in an ecosystem currently valued at US$2.6 trillion, it attempts to forecast how blockchain use will change over the next 25 years.
Currently, the most useful use case is still finance. Through alliances, most notably with Standard Chartered, OKX has attempted to grow in the traditional finance sector by enabling customers to use tokenized money-market funds and cryptocurrencies as collateral.
Eventually, “the distinction between ‘crypto banks’ or ‘neo banks’ versus traditional banks will largely disappear,” according to the paper. However, OKX has no intention of intruding on the domain of conventional banks.
“We provide technologies as a technological platform,” Lai stated. “We can offer a service or product that appears to be a financial product. We offer comparable benefits in a relatively small number of situations.
He emphasized services including cross-border payments, know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) checks, and mobile payments, which can be made using the recently released OKX Pay app.
Due to an increase in connected crime and the requirement to support law enforcement, many cryptocurrency companies are finding it difficult to maintain legal compliance.
Additionally, more governments have been enacting new rules for the sector, some of which involve licensing requirements for businesses providing services related to cryptocurrency, such as in Hong Kong.
OKX dropped its application to become a regulated virtual asset trading platform in Hong Kong last year. The Beijing-based business, which has a sizable following in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, stated that it is still investing in Hong Kong but has not provided an update on its decision to stop pursuing a license.
He stated, “At the moment, we are concentrating our resources in other licensed markets.” We won’t rule out reapplying for a license in Hong Kong, but we’ll wait and see how things work out before deciding whether to speak with them again.
According to Lai, OKX’s current priorities include the US, where it opened a regional headquarters in April in San Jose, California, as well as Europe, Dubai, Australia, and Singapore.
This year, President Donald Trump has created a more favorable climate for cryptocurrency businesses in the US, which has helped to boost sector optimism. According to the US Justice Department, OKX paid a punishment of more than US$504 million after entering a guilty plea to breaking US anti-money-laundering rules in February.
According to Lai, OKX is extending its use of artificial intelligence (AI) in addition to providing “exactly the same KYC and AML standards” as other financial institutions. The company hopes to be able to “evaluate and analyze massive blockchain data in less than one second,” which will enable it to detect suspicious addresses and transactions instantly.
AI is anticipated to be a key component of blockchain in the future. The use cases highlighted in the research include assisting with computational resource coordination and automated trading via AI agents.
