2025: A Steady Progression Toward Financial Freedom

An end of year memo to all our customers from Star Xu, CEO

Freedom in finance is often misunderstood. It's not about the absence of rules. Rather, it's the presence of choice, backed by systems that work when they're tested.

That was our focus in 2025.

First, I want to thank our customers, partners, and regulators around the world. A secure crypto ecosystem is built collectively. Open systems only last when accountability and cooperation are treated as strengths, not constraints.

We grew meaningfully this year. More importantly, that growth allowed us to raise standards across reliability, transparency, security, and access. Here are the few areas that are particularly important to me and our teams as we plug into the future.

The year 2025 had repeated market volatility led by failed systems and controls. Sharp drawdowns, large liquidation cascades, and derivatives expiries placed an extreme load on global trading infrastructure.

In late August, a major derivatives expiry coincided with heightened volatility across crypto markets. Multiple large platforms experienced service disruptions including delayed order execution and temporary trading halts.

In October, a rapid sell-off led to more than $19 billion in liquidations within 24 hours, according to aggregated liquidation data providers such as CoinGlass and The Block.

I am proud to say that during both events, OKX remained fully operational. Trading, deposits, withdrawals, and risk management systems continued without interruption. On October 11, our systems processed a record-breaking 1.72 million transactions per second while maintaining order latency at just 20 microseconds.

This has been a foundational strength of ours since we started building OKX. Our engineering infrastructure continues to demonstrate its superiority in the industry. It is not something I just say as a nice sound bite, it is now battle tested over multiple years and several market cycles.

We continued investing heavily in systems security, fraud prevention, and market surveillance. This included active disruption of large scale scam operations such as pig butchering schemes, consistent cooperation with law enforcement agencies across multiple jurisdictions, and decisive action against bad actors through delistings and account restrictions where user protection required it.

Hacks also do happen. Just this year, two major platforms in our industry were victims of hacks. Billions of customer value exposed. The way I have guided our teams over the years is to put security first, to not rely on third party tech and always build things in-house and natively. This alone dramatically reduces the risks of hacks. We also invested in education. The release of The Mild Mild West was part of a broader effort to raise awareness around why governance, rules, and enforcement matter in financial markets.

Throughout 2025, we maintained an average of 3-5% surplus of assets under management, ensuring customer assets were fully backed at all times.

We continued publishing monthly Proof of Reserves reports without interruption. Public disclosures showed:

These reports were independently reviewed by third party security and audit firms such as Hacken and made publicly verifiable using cryptographic Merkle tree proofs.

Our proof of reserves program has been cited by industry analysts and media outlets as one of the most consistent and transparent in the sector. Transparency is not achieved through announcements. It is achieved through repeatable verification.

We continued expanding self custody capabilities through our wallet products, including the introduction of passkey based authentication.

This materially improves security by reducing reliance on passwords and single points of failure, while also making self custody more accessible to non-technical users.

An open financial system must allow people to choose how they custody assets. Some will prefer regulated platforms. Others will choose institutional custody. Others will choose full self custody. Freedom exists only when those choices are real and usable.

These partnerships reflect growing confidence in OKX as infrastructure that meets institutional expectations around governance, custody segregation, and risk management. An open financial system cannot scale without trust from both users and institutions. These relationships help bridge that gap.

In 2025, we launched several major product initiatives, each designed to expand access without unnecessary complexity. These included:

In Brazil, the launch of our OKX Pay product made us the No. 1 most downloaded crypto app in the country in the month of December.

Our partnership with the McLaren F1 Team and Man City Football Team continued to extend our global reach. The team secured two championships, and the partnership generated billions of global brand impressions.

In 2025 and inline with our entry into new regulated markets, we saw growth across our platform, with our centralized exchange experiencing a 16% overall increase in trading volume globally. Our DEX trading volume increased by approximately 262% globally during the year, with daily active wallets increasing by over 100% compared to the year before.

By year end, we surpassed 120 million customers worldwide. That milestone was widely reported across industry media, but we view it as a responsibility rather than an endpoint.

Scale only matters if it is supported by systems, controls, and long-term intent.

We do not talk much about freedom because it is easy to claim and difficult to earn. In practice, freedom looks like:

Everything we built in 2025, from uptime and reserves to wallets, CeDeFi, and regulatory engagement, was aimed at expanding access without sacrificing trust.

These are my commitments to the customers and to our teams building this future as a team. Let's keep going with strength and responsibility into 2026.