Star Xu, the founder of OKX, emphasized the importance of compliance controls in the crypto industry. Xu’s comments come amid a growing focus on regulatory compliance within the sector.
On July 17, 2023, Xu tweeted, “At the current industry environment, all centralized swaps, exchanges, bridges without fully compliance controls including KYC, AML, and others will be high risk in every jurisdiction. Multicoin is the latest example. Protect your crypto yourself.” This statement underscores the potential risks associated with platforms that lack robust compliance measures.
Editor’s Note: It’s believed that Xu intended to reference ‘Multichain’ rather than ‘Multicoin’ in his tweet.
On July 14, 2023, Multichain announced the cessation of its operations due to the detention of its CEO Zhaojun and his sister by Chinese authorities. The team has lost contact with Zhaojun since May 21, and his sister, who was managing day-to-day operations and preserving user assets, was recently taken into custody. The future of the preserved assets is now uncertain. This follows a recent exploit where an attacker drained $130 million from various token bridges.
In a follow-up tweet, Xu revealed that the OKX Centralized Exchange (CEX) team has been proactive in establishing a global standard compliance infrastructure. “OKX CEX team start to build our compliance infrastructure at the global standard before, keep to build,” he wrote. This indicates OKX’s commitment to adhering to regulatory standards and providing a secure platform for its users.
In another tweet, Xu questioned the nature of UniSat Wallet’s newly announced brc20-swap. UniSat Wallet had earlier announced the launch of “brc20-swap, the first-ever Ordinals native swap, floating on top of bitcoin mainnet, utilizing brc20 protocol as its underlying asset infrastructure.” Xu responded to this announcement with a tweet asking, “Is it a centralized swap?” This query suggests Xu’s ongoing concern about the compliance measures of new Oridinals wallet.