OKX is a wind vane in the Web3 industry, with its product technology and narrative direction often being cutting-edge and able to quickly establish industry paradigms. On April 28, the "secret business line" mentioned by OKX CEO Star during the 2024 New Year's greeting was finally unveiled - the digital asset payment tool OKX Pay. With the launch of OKX Pay, OKX's three major business segment strategies were also officially clarified: centralized exchange platform, on-chain entry, and decentralized digital asset payment.
Leveraging OKX's over 100 million existing users, OKX Pay completed a cold start in its initial phase, quickly entering the crypto payment track. In the next stage, as it further connects with B-end merchant networks and adds the OKX Card in collaboration with global payment service providers like Mastercard, OKX Pay is expected to achieve instant payment and settlement of crypto assets in supported regions globally, bridging the path from online trading to offline consumption, truly pushing the "last mile" of crypto assets integrating into daily life. At the same time, with a Web2-like product experience, OKX Pay is also opening a channel for large-scale deployment of Web3 applications. As Star envisioned: "Road to the Next Billion Users".
The ideal is plump, but reality is worth pondering. By entering the payment space, what is OKX Pay truly leveraging? Is it a broader user base, a larger market scale, or a deeper integration of the crypto world with daily life? Let's start from the beginning.
OKX Pay Quickly Goes Viral
The first version of OKX Pay launched three core functions: digital asset payment, social interaction, and asset management. For new users, the entire OKX Pay process can be summarized as "you have an OKX exchange account → activate OKX Pay smart account → deposit USDT/USDC stablecoins → easily make on-chain payments → currently receive up to 5% annual incentive from the official balance → create groups with friends and send digital asset red packets in chats". It reuses the convenience of existing CEX KYC while ensuring asset safety through AA multi-sig technology and meeting compliance audits like AML. Notably, if you lose your Passkey, you can easily recover your wallet through ZK email recovery function.
After launching, OKX Pay quickly swept social media, with KOLs praising its innovative on-chain social payment experience: the exclusive group limited to 100 people was instantly full, and even after upgrading to 500 people, it was still insufficient, with many calling for OKX Pay to remove group size restrictions. Moreover, sent red packets were instantly grabbed. OKX Pay originally planned to quickly attract users through "5% annual subsidy" and "X Layer transaction fee-free" incentives, but unexpectedly went viral due to its social and digital asset red packet functions.
OKX Pay also supports QR code scanning or display for crypto asset payments, providing a Web2-like convenient experience. With zero transaction fees, instant stablecoin settlement, and seamlessly embedded text/voice chat and digital asset red packets, these advantages make OKX Pay the best entry point for new users into on-chain social payments. However, OKX Pay still has shortcomings of its first-generation version: such as being available only in some regions, supporting limited public chains, inability to scan QR codes to add group members, inability to freely modify group nicknames, and inability to turn off contact synchronization permissions. While these functional deficiencies need subsequent iteration, they also reflect users' enormous enthusiasm and participation in social payment gameplay.
Entering Stablecoin Payment
Since OKX Pay already supports USDT/USDC stablecoin payments, let's explore from the stablecoin perspective whether its business model is robust enough and has sustainable profitability potential?
As of April 2025, the global stablecoin market cap has exceeded $240 billion, becoming a key force in driving cross-border payment innovation. Thunes' research indicates that stablecoins are reaching a turning point in B2B trade and rapid settlement, with over 70% of cross-border transactions using stablecoins to reduce traditional wire transfer's high intermediary fees and long delays. Compared to traditional SWIFT wire transfers or credit card networks, cross-border transactions settled with stablecoins can reduce costs by over 40% and significantly improve speed. Additionally, financial institutions like FV Bank predict that corporate stablecoin payments will surpass traditional methods this year, providing institutional support for OKX Pay's large-scale enterprise-level applications.
Driven by enormous demand, traditional payment giants are testing crypto payments: Visa provides USDC targeted clearing services for banks and large FinTech firms through the Ethereum network, while PayPal issues PYUSD through Paxos Trust, supporting buying and transferring within its hosted accounts, seamlessly introducing crypto funds into existing fiat payment systems. However, as a pure native on-chain product, OKX Pay leverages OKX Wallet's AA smart account architecture and X Layer ZK L2 network based on Polygon CDK to achieve zero-fee on-chain final settlement. This not only gives users control over their assets but also paves the way for future integration of payment processes with Wallet's DeFi ecosystem and smart contract PayFi scenarios, opening a truly innovative digital asset payment experience.
More importantly, by establishing a compliant closed loop with local institutions and industry partners, OKX Pay can quickly win the trust of enterprises and large merchants. By providing an SDK and API, it facilitates merchant access to this vast and liquid payment pool and can further collaborate with traditional payment networks like Mastercard and Stripe to connect on-chain stablecoins with bank card systems, achieving cross-border instant settlement in supported regions. With its low-cost, high-security, and fast-settlement advantages, OKX Pay not only strengthens OKX ecosystem's competitive barriers but also forces competitors like Binance Pay, Kraken Pay, Crypto.com Pay, and Coinbase Pay to accelerate technological and compliance innovations, thus creating an opportunity for OKX to overtake in the crypto payment track.
Three Business Lines Established
OKX's strategic layout has gradually become clear, forming three core business segments: centralized exchange (CEX), on-chain entry (Wallet), and decentralized payment (OKX Pay). This in-depth layout not only meets users' diverse needs from asset trading and on-chain interaction to daily payments but also marks OKX's strategic upgrade from a traditional digital asset trading platform to a comprehensive Web3 service provider with financial infrastructure capabilities.
Among these three segments, the centralized exchange platform remains OKX ecosystem's core hub, providing users with efficient and secure crypto asset trading experiences through its deep liquidity foundation, millisecond-level matching engine, and global compliance layout. OKX Wallet serves as a one-stop entry to Web3, supporting multi-chain asset management, DApp interaction, NFT browsing, and DEX trading core functions, significantly lowering the technical barriers for ordinary users to enter the on-chain world. OKX Pay plays a crucial role in decentralized payment, supporting instant zero-fee on-chain payments for mainstream stablecoins like USDT and USDC, and actively promoting crypto payment popularization and application scenario expansion in supported global regions through collaboration with traditional financial service providers like Mastercard.
Through the collaborative development of these three segments, OKX has created a functionally closed-loop and scenario-interconnected crypto ecosystem. The business segments form complementary advantages, jointly driving continuous user experience optimization, demonstrating significant advantages in asset trading convenience and security, as well as on-chain application accessibility and usability. This strategic synergy not only significantly enhances the overall user experience's smoothness and completeness but also increases user stickiness and activity on the OKX platform. On this basis, OKX continuously promotes crypto technology and application penetration into mainstream markets, injecting new momentum into industry development and becoming a bridge and accelerator towards mass adoption in the crypto field.
From Tool to Lifestyle
OKX Pay has broken through cross-border settlement barriers in some globally supported regions through zero-fee stablecoin payments, significantly lowering the threshold for crypto payments with a Web2-like smooth experience. It is not just a payment tool, but is gradually becoming infrastructure for the Web3 era. With strategic synergy across three business segments, OKX Pay is building a complete crypto ecosystem closed loop, redefining the application scenarios of crypto assets in daily life. As OKX Card and merchant networks are comprehensively rolled out, crypto payments are expected to naturally integrate into our daily lives like QR code shopping.
Imagine one morning, when buying soybean milk, the boss shows you a QR code that can be scanned with USDT; when you pay for coffee with ETH on your phone, the receipt automatically displays "This consumption is equivalent to 0.0012 ETH, real-time exchange rate has been converted to local currency". This is no longer science fiction, but a future payment scenario OKX Pay is advancing. Perhaps one day, we will no longer discuss "do you have crypto assets" but "how do you live with crypto". At that time, this might be OKX Pay's destination. It does not want us to adapt to a new world, but to let the new world fairly embrace every ordinary person.
OKX Pay is responding to this expectation at the fastest speed. Sherry, OKX Pay's leader, revealed in a Space sharing that the product completed 4 iterations within 8 months before going online, with each update representing a deep consideration and strategic layout for the future payment ecosystem. Such a high-frequency innovation rhythm not only reflects the team's persistent pursuit of product excellence but also means that OKX Pay is using technological innovation as an engine to gradually realize the vision of integrating crypto assets into daily payments. Through continuous iteration, OKX Pay continuously breaks through technical bottlenecks and scenario limitations, accelerating crypto payments from theoretical conception to life practice, and striving to connect the "last mile" of crypto assets integrating into daily life.
What users can perceive is that such a beautiful prospect is getting closer and closer.
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