Crypto exchange OKX launched a standalone app on Tuesday that lets users convert more than 50 local currencies into U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins, as the company tries to expand its offerings beyond just being an exchange.
OKX Money, which went live at the company’s OKX Now Product event in Singapore, is aimed at emerging markets in Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. OKX argues that currency swings, limited banking access, and foreign-exchange fees in those regions make it difficult to “protect savings and spend globally.”
“The key gap for people and institutions is settlement,” Haider Rafique, OKX’s global managing partner, tells Fortune. He specifically cites two friction points: a small business shouldn’t wait days for a bank to settle a payment and a traveler shouldn’t have a credit limit frozen by pending hotel deposits.
“I grew up in Pakistan,” he says. “I still have all the receipts of my mom and dad sending me money through Western Union,” along with the memory of the fees paid from their “hard-earned savings.”
OKX Money will allow customers to hold three dollar-backed stablecoins: Paxos’s USDG, Circle’s USDC, and Tether’s USDT. According to OKX, the platform offers up to 10% annual yield on eligible USDG balances, virtual and physical cards with no foreign-exchange markup, and referral rewards.
Compared to legacy technologies, “crypto has one moat: We are technologically more advanced than traditional finance, whether it’s money or markets,” Rafique says.
OKX Money is the latest launch in a series of new products by the cryptocurrency exchange, sparked in part by a March funding round with Intercontinental Exchange. The owner of the New York Stock Exchange invested in OKX in a deal that valued the cryptocurrency exchange at $25 billion. (The total investment was undisclosed, but Bloomberg reported the figure to be roughly $20 million).
On Sunday, the OKX-ICE joint venture–co-chaired by former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo—filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a separate platform for round-the-clock trading of more than 60 tokenized U.S. stocks.
In recent weeks, OKX also introduced an account-protection program, named OKX Shield. In addition to security safeguards, Shield promises to reimburse up to $100,000 for regular users, and up to $500,000 for its highest class of VIP users, in the event of a third-party takeover. The launch comes as crypto platforms have lost an estimated $2.7 billion to hacks this year, according to security firm CertiK, including nearly $388 million stolen from rival exchange Bitget last month through a vulnerability in a third-party security product.
Roughly 97% of global stablecoin market value is tied to the U.S. dollar, a dominance drawing attention in Washington—where officials hope dollar-backed tokens will fuel demand for U.S. assets—and beyond, where several economies are exploring their own alternatives.
“Every nation should be thinking about this technology,” Rafique says. “But the question is: What is the world willing to put their money towards?” He says he would welcome an Asian rival to the dollar stablecoin: “If there’s an Asia-based, fiat-pegged stablecoin that has stability, people will absolutely trust it.” In particular, he cites a Singapore-dollar-based stablecoin as something he’d be interested in.
Rafique sees the crypto industry at an “inflection point.” Even as Bitcoin has rebounded, he says, liquidity in the altcoin market “is just not there.” Consumers in markets like Venezuela and Turkey once “YOLO-ed” into crypto to hedge inflation and chase fast-rising assets
Yet now, with access to U.S. markets, energy markets, and pre-IPO price exposure, Rafique says emerging market investors are asking a different question: “Do I really need to bet on the next ape coin?”
