Ray Xiao

Investing @OKX_Ventures. Curiosity is the North Star. Technology diffusion is as vital as innovation. Prev @IOSGVC

Opinions are my own.

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

🧵 1/ Beyond the Checkout Page: Who Will Build the Economy for Agentic Commerce?
A deep dive into the battle between human-centric design and machine-native protocols. As AI agents evolve from assistants to autonomous entities, they're reshaping commerce.

Here is the full link of the research: https://t.co/mcRIVtTt9l

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

The future of commerce is here: Agentic Commerce is redefining how we shop, pay, and trust in a machine-driven economy! From AI agents handling purchases to crypto-powered, machine-native payments, we're on the cusp of a revolution. 💸
Read more: https://t.co/6oMdJxRuZt

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

cyberpunky crypto 今天的处境，挺像@cdixon 在19年写过的一篇文章《Strong and weak technologies》讲的：技术分成强形式和弱形式。

这点映射到今天的crypto就是"强crypto"和"弱crypto"。今天弱crypto拥抱了主流，大量从业者放弃了强crypto 也不再相信。

这篇老文章说了类似的事情：很多技术往往成对出现，强形式 vs 弱形式。 强技术从第一性原理出发，按技术本应有的样子设计，不迁就现有世界。一开始看起来奇怪不实用、像玩具，但能改变世界来适应自己。 弱技术是妥协版本，对现有世界更友好、更务实，更像传统形式的延伸。

在Gartner曲线退潮的时候，很多人会从强技术转向弱技术，因为弱技术看起来离主流更近。Dixon当时说这通常是个错误，因为真正定义新时代的总是强技术。

这套观点19年写的时候应该不少人是信的，今天还剩多少真笃定的不好说，况且就算对，世界适应技术周期也许是10-20年一两代人的时间线。

强crypto终将赢/至少能占据一席之地这件事，已经更像极客们的信念，无法论证。不论如何，结论应该是开放的：要么cypherpunk确实是真正的强形式，只是周期还没走完；要么它本来就不是强形式，只是ideology上强、商业上弱到无法自立的形态，会赢的是在强弱光谱里不断找平衡的混合路线。不同代际不同背景的talent应该也会相信不同的剧本。

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

We'll discuss privacy adoption this week with @yrschrade @sergey_nog @randhindi. Stay tuned!

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

Privacy Unlocked: Crypto's Next Frontier for Institutions, Retail & AI

In this institution led cycle, privacy is emerging as one of the real catalysts for mass adoption of onchain finance. For retail, it's quickly becoming the default feature. Meanwhile, the AI & privacy wave hints at an entirely new class of use cases just ahead.

🎯 Why privacy is the driver of the next wave of onchain apps
🏛️ Compliant privacy & institutional use cases
🤖 Where AI × privacy intersect
🔧 The real bottlenecks of embedding privacy across different product layers

🗓️ Date: June 3, 9 PM HKT / 9 AM ET

🎙️ Featuring:
@sergey_nog (@arc)
@yrschrade (@Arcium)
@randhindi (@zama)

hosted by @_RayXiao

Set your reminder below! 👇 https://t.co/0VHuaTXZDZ

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

Unified margin is unquestionably the direction every major trading platform is heading, but across financial history, infrastructure consolidation has never erased the natural segmentation of user behavior. The biggest platform doesn't necessarily own every category.

Institutions want cross asset risk netting and capital efficiency. Retail wants intuitive UX, community culture, and group identity. Perp traders, institutional options investors, and prediction market event bettors operate on completely different mental models. If platforms just commoditize discrete event contracts into "another leveraged perp pair," that won't build lasting retention.

The real alpha sits in vertical moats that nail specific user behaviors. The long term challenge for any trading platform in the next chapter is serving the deeply entrenched stickiness of specific niches on top of a highly standardized clearing engine.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

Perps and prediction markets keep pulling toward each other. On April 21, Polymarket announced it was launching perps, with BTC, NVDA, and gold among the first markets. Two weeks later, Hyperliquid activated HIP-4 outcome contracts on mainnet. On May 25, Hyperliquid extended HIP-4 again, this time giving validators a role in publishing, listing, and settling off-chain event markets, with macro events now in scope.

On the surface, they look nothing alike, one a leveraged continuous position, the other a binary contract priced 0 to 1. But step back and they're doing the same thing: putting a price on future uncertainty. Think of a perp as the leveraged, continuous version of a prediction market. The differences sit in design parameters, maturity, margin, settlement, but the underlying demand is identical. Turn views about the future into something you can market-make, trade, and hedge.

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

@maraoz Disagree. Social engineering attacks are way more annoying than code level hacks, and most cases never even get public exposure.

[Marc Zeller @Marczeller]

It's been a while since global sentiment towards crypto has been that bad.

I said this many times, we're not in 2021/22 end of cycle because this time no SBF/Celsius/Luna. We're in 2018, a slowand lingering despair of "we're not cool anymore" mostly solely due to price not going up.

Back then, when the tourists left, the builders delivered MakerDAO, Compound, SNX, EthLend (Aave) and more with mostly apathetic reception.

It's an exciting time to focus and deliver even if the market will be ungrateful for a while.

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

Crypto is making 'trade everything' borderless.

This is undoubtedly the next chapter of crypto's mass adoption story after stablecoins and payments. The wall between onchain and the real world is coming down, and the next 5 years will prove it.

[X Layer @XLayerOfficial]

https://t.co/3PiIWU41j4

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

RFQ vs CLOB can be boiled down to one question: who profits from your trade. Pool LPs take it (socialized broker); external MMs compete for it (TradFi); or skip the internalization middleman entirely, user trades directly against MMs on the public book (DeFi CLOB).

CLOB camp says RFQ doesn't provide real onchain price discovery or composability. RFQ camp says CLOB's bootstrapping costs are too high for medium and long tailer RWA assets

Both models have their own niches, the endgame is hybrid

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

The onchain RFQ vs CLOB debate dominated CT last week. RFQ in crypto now covers two completely different businesses that happen to share a name.

1. The first is the multi-maker RFQ aggregator. UniswapX, 1inch Fusion, CoW. External fillers, solvers, and MMs compete on private quotes, user takes the best fill. Economically this is what "RFQ" means in TradFi. Uniswap cleared over $1T in 2025 volume (TokenTerminal).
2. The second is a single-counterparty pool with an RFQ-style interface. One internal pool sits on the other side of every trade and hedges offchain. No external maker competition. The business model isn't TradFi RFQ at all, it's Citadel-style retail internalization: Robinhood routes flow to the wholesaler, the wholesaler internalizes, user gets a small price improvement, wholesaler pockets the spread.

Two different economic structures. Multi-maker compresses spread through competition. Single-counterparty captures spread through monopoly pricing plus cross-domain hedging.

And TradFi RFQ doesn't actually work the way most onchain pitches imply. The dealer's whole business is sitting on balance sheet, and they don't just warehouse and wait for the offsetting RFQ. They internalize against future client flow, offset in the interdealer market, hedge piecewise across correlated assets, whatever the book and the day call for. The whole loop stays off the public book and dealer PnL is compensation for carrying inventory. A maker who hedges back-to-back on a CLOB the moment a quote fills is just running a single-maker CLOB clone.

The onchain versions split along these lines too. Multi-maker inherits the competitive pricing but most makers hedge immediately rather than warehouse. Single-counterparty is its own thing entirely: retail internalization, ported onchain.

[avi @avizurlo]

https://t.co/8aO7KXyKpe

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

hey we are here now

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

@cyntro_py well said! so cool

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

@OKX_Ventures Trade everything on chain, forever

[Axis @AxisFDN]

18.2% net APY. $32.5m TVL. 6 weeks of private beta.

The latest Axis tear sheet - published directly to the timeline for everyone, not just LPs.

Uncorrelated to the market. Delta-neutral, synchronizing prices globally.

Full report in thread.

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

Huge respect to C4 @code4rena @sockdrawermoney and the whole security researcher community.

I still remember one of my favorite panels, people are debating about the community driven security model. Spicy, but also love that energy we had.
https://t.co/aQ3lx3Ntxv

[Code4rena @code4rena]

After careful consideration, we’ve made the decision to wind down @code4rena. This community has meant a great deal to everyone who has been part of building it, and sharing this news is not easy.

[Ray Xiao @_RayXiao]

We've been tracking the AI commerce shift at OKX since early last year and wrote about an article about how we believe agent commerce will rewrite the foundations of business: https://t.co/mcRIVtTt9l

The biggest shift in commerce is moving from the checkout page to the intent layer: from clicks to intents, from executors to delegators.

The closest point to the customer is no longer the storefront or the app. It’s the AI agent that holds the user’s intent.

Value will accrue not to whoever owns the traffic, but to whoever owns the protocol agents transact on.

Card rails were built for humans. Open protocols, native wallets, and programmable rules are the stack built for machines.

This is where crypto stops being an alternative. We believe it will become the default substrate for agentic commerce.

APP (Agent Payments Protocol) is our big move in shipping the thesis.

It enables agents to:

• Discover and engage with each other
• Agree on terms and pricing
• Execute payments across different models (one-time, streaming, escrow)
• Complete and settle work end-to-end without constant human coordination

In that sense, this is less about “payments” in isolation, and more about infrastructure for agentic commerce.

Just as open protocols shaped the early internet, we think similar primitives are needed for an AI-native economy.

Read white paper here:

https://t.co/PpFQDqOEvF

[OKX @okx]

https://t.co/iVuKSD6Xgi

[Tushar Jain @tushar_jain]

0/ DeFi needs circuit breakers and other safety mechanisms which slow down large transactions and provide time for reaction. Borrow lend protocols should not allow a new user to show up with a $300M position and take out a loan against it immediately. Some ideas:

[OKX中文 @okxchinese]

https://t.co/EtUisaIoaC

[OKX中文 @okxchinese]

https://t.co/SIjAthZoRk