Seven Years of Detours
On Mingxing Xu's timeline, the first seven years were all detours.
After graduating in applied physics from the University of Science and Technology Beijing in 2006, he entered graduate school at Renmin University and then dropped out to start a company—motivated by Jack Ma's story—and built Wantuan.com, a group-buying website. This was the bloodiest period of the “hundreds of group-buying sites” war; he had no differentiated advantage, and the project died.
After the failure, he did something many founders do not: he went back to being an engineer. He briefly joined Yahoo China on search technology, filling in real internet engineering experience.
That same year he helped found Docin, a document-sharing site, and eventually became its CTO, staying for six years. Those six years filled in more than technical knowledge: they added product, team, fundraising, and scaling experience—the full toolkit actually required of a chief executive.
Selling His Home at 27, Then Stopping Months Later
In 2012 he left Docin and sold his home to invest in restaurant O2O. A few months later, he stopped.
This is the easiest section to skip and the most valuable one on the timeline. It was not simply a “failure,” but deliberate loss cutting plus confirmation of his capability radius: he tried offline, operations-heavy work, found that it was not his strength, and admitted it within months instead of burning all the money.
This action followed the pattern of how he handled the failure at 21—after a failed startup, do not force another one; return to the place where you are strongest.
2013: Getting It Right Once
At age 28, he founded OKCoin.
About three months after launch, it raised a $10 million Series A led by Ceyuan Ventures. The move from serial founder to the person in charge of a crypto trading platform took only a few months.
On the surface, it looks like he simply “caught Bitcoin.” In reality, seven years of accumulated ability were repriced in a new market: his physics and mathematics foundation, Yahoo's engineering training, and six years as Docin's CTO could all be used directly in a matching engine. He did not change careers; he moved old capabilities into a new market whose rules had not yet been fully written.
From Exchange to Infrastructure
After China's 2017 ban, international business continued through entities such as OKEx. During this period he publicly stated at one point that he had no shareholder, legal-entity, or director relationship with OKEx—the organizational and power relationships were not transparent at the time, laying a mine for later.
The mine went off in October 2020: a private-key holder cooperated with an investigation by Chinese police, and OKEx suspended withdrawals for about five weeks. Media reports said that person was Mingxing Xu. An exchange halted for five weeks because of one person is the clearest demonstration of key-person risk.
In 2022, OKEx was renamed OKX, and the business was restructured from a matching platform into an infrastructure portfolio combining trading, wallets, self-custody, and on-chain payments. In February 2025, Aux Cayes Fintech, the entity operating OKX, pleaded guilty in the United States to unlicensed money transmission and paid more than $504 million in fines and forfeiture. Note that the guilty party was the company entity; the Department of Justice announcement did not announce a personal guilty plea by Mingxing Xu. This must be strictly distinguished from CZ's personal criminal plea.
The Boundary of Engineering Rationality
Looking at the three people together, Mingxing Xu is the most “ordinary” type of founder: no dramatic immigration route, no $4.56 million lunch, just a person trained in the sciences who failed, made up for gaps, failed again, cut losses, and then spent thirteen years in the direction where he was strongest.
But his story also makes one point: technical rationality does not automatically generate clear governance structures. Opaque organizational relationships, a private key concentrated in one person's hands, and global expansion running ahead of compliance are not problems engineering ability can solve; eventually, each sends a bill.