The Bitcoin Shift That Will Change Markets Forever | Haider Rafique

**Scott Melker** (0:00)
People in crypto talk about tokenization like it's going to happen in the distant future. But Haider Rafique from OKX says it's coming a lot faster than people think. In this discussion, we get into why the old financial system may be on borrowed time.

**Haider Rafique** (0:14)
Look, there's enough case studies on when companies don't innovate, they don't welcome change, they get obsolete, you just look at the streaming business or Blockbuster is a great example of it.

**Scott Melker** (0:25)
Why OKX partnering with ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, could be one of the clearest signs yet that Wall Street and Crypto are about to collide, and why the next phase of markets may be about bringing stocks, futures and everything else on chain, making them tradable 24-7 around the world. We also talk about how AI agents could soon be managing portfolios, moving money and building financial apps with almost no human input.

**Haider Rafique** (0:50)
We're probably going to launch a new AI or agentic product almost, if not every week, every two or three weeks. Most of the company is going to end up running with agentic tools, with people monitoring these tools.

**Scott Melker** (1:02)
Through all of that, one huge question hangs over the entire conversation. If everything becomes tokenized, programmable and always on, where does Bitcoin fit? This one is a deep look at the future of finance, AI, tokenized equities, crypto regulation and the next evolution of global markets.
What do you make of this market? It's been mayhem.

**Haider Rafique** (1:46)
I don't know. I don't know, yeah.

**Scott Melker** (1:49)
You usually have like strong conviction and idea of where things are going, and even myself, I could see anything happening at this point.

**Haider Rafique** (1:56)
It's true. It reminds me a little bit of the COVID days, when there was a bit more fear in the market, but that didn't last too long during COVID. I feel like this may last a little longer.

**Scott Melker** (2:11)
Yeah. I mean, I think markets in general are exceptionally confusing. There was a couple of weeks ago and the S&P was at an all time high, and the fear and greed index on stocks was like a four. It's like the most fearful the market had ever been, but with it at an all time high, and I think that pretty much sums it all up. But I mean, everything's trading like a risk asset now.

**Haider Rafique** (2:30)
It is.

**Scott Melker** (2:31)
Oil, gold, silver, they're all just mean stocks.

**Haider Rafique** (2:34)
It might as well.

**Scott Melker** (2:36)
Okay. So speaking of mean stocks, then obviously you guys presumably have a roadmap that's going to be tokenizing and trading everything, right? So OKX obviously has been at the forefront of all of those products, and you're making a move in the United States. So what kind of behavior are you seeing, I guess, on the exchange that would give us more information on what people are looking to trade and how the market is behaving?

**Haider Rafique** (3:01)
You know, it's fascinating.
The parallels of when every crypto exchange is sort of on the same trajectory, so to speak. Everyone's trying to build the everything app. And it started with the super app concept a few years ago. I think you and I were talking about it. I think we were in Singapore. And you fast forward to today. And I think when you look at the top five exchanges, everyone seems to have the same strategy, which is around two main things as we see a backdrop of market softening in crypto. One is the idea of tokenization. And the other is agentic tools and how agentic AI can add more value to the services we provide customers. I think on OKX, we're of course pursuing both. You probably saw the announcement. We didn't say much about tokenized assets before this announcement, because the reality is we were working on this and it was too premature to say anything because it really determines the strategy of the company. How do we build this out? Do we build it out in the synthetic form that a lot of other companies are doing it? Or do we focus on issuer based tokenized assets? And naturally, I think you know a lot about our company. We tend to build native technology. And our preference has always been, if we're going to add tokenized assets, at least the majority of it should be issuer based. We may have cases or use cases where we choose to have sort of the synthetic version of an asset, but the preference is always issuer based token.