Commemorating OKX's 5th Anniversary | OKX's Perfectionist Obsessives

Source: Mars Bit News

Last week, I chatted with several friends about industry development. What brought us together was Daniel, OKX's Technical Lead. In our casual conversation, we learned many stories from OKX's past.

From 2021 to now, it hasn't been easy for the internet economy or the real economy. The dividends of internet traffic are fading, and coupled with the pessimistic reality, behind the uncertain fates of countless individuals and businesses, the overall environment feels lost about the future. The "money-making" aura of crypto assets is fading, and some companies are strategically abandoning growth and innovation, choosing conservative complacency and compliant profits.

"The future is here" - an idealistic phrase that was all the rage at blockchain conferences worldwide five years ago - now seems to be deliberately avoided by some, because saying it feels like "empty promises."

When you strive for ideals, you become your own light, leaving darkness nowhere to hide. Over five years, tens of thousands of people have cycled through OKX's offices, but in every period, there's been a group of young obsessives pursuing perfection. They haven't rested on OKX's accumulated laurels, but instead continuously delved into DeFi, Web3, and NFT trends, determined to forge OKX's own path.

Seeds · The Birth of the Trading System

Daniel, now OKX's Technical Lead, joined OKX in early 2017 when it was still in preparation. As a programmer, he majored in software engineering in college, joined an internet company after graduation, and didn't go all-in on blockchain until January 2017.

In 2017, Li Xiaolai was still the number one influencer in the crypto world with his "INFO+Coin Capital+Yunbi.com." On May 31st, in that scorching summer, OKX was successfully established in Belize, and the OKEX Trading System built by Daniel and his technical team was launched.

When Daniel first arrived, the company was in a wild era. Where did OKX's team come from? For such a startup team just emerging in the Crypto industry, Daniel's answer was that colleagues came from all over the world, many giving up high titles and salaries to resolutely choose OK and join this industry full of uncertainty.

The first challenge was to make OKX's Trading System capable of smoothly processing every trading order 7x24 hours within months, especially to withstand the trading peaks brought by Bitcoin's violent fluctuations.

To ensure the OKX Bitcoin Trading Platform could launch as scheduled on May 31st, Daniel and his team members fought for several months, working overtime almost every day. As one of the leads, Daniel even didn't go home for 23 consecutive days, eating and sleeping at the office. Many people didn't have formal workspaces, and the office was very crowded. Now when Daniel mentions the past, he still seems somewhat exhausted, with deep eye circles and a tired face giving this post-90s engineer a trace of weathering.

From initial design to intermediate technical architecture, over more than a hundred days and nights, they successively overcame numerous technical challenges. What impressed Daniel most was ensuring high availability and low latency after user growth surged, as well as support for more trading pairs - all requiring rapid processing.

Efficiency and strength are inseparable. When talking about team background, Daniel's expression began to light up. "In September, Brother Chong joined the OKX team with over a decade of traditional finance experience. He's written 10 million lines of code himself. Technically, he helped me avoid many pitfalls and achieve goals faster. I'm still very grateful for his joining."

From the first line of code to the platform's smooth launch, the effort was hard but the rewards were equally rich. OKX lived up to expectations, becoming an industry leader in less than a year with unstoppable momentum.

Sprouts · Contracts Emerge

An important reason for OKX's rapid success was - contracts. OKX elevated the Bitcoin-centric crypto market from spot trading to a new level. The application of complex financial tools gave Bitcoin, born in economic crisis, more financial imagination.

On November 3, 2017, OKX announced: "After tremendous efforts and your patient waiting, ETC, ETH, and BCH contracts are finally meeting everyone."

Daniel recalled that the most criticism he received wasn't from his boss, but from Eva. Once she burst directly into the meeting room: "Do you know about this problem? Customer service phones are blowing up, and you're still leisurely having a meeting?" Eva was a member of the customer service team - at OKX, everyone is customer service.

Currently, OKX customer service uses multiple languages and serves users 7x24 hours. About 5 training sessions per month, focused on new business, expanding and sharing various user cases, online response time compressed to 25 seconds, ticket response 10 minutes.

OKX's customer service isn't "script-based" - the goal is to help users solve problems to the maximum extent. Front-end customer service receives user feedback, then contacts technical, security, risk control, etc., to try to handle it. OKX's internal user problem communication group has up to 620 people, including nearly 30% of employees from various departments, to match user problems to corresponding leads immediately. The customer service team accounts for 25% of total employees.

Take user asset mis-deposits as an example. OKX disclosed in its 2021 financial report: overseas regions processed 5,636 cases worth over 14.7 million U+ annually, Chinese regions handled 13,792 cases worth over 1.07 billion U+. OKX is still the first in the industry willing to do this.

After OKX gained the honor of "Contract King," what came wasn't just investors, but some with ill intentions.

In July 2018, a user suddenly built massive long positions. High leverage and rolling positions made this trade's risk increasingly prominent. If market volatility caused liquidation, it would affect other users on a large scale. Sky, working in risk control, monitored the abnormal behavior and immediately took measures.

Sky tried multiple times to communicate with the user to request controlling positions to reduce risk, but the user refused to cooperate. To protect the interests of the majority, Sky proposed a solution: take 2,500 BTC from the platform's own funds and inject into the risk reserve pool to reduce the socialization ratio. Real-time proved this operation indeed minimized risk.

Sky frankly stated that this event brought them more reflection. Subsequently, the platform upgraded risk control measures to prevent such problems from happening again. People always grow through experience, can't easily give up, and certainly can't muddle along. Where you fall, there you get up. We keep breaking through upward to make ourselves better.

In early August 2018, upgraded "anti-market manipulation strategy," end of August launched "mark price" function, September launched "risk limit" mechanism, September optimized "risk reserve." Sky and the risk control team had to run ahead of the product, ahead of the market, and run cautiously. In fact, the mines OKX stepped through were the crypto world's mines, the roads walked were the crypto world's roads, a "warning" for later comers in the crypto world.

Taking Root ·Unified Account

In 2018, OKX launched rapid iterations: trading big data, USDT margin, perpetual contracts and other functions, plus new business lines like OKB and mining pools. But as DeFi began to emerge, it posed new challenges to OKX - CEX was about to face DEX impact. This meant OKX needed to adjust its strategic layout as soon as possible.

At the end of 2018, Daniel led the team of 20 original technical personnel to different countries to start "advanced study" tours - blockchain project teams, tech companies, top universities, international training. "Our bottleneck is there. On one hand self-breakthrough, on the other attracting external aid - a big battle is coming."

Thus entered 2019. This year can be called a turning point as digital assets recovered from the bear market.

At the time, HR colleagues would recommend personnel to me every day, Daniel introduced. Later I learned that the recommendations I got were only a small part of submissions. At the time, recruitment had only three requirements: identification with blockchain, basic work ability, and integrity. Crypto is a relatively special industry - only upright people can stay. Educational background, graduation school, family factors - none became frameworks restricting everyone from joining OKX. Everyone could try what interested them.

With the help of DeFi's new model and financial attributes, the open OKX attracted top talent from giants in different fields like Google, Microsoft, and JPMorgan Chase. More cross-industry ideas collided inside OKX, sparking new flames. To this day, OKX's internal training still retains that "tradition" - perhaps morning sharing DeFi's financial model, afternoon becomes NFT art appreciation. Everyone is like a sponge, rapidly absorbing various ideas and knowledge.

A colleague from JPMorgan Chase raised a question: Why does cryptocurrency trading have fund transfers between accounts? Daniel's team initially didn't understand, because all exchanges operate with this trading logic. But in the traditional financial market, which has developed for hundreds of years, a trading account's funds are universal.

Why not in the cryptocurrency market? Is it because technology is relatively simpler, or product logic more complex? Daniel began thinking about deeper issues. Scattered funds meant margin couldn't be shared, fund utilization extremely low. If the barrier between accounts could be broken, fund efficiency would improve more than one level.

Since we know, we must do it. These perfectionist obsessives insisted on creating a more ultimate trading system. This was not only a challenge to their own abilities but also breaking users' inherent usage habits. Although giving up meant starting from scratch, following the heart brings greater energy and is the most appropriate choice.

On January 26, 2022, OKX officially took down the classic mode, which they called "the end of an era." This pioneering move put OKX ahead of the industry by at least 2 years. Dual currency win, C2C lending, strategy section, arbitrage orders and all products based on "Unified Account" became more perfect, truly achieving arbitrage hedging, and maximizing leverage multiples and arbitrage space.

Blooming · OKTC and Wallet

In 2020, OKTC became the "difficult birth chain" in everyone's mouth. Use existing code? Or make a public chain with unknown performance yourself? To provide fairness, protect users, OKX's vision has always been to build a blockchain world. No one can reach the sun by just reaching out. OKX chose a rugged but more scalable route. Even if lonely, there's still room for trial and error.

Mr. Yu recalled that everything is hard at the beginning. Although everyone agreed on making their own public chain, they took many detours at the start. Initially using Cosmos SDK and porting EVM, many unsolvable situations appeared, making problems hard to investigate and performance improvement difficult to start.

During the beta phase, OKTC was dragged down by a GameFi project, far from the target 2000 TPS. Ultimately, we digested every line of code, made hundreds of optimizations to the public chain's consensus, execution, and storage, and found a sustainable iteration path. On December 29, 2020, OKTC mainnet officially launched. And OKTC has set even more aggressive goals.

In 2021, Eric's deeply cultivated DeFi field began to gain strength. In the decentralized world, there are too many dApps, NFTs, and airdrops to play. Is there a wallet that can parse all these assets, create an aggregated entry, let users enter the decentralized world with low thresholds, and efficiently manage assets?

Accompanying DeFi's explosion, various public chains emerged one after another, and DeFi protocols based on public chains were endless. Eric said market wallets and node interaction had problems like slow loading and poor experience. After code improvements, OKX iterated the technical architecture, using faster lightweight parsing, data middleware and other methods to solve industry problems.

In January 2022, OKX launched a one-stop decentralized ecosystem aggregation platform, providing users with multi-chain non-custodial wallets, NFT market, DEX, DApps and other products. Currently Web3 Wallet responds faster, parses on-chain data more comprehensively, and provides better experience. Eric's "One DeFi portal to rule them all" became reality.

In 2022, at a strategy meeting, James from marketing proposed changing the English name OKEx to OKX. Product, R&D, technical, customer service, functions, operations, design started big discussions, the scene once very chaotic. Decentralized business, public chains, DeFi, Web3, metaverse, NFT and other businesses opened new territories, already hard to contain under "Ex" (exchange).

This reason gained everyone's approval. To explore infinite possibilities, remove "E", keep the infinite possibilities "X". This wasn't a simple rename but an important brand upgrade, and a brand tone shift. The first big event after upgrade was announcing becoming Manchester City's partner, and subsequently reaching long-term cooperation with the McLaren team. OKX began accelerating breakthroughs in blockchain and external barriers.

On January 18, 2022, OKEX officially renamed to OKX. OKX changed the blue logo and official website UI used for years to a "checkerboard" style.

Results

Better future: game on.

The future is here.

At the end of the meal, I was still savoring these details.

Five years is a time node. For a person, it's neither long nor short. But these five years encapsulated half the crypto world's history. OKX can be said to be the most representative platform. We watched it rise and fall, stumble, be reborn. Currently looking at OKX, it lacks an extremely distinct "personality" - that's because its personality is "inclusiveness."

I've also used many trading platforms, each with its own characteristics, but 90% have faded from everyone's view. Now thinking back to the reasons, still unclear. Some started with malicious intent, some went astray midway, others got stuck in difficulties - ultimately didn't persist. OKX had much questioning during these five years of popularity. It accommodated Daniel, Eva, Sky and this group of obsessives pursuing perfection. They created unified accounts, real-time settlement, NFT market, Web3 Wallet and other amazing works. They made decisions initially not understood, but it's these decisions that made OKX move faster and faster.

Believe that in the next five years, we can get many answers.

Can Bitcoin break through $100,000?

Will NFTs become mainstream collectibles?

What exactly will the WEB3 world look like?

How does the metaverse integrate into our lives?

I also believe that some of these answers will be revealed to me by this group at OKX.

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