Setting a new standard for crypto account security

By Erald Ghoos, CEO of OKX Europe

Today, we launch OKX Shield in Europe: up to €500,000 in account protection, with no subscription or activation fee. We're taking greater responsibility for customer protection, and putting our own money behind it.

Europe has spent years building some of the world's most sophisticated financial consumer protections. And consumers still lost billions to fraud last year.

The latest EBA and ECB data show €4.2 billion in payment fraud across Europe in 2024, up from €3.5 billion in 2023.

This is a problem showing up across every part of the financial system: criminals increasingly target the person holding the money rather than the institution protecting it. Banks haven't eliminated fraud after decades of trying, and we won't eliminate it either. Where there's money, someone will try to take it. The real question is whether crypto platforms are prepared to raise the standards of protection our customers deserve.

We think the answer has to be yes.

Millions of people now use digital asset platforms for things that used to sit exclusively with banks and brokers: holding assets, transferring value, making payments, investing, accessing markets. The line between "a crypto app" and "a person's broader financial life" is getting harder to draw with each passing year.

As that usage grows, the standards around it have to grow too. Traditional finance built its authentication, fraud-detection and reimbursement frameworks over decades, and crypto is still catching up on that maturity curve. We don't think crypto companies need to wait to close that gap before raising their own bar. Someone has to raise the standard the rest of the industry works toward, and we'd rather be the one raising it than the one waiting for it.

That's the thinking behind OKX Shield.

OKX Shield gives customers financial support if an unauthorized third party takes over their OKX account and transfers their assets.

Every European OKX customer can get immediate protection of up to €100,000 simply by activating OKX Shield's security settings, no extra charge, no VIP tier required. Protection rises to €250,000 for VIP tiers 1 through 3, and €500,000 for qualifying VIP 4+ customers. Stronger account protection belongs in the service customers already receive, whether they're a first-time user or our highest tier.

Customers deserve to understand exactly how their assets are protected, because each safeguard is doing a different job.

OKX is authorized under MiCA. Customer funds are held separately from OKX's own funds, and we maintain 1:1 reserves, publishing monthly Proof of Reserves reports so customers can verify their balances are included for the assets each report covers.

OKX Shield adds a further layer on top of that, at the individual-account level. It's built to defend against account takeovers, including credential phishing, malware and SIM swaps, where someone else gains control of an account and moves assets out of it without authorization.

OKX Shield brings your security checks into one place, so you can see what's complete and what still needs attention.

OKX Shield recommends settings and security measures to protect yourself. Complete the steps and you're opted in: enable a passkey, switch on large withdrawal protection, block web withdrawals, and turn on transaction verification. OKX Shield also checks the health of your linked devices, keeping your OKX app updated and your devices free of malware, rooting or jailbreaking. If something needs fixing, OKX Shield will walk you through it.

Once activated, you can see your protection status and exactly how much cover you have. Keep the required safeguards in place, and that protection stays active.

An account takeover happens when someone else gains unauthorized control of an account and moves its assets to a wallet the owner doesn't control, for example, a customer enters their login details on a fake website by mistake, and a scammer uses them to access the account from another device and attempt an unusual transfer.

With OKX Shield's security settings active, attempts like this are unlikely to succeed: the routes into an account, and the routes to moving money out of it without authorization, are locked down. And for extra peace of mind, if the worst does happen anyway, we back that protection with up to €500,000 for qualifying customers.

OKX Shield is designed around transfers made by someone who has taken over an account, not payments a customer makes or approves themselves.

To be clear about what OKX Shield is and isn't: it's not deposit insurance, and it isn't the same as bank-account protection, digital assets and bank deposits sit under different legal frameworks, and we're not claiming OKX Shield replicates them. What we are saying is that customers shouldn't have to wait for crypto to fully close that gap before getting meaningfully better protection today, and we're backing that with our own funds.

MiCA gave Europe a common regulatory framework for crypto, and that matters. But regulation sets a minimum, it was never meant to be the finish line. Competition is what pushes an industry past the minimum, and we think security and consumer protection should be one of the places crypto companies compete hardest.

The best outcome for this industry isn't every company meeting the regulatory floor. It's every company competing to protect customers better than the last one did.

With OKX Shield, we're putting a financial commitment behind the security measures we ask our customers to maintain. We don't think this makes crypto equivalent to traditional finance, the two still sit under different frameworks, with different protections. What it does is set a new gold standard for what a crypto platform should provide, and we believe the rest of the industry should follow.