OKX just handed a board seat to Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor whose administration wrote the BitLicense back in 2014. The exchange, ranked fourth largest in the world by volume, has been trying to land that very license for more than a decade and still doesn't have one.
The New York Department of Financial Services register tells the story plainly. Coinbase is on it. Gemini is on it. Mastercard and MoonPay are on it. OKX is not. The irony of chasing a license for eleven-plus years while watching competitors collect approvals has never been a great look, and OKX's compliance history makes it worse. Between 2018 and early 2024, US customers ran more than $1 trillion in transactions through the platform, even though OKX's own policy at the time barred Americans from using it. One employee told a US user in 2023 to "just put a random country and it should go through." The company later called this a "legacy compliance gap."
A pattern of strategic hires around the same regulator
Cuomo is the most prominent name in OKX's BitLicense push, but he isn't the first piece on the board. Bloomberg had already reported that Cuomo, while serving as a paid adviser to OKX during a federal probe, encouraged the exchange to bring in Linda Lacewell, a former NYDFS superintendent, the exact agency that issues the BitLicense. Lacewell joined, and by March 2025, five weeks after OKX entered a guilty plea, she was named chief legal officer. The company said her promotion would "bolster our global regulatory presence."
The BitLicense has never been an easy credential to acquire. When Kraken looked at the application in 2015, it publicly described the license as "a creature so foul, so cruel that not even Kraken possesses the courage or strength to face its nasty, big, pointy teeth" before pulling out of New York entirely. Fortune noted that in the license's first three years, only four companies cleared the process.
OKX founder Star Xu framed Cuomo's appointment as a step toward building "the world's most trustworthy large digital asset exchange." The practical stakes became clearer in June 2026, when Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, announced a 50/50 joint venture with OKX, co-chaired by Cuomo. That venture plans to operate a US broker-dealer and futures firm, pending, in the company's own words, "certain regulatory approvals." What those approvals might include is not hard to work out.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.
