# OKEx Strategy: AI Agents and Tokenized Assets

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-09-02

## Transcript

So AI will become the intellectual layer and crypto will become the economic layer.
What it means is everyone is talking about tokenization and AI, but what does that mean for crypto?
Is there going to be a distinction between TradFi and crypto anymore?
And what does it mean to have an exchange for AI agents?
Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that's starting to think we're going to have to ask AI to figure out what to do about itself and politely ask it to make no mistakes.
I'm your host, John Gill, and today is Wednesday, September 2nd, and today we are joined by Linux Live.
Linux is the global chief commercial officer at OKEx, where he has led international strategy, commercial operations, and the exchange's expansion into DeFi and on-chain infrastructure.
Linux has had a front row seat to OKEx's New York Stock Exchange ambitions, on-chain activities, AI, a whole lot of other things.
He's full of alpha.
He's going to tell us a whole bunch of information in this episode.
If that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
And a reminder, our podcast today is free, and that would not be possible without our wonderful partners at Sabre.
the stablecoin payments platform built for Asia.
So keep an ear out for more information on them later in the episode.
But for now, welcome to the Milk Road Show.
Lennox, how are you, sir?
Hello, John.
Thank you for having me.
I'm really excited to have you on the show.
There's a lot.
Yeah, there's a lot of exciting things going on at OKEx these days, and I want to hear about all of it.
I thought a good place to start this conversation would actually be not in the East where you are, but over here in the West.
The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange invested in OKEx at a $25 billion valuation, and they took a board seat.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what this strategic partnership means, what it unlocks for OKEx, and just what you're seeing happening here.
I think it's also a very important strategic.
partnerships between OTX and ICE.
I think we have a shared vision in relation to our tokenization of the financial asset classes.
I think the ICE partnership give us, I would say, a practical route for us to connect to a regulated trading venue so that going forward, I think with that partnership, we have a very strong fundamental.
and we have a very strong partner to potentially substantially increase the distributions and the reach on tokenization, equities, commodities, derivatives products.
On the contrary, the crypto product will probably in one day become a tradable instrument in a regulated liquidity venue like ICE for instance.
so I think it serves a very important bridge between these two legacy isolated systems Could you talk to me a little bit more about how these two sides of this partnership are going to change each other?
In other words, crypto is coming to TradFi, TradFi is coming to crypto.
How are they changing each other as they start to collide here?
And what are you seeing happen as those two sides, those two worlds run into each other?
The two worlds, I think, yeah, we are directly or indirectly influence each other.
particularly OKEx versus ICE, right?
I think I'm talking in general on crypto ecosystem versus colline, the traditional ecosystem.
You can see traditional exchanges starting to add trading hours.
This is an obvious example that being influenced by crypto exchange, for instance, for example, in OKEx, because in crypto, we are trading 24 hours, seven days, 300.
We never The market never stops.
The market never stops is a very important technological advantage because it means the market, the matching engine, the risk engine, or everything has to run non-stop.
So it's also symbolic that the architectural build within the OKEx or within crypto exchange has to be really robust to handle all kinds of abnormalities, right?
So the traditional exchange needs to catch up because we are building, we already successfully build continuous markets for years.
So on the other hand, as crypto exchange for instance, like OKEx is, we're adding more instruments aside from crypto native product like Bitcoin, Ethereum or other else.
We're starting to adding tokenization instruments, equity, commodities or everything into the exact account structure, the restructure account structure.
governance structure onboarding infrastructure within the same system so these two worlds collide and commingral within each other that's the trend that we're seeing and we're seeing that we have both influence to each other the market has become as commingral as a huge giant market Hi, everyone.
This is John.
Listen, our Milk Road Pro analysts nailed this AI bull market.
They had dozens of calls pay off in a big way for our community.
If you want to see how our entire team of analysts are positioning for the crypto bull market that's going to come after this bear market finally ends, you can join us now at Milk Road Pro.
It's just a dollar.
Link is in the description.
You'll get access to all of our analysts' trades, their watch lists, and see how they're navigating this in their portfolios and get access to ask us questions in Discord anytime, day or night.
It's just a dollar.
Link's in the description.
Milk Road Pro.
Join now.
I'll see you there.
So talk to me about what you see happening in like, let's say, for example, the DeFi space as we start to get more tokenized assets, more real world assets from TradFi on blockchain rails.
Do you see these moving into the DeFi space and how does that evolve?
What changes there as that starts to happen?
Yeah, that's very interesting and a little bit impersonally a little bit surprised development in my perspective.
I personally was worried about, hey, what's the reason that a user trade Apple share listed on Nasdaq versus our tokenized Apple share traded on OKEx for instance, right?
So there will be distinction between between Ligreti and Market Tab and all that.
But I can see right now tokenized instruments starting to become an important collateral or fundamental asset class within the defined space.
So defined historically is just borrowing lending protocol, a lot of them are borrowing lending protocol with AMM and liquidity professions.
But right now we're seeing a lot of liquidity pool or AMM protocol starting to add tokenized treasuries as the basic yield generation instruments.
and we're seeing that people particularly integrated MIMS coin versus tokenization of securities as part of the building blocks in DeFi spaces.
So I'm not surprised that there will be other new hunting opportunities on DeFi but with the basis of tokenized instruments.
So I want to talk about some other things that are happening at OKEx that are part of the evolution of crypto and TradFi here.
I wanted to bring up AI agents.
A few months ago, you gave a presentation that I saw at the Web3 Festival in Hong Kong.
And the title of the talk was On-Chain OS, the Operating System for the Agentic Economy.
I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about this.
What is this operating system?
How does this bring AI agents on chain?
What are you guys building here?
What's going on?
In short, it's an open-toothkit.
So OKEx is a massive ecosystem.
We call it crypto exchange, but it's a massive ecosystem.
We have a wallet function, we have a central exchange function, we have market data, we have payment rail, we have Texas routers, we have all kinds of API function call.
So what we really want to achieve here is whether or not people simple users, general users can interact with these massive features and product within plain language, plain natural language with the capability of what LMM AI model that's building right now.
So give me a very simple instance.
It's like could a simple user basically tell us, hey, I want to buy Bitcoin as a dip in plain language.
then we can translate this kind of natural language processes and we distill and become an executable trade route with callable API according to all our functions.
That is the basic concept.
So as a toolkit, the developer can use our AI skill for natural language workflow.
The developer can use the MCPE.
native agent integration API with full program static control.
The key point is orchestration.
The Thief Kit allows developers and users with plain language and on the back and behind, we have orchestrated all kinds of OKEx products and features with a security layer so that the agents that the user build with the capability to seamlessly use all kinds of features and products.
that's allowed in OKEx ecosystem.
Is that live today?
In other words, if I go on OKEx, it's live right now, so I can go on OKEx, I can hook up my agent and in plain language say buy Bitcoin and it'll go in OKEx and be able to do that.
Of course, you need an account in OKEx.
The beauty part is it's not basically, hey, an agent, add an agent and buy Bitcoin.
The core part here is not integrating with agent or...
The crux of this product, I would say, is adding security layer so that we keep adding checkpoints on every single step.
We need human control and critical element.
Before the agent starting to deduct your phone within the account, we need user authorization.
Before they're making a critical movement of any kind of transfer access or movement of withdrawal, we need.
mandatory authorization from users.
I think that is the core part of the agent-debt trading ecosystem right now.
Okay, so making sure humans stay in the loop and that it's done safely and securely.
How much adoption are you seeing for this right now?
Is this something you guys have added but that people are hesitant to try?
Are you seeing a lot of users move to adopt this?
What's the traction been so far on this product?
We see a very interesting example.
It's a relatively new product.
I think I would say people are starting to adopt it.
Still a little bit has to take because it's a relatively new thing.
It got technological barrier and background.
But the interesting figure to me is most of the early users within this product, I would say, is retail with no coding experience.
I think that is something that we want to see.
right now what I think we got around monthly trading volume generated by this kind of agent agent agent product static maybe 50 million US dollar or 70 million US dollar around that but the the what really exciting is the retail setting to add automation capability because because what we can see the problem of retail trading are mostly on they are mostly affected by emotion.
You can imagine, right?
So the emotion affects trading so much and eventually affects trading performance.
So if the user or general user is starting to add, hey, screen the market, do a backtesting, execute on an average basis or T-WAR basis on a single trade, or hash my portfolio using option, give me parameters.
with agent inbuilt.
So I think it's added a lot of capability for the user.
What exciting us is a majority of this user or this product are general retailers with no good experience.
It's not exactly institutional, professional, well.
I think that might be training the trading behavior going forward if it's picked off.
Do you think that this is helping these users with no technical experience who are now leveraging this?
Is this helping them get more out of OKEx?
In other words, are their agents able to leverage things that you guys offer, products and services, that a human user might miss the value of that?
Because I feel like that's a big unlock that AI agents can bring because they are able to see the whole landscape of products and services and understand what's available there.
find things and do things that a human user might miss.
Have you seen any of that happening or how do you think about that?
I think I see people might be underrated their own capability.
They can't do things.
They can't do things.
For example, a lot of user stories, classic user stories look like this.
Hey, I have years of experience.
on reading certain patterns of the markets.
However, I don't know how to codify between an automated trading execution agent.
And very importantly, I don't have experience or sufficient knowledge in terms of risk management and positional management using two instruments like option because I have zero understanding, zero knowledge on option.
So I need this kind of I they would translate their basic trade ideas talk to the agent talk to their model and the agent starting to step by step guide them to become to build a professional investment strategies with risk management tools monitoring and starting on even a best execution exercise this is something that cannot imagine without professional, institutional to step in.
So right now, it's a capability that everyone can use.
We think everyone will have a huge potential by basically learning the market, translate it into this capability, into their plain language to agents, empower the agents, OKS serve at the security and infrastructure layer and help them to to trade.
So let's take this a step further.
You said that right now a big feature, a big focus of the platform is to keep humans in the loop, make sure that humans are approving everything and they have, you know, secure and, and, uh, scalable, trustable agentic operations.
What about unsupervised agentic activity?
Is that something that you envision being on the horizon as something you want to work towards?
In other words, I can just give my agent a wallet and the keys and like kind of my investment objectives and let that agent manage my capital for me without my supervision?
Or do you not think that that's a direction that you want to go?
Or just how do you think about that process?
I think it's an automation with boundary.
With boundary means our the agents and a platform itself, they have to give or identify high risk movement of those agents and make sure humans are in the loop.
And also the platform, for example, like OKEx, we have to enable, we have at least have a features enable for users.
For example, these agents cannot trade.
The only capability for this particular agent is sticking, for instance.
And these agents have no capability to withdraw.
This agent can only have a read-only or trade-only authorizations.
So this kind of permission control as a whole, we have to build it and let the agents to call it to use that.
and let human in the loop.
Of course, maybe one day in the future is the user feels so comfortable, I can delegate a part of the features and part of the authority to another agent.
But I believe the concept is still the same, right?
Human need to be in the loop in every single step.
But if...
If you're comfortable enough, you can delegate some of the features, some of the authorization, certain agents at the check and balance.
Maybe it will evolve sometime.
Gotcha.
Okay.
That's helpful framing on that.
The last question I had on this is, you know, we talked about human supervised training, and then if a human gives the permission to the agent, it can do some things without human supervision, but that's up to the human's discretion.
But what about agent to agent?
transactions and economic activity that's happening.
How do you think about approaching that?
And what's the outlook on that?
Very important, because I think eventually the financial system is going to evolve and upgrade.
So AI will become the intellectual layer and agents or agents will become, or I would say crypto, crypto will become the economic layer.
What it means is the agents with, because it's in part of the AI way, we will have intellectual elements built within the agent.
So the agent starting to need to make decisions and going forward, agents need to talk to the other agents or even buy a subscribe service with another agent.
Very simple example.
I was a QanTray before and I need to normalize the market data.
from different kind of market data feed.
So this agent built for that.
It's a very streamlined trading operation.
I think everyone would need it as a quant trader.
So starting to say, hey, this is an agent that I built for years.
It works so far for OKC market data plus IC market data, for instance.
I want to sell this normalization agent service to another quant trader where we share the same problem.
So the other coin traders will think, hey, these features work just fine, this agent works fine, can I just borrow or subscribe this kind of service?
But this subscription service already facing a lot of difficulties today with the current payment system.
In the FIAS, we need KYC, it's a payment rail, banking rail acceptance.
So crypto is, I think, fundamentally built.
for agents versus agent trading because it has identity as an escrow fund.
We have limited authorization control bill within.
We can pay per call rail.
We even have a reputation of system within blockchain.
So I think going forward with AI as the intellectual layer, agents can control the identity and start paying money.
We will literally see more agents to interact with each other than Helmut eventually You know, one thing we've talked about a lot on this show is that crypto is quickly becoming a huge part of the global payments infrastructure, and nowhere is that more obvious than in Asia.
But if you're actually running a remittance company or a payment business, you know that the hard part isn't moving the stablecoins.
It's dealing with local banking partners, compliance, liquidity, and all of the operational headaches that come with sending money into places like India and Southeast Asia.
That's why today's partner is Sabre.
They give payment companies stablecoin-powered infrastructure to collect and make payouts across Asia without having to build all of that complexity themselves.
Yeah, and there's a lot to unpack in all of what you just said there, but I think that's a really interesting perspective on this.
Okay, I have a lot of other questions, but I want to kind of just like drill down a bit more on this agentic agents as the intelligence layer.
What does the product look like in that world?
Because I think, you know, right now when we think of an exchange, it's built for human beings and all these user interfaces and all these products and services are designed specifically for human beings.
But in a world that is primarily driven by agentic operators and AI operating in TradFi and crypto and making these transactions.
Does the exchange just become a wallet?
Does it just become like a part of an API layer that an agent will call when a human speaks to it and tells it to?
Like, how do you see OKEx evolving in that world?
And what does an exchange mean in a world where agentic operators are the ones conducting most of the transactions?
Probably OKEx and also the other company, not just OKEx, but also another SaaS company, for example, like Salesforce, for instance.
this need to starting to become more agent friendly.
So the fundamental infrastructure doesn't change.
So meaning the matching engine needs to be robust, resilience, KYC modules, AML, essential model need to be robust and fulfill all the regulatory requirements.
The product need to have sufficient and comprehensive API features that allow uh people to call and automate it uh to run automated agents or within this those kind of api features and call so uh we will likely to say there will be a disappear in terms of trading interface so training in we we i think okx including the other peers we spend a really a lot of time in terms of user trading interface charting buttons, color tone, etc.
But going forward, including OKEx, we have to think about it in an agent perspective, which means whether or not we have sufficient features for the agents to deploy, whether or not we can support sufficient model, or whether or not we can maintain the balance of optimations private key security and also whether or not we can open up the compliance layer to the agents so that they have the authority that they are allowed to access those kind of products and market.
The OKEx doesn't really change but it's become a really big wrapper layer to serve the future thousands or even millions of agents.
So we need to think about throttle as well and the capacity that how many agents that we can interrupt.
Gotcha.
Okay, so it's no longer just being built with humans in mind and human users, but you also now have to take into account the AI users and making sure you're building things that are friendly for them and that make it OKX attractive as an exchange to AI users.
Really interesting perspective here.
I want to kind of zoom this out a little bit.
really enjoyed this conversation, by the way.
So this is fascinating to me.
But there are a lot of other exchanges, as you said, that are trying to move in this direction of pursuing tokenization, bringing more real world assets on chain, and then also trying to come up with their own solutions for AI agents and this crypto AI integration that we're seeing.
Could you differentiate for me a little bit, just in your perspective, what makes OKEx's strategy on these things stand out or different from maybe a Coinbase or Robinhood or some other incumbents from Wall Street?
Just what makes OKEx's strategy here distinct?
Think about that.
What is the ultimate purpose of tokenization?
The financial market doesn't change.
Still, we got stock.
We got IPO, we got everything with commodities, the exchange is still operating.
The ultimate purpose of tokenization, in my opinion, I think is distributions or interconnected with other ecosystem.
So OKEx, I think is play a role within a distributor for the tokenization product in a global scale.
For example, we distribute a strategy, it's very simple.
We have a really strong breadth of the range of products from exchange, from wallets, from X-layer chain, and not just products, but also different kinds of onshore regulated entity in global scale.
So think about tokenization might be happening in the US.
and we at OKEx are representing, we will become the bridges that distribute this product or integrated this tokenizing product within all of the OKEx ecosystem from central exchange, from apps, from X-layer ecosystem and tailor-made it to the regulated market that allowed it to those users.
So eventually you will see maybe maybe Coinbase or some of our peers may be really focused on some market for instance in US.
Our capability is we distribute through products plus global regulators like a framework.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So the OKEx secret sauce is huge global distribution, but also a huge amount of regulatory compliance and getting access to more jurisdictions and more distribution by being compliant.
That makes a lot of sense there.
And I think that strategy...
And product.
You need to have a really strong diversity of product.
And we put those tokenization instruments into all this product and make sure everyone can use it.
For example, payment product.
a card product, right?
A card product, OKEx card and OKEx pay product.
One of the examples is we're putting stablecoin as a usable balance within some jurisdiction in a card product.
This is a perfect example.
That's how we can distribute a tokenized US trade yield within a day-to-day payment ecosystem, daily life, right?
Using OKEx product plus our regulatory framework.
can never happen in previously right good thing about it yes product is definitely important too okay this is a crypto show i do want to bring this conversation back to crypto and digital assets Tokenization is a big part of all of this, but I think a lot of people in our audience are seeing all these things happening and these new products things being launched, but they're wondering, okay, how does this actually involve things like Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana?
And I would love for you to tie that tie all of this conversation back to some of these blockchain ecosystems and the digital assets and just what your outlook is on that.
The outlook on that would be people that enter the it's two world.
certain things to influence within each other.
Take it for example for our, I think I call it a stock plus memes ecosystem of building blocks within DeFi space.
That's very, to be very, very surprised to me.
But you can see the mechanics look like this.
People want to create certain memes that tie to certain equities, right?
and they put it in a DeFi building blocks.
So people using USDC or LSD, they want to buy those memes.
But however, in order to buy the memes, you have, you subscribe those memes or receive the airdrops in names of the memes.
You have to buy or you have to own those kind of tokenized ads.
So whoever have the authority to ask those, to owns and distribute those kind of tokenized equity.
They're starting to buy more shares in regulated markets, right?
So it looks like MEMS create and other rounds of demand to a regulated stock or a stock or equity list on the regulated exchange.
It's really fun.
So what we imagine here, we can look beyond that.
what will happen is not memes but certain corporate action events, arbitrage safe strategies, new enhancement tokens.
So in order to receive those kind of benefits in defined space, you have to put liquidity into a liquidity pool with a collateral or a tokenized equity.
This subsequently inference.
the other equity in regulated exchanges.
So these two worlds starting to, I think, reinforce each other.
What underlying technologies that we're using?
Ethereum, Solaner, Arbitrums.
So this kind of area in this kind of fundamental blockchain layer and directly benefits from this new area or new flow of capital, I would say.
Okay.
And the other question that naturally follows from this, I think a lot of people are wondering, and this is just your opinion.
You're not speaking for OKEx or anybody.
I just want to know what you think about this.
Where do you think the value from that starts to accrue?
Does it...
you know, collect in some of these DeFi protocols where maybe some of this memetic trading and some of these tokenized assets are going?
Does it go to some of these L1s like Solana, like Ethereum?
Where do you think that value starts to finally accrue as all of this new economy and new tokenized activity moves into crypto and onto crypto rails?
I think it's give us an example that, hey, it's an other level of use scale because people...
used to think it's just another equity, right?
So people were wondering, hey, people are starting to previously, we compared the liquidity of tokenized equity versus traditional equity.
But right now, people are starting to think about, hey, this is merely a collateral.
And with that collateral, I can receive different kinds of airdrops.
So that will be a new wave of innovation and creation and product innovations.
using that mimetic trading model.
MIMS is a start, but how about recycled borrowing and lending using that as collateral.
So tokenized equity treasury will become the fundamental building blocks as a start, where from yield perspective and counterparty underlying perspective.
With that, we will see a lot more innovation product by reference of limited trading.
Okay, so you're saying that mimetic trading is going to just basically bring a whole bunch of new things that we can't anticipate right now, and we still have to kind of see where that goes.
Is that kind of what you're saying there?
We started saying there will be another wave of innovation that subsequently benefits all kind of fundamental layer that we have just mentioned, whether if you're epsilon L1.
So we're receiving new per record high of TVL.
and record high transaction volume and also with a record high of interaction and probably with a new wave of different other dApps compared with the D5 1.0 right so because everything changes today and we'll see a lot more isolated uh element within within DAXes for example that only accept regulated entry and we will see that this kind of Okay, so you're just basically saying there will be a huge wave of innovation, rising tide lifts all boats, and there's going to be a lot of benefit to go around here.
I think that perspective makes a lot of sense.
It sounds to me, Lennox, like you're kind of implying here that you think we've entered a new crypto bull market and that there's a huge wave of new products and new capital coming.
Do you think that crypto has bottomed and do you think we're starting a new bull market?
Is that what you think has happened here?
I'm getting a bit more optimistic.
compared with the last very cycle.
So think about the wave of capital.
The phase one capital, I would say driven by ICO, what we see, right?
Stage two capital, I would say probably driven by stablecoin.
Phase three capital, probably driven by Bitcoin ETF and institutional adoption.
That's what we talked about two years ago.
So right now, probably a new wave of new capital that's starting to interest people.
It's like a tokenization plus composedly defined.
So all the defined protocol, DAXs, layer one chain, layer two chains, starting to update and upgrade their product and features to cope with this new wave of changes and capital.
And of course, regulatory clarity starting to accept tokenization.
Traditional chains starting to build tokenization platform, wrapper.
or different kind of current executions that give a lot more regulatory clarity for institutional access for this kind of product, it will become a new wave of capital flowing to crypto space.
So that's why I think it's a lot more optimistic than before in terms of if you're asking about crypto, whether it's crypto crypto.
All right.
I have a very specific ask for you guys.
Somebody listening to this knows the person running marketing at a crypto or AI company that should be advertising with Milk Road.
We reach more than half a million investors across everything we do and Q4 is filling up.
So don't be the brand that waited too long.
And the cool part about sponsoring the show is this episode is still going to be getting plays months from now.
So send this to them.
Look like a genius and tell them to go to milkroad.com slash sponsor.
Really a pleasure to get you on the show and to share all of your insights about all these major things that are happening.
And like I said, you have a front row seat to what's going on.
So your input is really appreciated.
Thanks for being on the Milk Road Show.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Follow me on Twitter.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for being here.
Linux Live, Global Chief Commercial Officer at OKEx.
Thanks for being on the Milk Road Show.
I really enjoyed it.
Thank you so much.
And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all in the next episode of the Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
Everything you hear on Milk Road is for informational purposes only.
These are our personal opinions, not financial advice.
And we may own some of the investments we talk about.
Always do your own research and make the decisions that are right for you.
See you next time.