OKX Brand Guidelines: OKEx in 2017, a 2022 Rename & a Cyberpunk McLaren Livery

An exchange that grew out of an earlier one.

OKX began as a sister to an older business. English Wikipedia says it started from Okcoin, a cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2013 by Star Xu, and that the platform expanded internationally and launched as OKEx in 2017 in Hong Kong. Bloomberg, in a report republished by Claims Journal in February 2025, also describes the exchange as launched in 2017 by Star Xu, originally named OKEx, and rebranded to OKX in 2022.

Its base has moved. English Wikipedia says the company was first headquartered in Beijing, and that in October 2021 it announced it would stop serving customers in mainland China because of new regulations, after which its founding team moved away. Over the next years it took on a run of national licences and offices, according to the same source: a provisional virtual asset licence in Dubai in July 2022, an application for a virtual asset licence in Hong Kong in March 2023, and a company incorporated in France in April 2023, with plans for a European hub in Paris.

The corporate structure is spread across several entities. When Hypebeast wrote about the brand in September 2022, it called OKX a Seychelles-based exchange; Bloomberg in 2025 named the exchange owner as the Seychelles-based Aux Cayes FinTech Co., which outside counsel for OKX described as one of many OKX affiliates. In April 2025, English Wikipedia says, OKX relaunched operations in the United States and moved its headquarters to San Jose, California.

Three letters, a token and a racing livery.

In 2022 the name changed. The old name, OKEx, became OKX — three capitals in place of a mixed-case word — and the change is dated to 2022 by both English Wikipedia and Bloomberg. The company’s own about page now presents OKX as a cryptocurrency exchange offering spot, margin, futures, options, lending and on-chain services, and says it serves millions of users in over 100 countries; those are its own figures.

The exchange has a token of its own. OKB is the native utility token of the OKX exchange, English Wikipedia says, and in 2025 the company announced an overhaul of the token’s economic model under which OKB became the sole native gas token of X Layer, its blockchain platform. The website also carries a separate OKX Wallet for on-chain use, a Proof of Reserves page and a card and payments section, according to its own navigation.

The brand also appears in sport. Hypebeast reported in September 2022 that OKX was the primary partner of the McLaren Formula 1 Team, and that the two had made a cyberpunk-inspired “Future Mode” livery for the 2022 Singapore and Japanese Grands Prix. The scheme added flourishes of pink and engine illustrations to McLaren’s papaya orange, ran on the MCL36 cars and on the drivers’ race suits, and was co-designed by the two companies, according to an OKX statement quoted by the magazine. The partnership continued: McLaren’s own website titled its preview of the 2026 São Paulo Grand Prix “Presented by OKX.”

Away from racing, English Wikipedia says the Tribeca Festival signed OKX as its top sponsor in June 2022, with exclusivity in categories including cryptocurrency exchanges and NFT marketplaces.

The website itself is laid out as a catalogue of services. Its navigation groups products under headings for buying crypto, markets, trading, earning, institutional services and learning, with separate pages for proof of reserves, fees and listing applications, and a learning section of guides on how to buy crypto and crypto news. In 2026 it also offers trading in stocks, ETFs and commodities using crypto, and tools for building trading agents, according to the same navigation.

How crypto exchanges present themselves.

Crypto exchanges sell access to something customers never hold in their hands, so their brands are carried by screens, numbers and paperwork. Across the category, wordmarks appear in black, yellow, blue and bright neon tones, and the app screens that exchanges publish in stores and on their own sites put price charts, order books and coin icons at the centre of the picture.

Listing pages form a second layer. Each coin or token an exchange supports gets a page of its own, with a ticker symbol, a chart and a short description, and new listings are announced as news. Alongside them sit proof-of-reserves pages, where an exchange publishes snapshots comparing the assets it holds with what it owes customers, and security pages that explain how funds are stored, for example in internet-connected hot wallets and offline cold storage. The Journal of Accountancy noted in November 2026 that such a proof is a self-prepared, point-in-time comparison rather than an audit.

Regulation shapes the look as much as marketing does. Footers and legal pages list licences and registrations country by country, and the same brand can offer different products, or none, depending on where a visitor lives. Under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets rules, exchanges name the national supervisor that authorised them, and a market exit reaches customers as a dated notice with deadlines for withdrawals.

Two more channels carry the names further. Sports sponsorships put exchange logos on football shirts, tournament boards and arena signs, far from any trading screen. Help centres do the quieter work: guides to identity checks, deposits, fees and withdrawals, written for people new to the product. The guides in this collection look at how individual exchanges put those parts together.

A guilty plea, then a return to the United States.

The company’s largest legal matter came in the United States. On 24 February 2025, Bloomberg reported, OKX pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to a single felony count of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, under an agreement between US prosecutors and Aux Cayes FinTech. The company admitted that from about 2018 to early 2024 its platform handled US-based transactions without registering as a money services business, and it paid penalties in fines and forfeitures. Outside counsel for OKX said the settlement contained no charges of money laundering. Two months later, in April 2025, OKX relaunched its US operations, English Wikipedia says.

The same Bloomberg report describes OKX as one of the largest crypto exchanges by daily trading volume, and the company’s own website calls it one of the leading exchanges by trading volume; both are claims about scale, not about the brand. The about page states a vision that crypto will reshape money, the financial system, the internet and society, and a mission to “promote and advance crypto globally.”

For a design guide, OKX shows how a rename can be as small as dropping one letter: OKEx became OKX, three capitals now used on its website, a McLaren livery and a festival sponsorship. Compare Binance, another exchange launched in 2017, and Bybit, another exchange in this series. For this guide we use black, off-white and a lime with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep OKX’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.