On January 24, 2026, OKX's "New Year's Eve Dinner" event was held as scheduled. For OKX, the "New Year's Eve Dinner" has entered its second year and has gradually become an important annual node connecting the team, the community, and partners. It is not just a "reunion dinner," but more like an end-to-end alignment of industry trends, product roadmaps, and community consensus: OKX aims to clearly explain the things that are "truly going to be implemented" and solidly execute the things that "can be accomplished together."
At the event, Zakk, Head of OKX Wallet, systematically shared the core methodology of OKX Web3 products and the key directions for the next few years: rooted in security and self-custody, bridged by product experience, and driven by ecosystem and infrastructure, ultimately pushing crypto assets from "professional tools" to "daily life."
Pushing Web3 Experience to the "Extreme"
In Zakk's explanation, the "extreme Web3 experience" is not a slogan, but a set of verifiable, sustainable, and iterable product standards—firstly, security and self-custody, and secondly, "leaving complexity to the system and simplicity to the user." He emphasized the underlying principle of self-custody: Not your key, Not your asset, which is the long-term criterion for OKX Wallet's design and trade-offs.
More "down-to-earth" was his use of personal experience to explain why security capabilities must be built into the product: for example, the common on-chain "similar address poisoning" scam, which quickly generates highly similar addresses after a large transfer is completed and initiates a small transfer, inducing users to "copy the wrong address" when copying historical records. In response, OKX Wallet has clearly identified "similar address scams" as a key risk in its official security content and provided protective measures such as similar address prompts on the transfer page and address labeling. The core goal is to reduce irreversible losses caused by "misreading a single character."
On the proposition that "self-custody must be more secure and also easier to use," Zakk further broke down OKX Wallet's capabilities into two parts:
First, the "security and self-custody" system, including open source, third-party audits, and continuous security governance; he mentioned that OKX's self-custody system adheres to open source and multi-party audits, which is a core principle. This aligns with the roadmap disclosed on OKX's official "Security Audit Report Collection" page: OKX Wallet's front-end, mobile-end, and SDK components have undergone third-party audits, with relevant reports and audit scopes publicly summarized.
Second, "parsing and aggregation," which involves converting fragmented on-chain information into an integrated experience that users can directly understand and operate. Zakk provided a set of core capability metrics at the event: support for about 140 public chains, aggregation of about 500 DEX protocols, and emphasized that this is not a simple stacking but aims to improve transaction speed and quotation quality through smart routing and global deployment.
Three Product Lines Pointing to One Goal: "Easy to Use" and "Accessible to Everyone"
The information density of this "New Year's Eve Dinner" was reflected in three key products: Smart Account, CeDeFi, and OKX Pay. These three lines are advancing in parallel, pointing to the same goal: making Web3 products "smooth for professionals" while also ensuring "easy for beginners to use."
First, the OKX Wallet Smart Account. Zakk provided a clear generational division of industry wallet evolution: the early stage was based on trust with "end-side direct interaction with the chain, open source and auditable"; followed by a stage of "automatic parsing, more user-friendly experience"; and the third-generation wallet that OKX is exploring aims to integrate "point technologies" such as AA, MPC, and seedless recovery into a practical, integrated product capability, with the core being the introduction of stronger automated trading and strategy capabilities under the premise of self-custody.
The Smart Account emphasizes using TEE to provide an "encrypted vault" level of isolation and protection for private keys and bringing advanced trading capabilities (such as limit orders, take-profit, and stop-loss) that were previously more common on centralized platforms into the self-custody experience. Zakk particularly emphasized the direction of "intent verification": ensuring that user command intent is verified on the client side to avoid tampering when passing through the service layer, with plans to promote open source and drive industry standardization.
The second line is CeDeFi. Zakk's judgment is very "trend-oriented": he believes that 2026 may be the "year of the novice user," as more regional regulatory frameworks are established and stablecoin scale continues to expand, the market will need a more widely accepted product form—it could be Pay, a wallet, or a new entry point connecting CEX and DEX. The first critical product OKX is building is a CeDeFi wallet form for exchange users, allowing them to "embrace the on-chain": based on the TEE architecture, achieving "more decentralized and without needing a mnemonic phrase," and enabling CEX and DEX to work synergistically within the same framework, with plans to expand more on-chain asset types (including Meme, RWA, etc.) in the future.
The third line is OKX Pay. Zakk positioned it at the event as a key product to "embrace hundreds of millions of users" and proposed a very everyday product vision: further integrating payment and DeFi, making it possible for crypto products to integrate into daily life—only then can the industry break through the long-term ceiling of its circle.
X Layer and OKX Web3 Ecosystem: The Foundation for Continuous Advancement
If wallets and payments solve the "entry and scenarios," then X Layer solves "speed, cost, and scalability." Zakk was very direct in positioning X Layer at the event: it must first fulfill its "historical responsibility" by solidifying the technical foundation to be responsible to the community in the long term; and summarized the current stage as the "foundation for continuous advancement."
For the three-step process of the "foundation," Zakk provided a more engineering-oriented path at the event: the first step is solid technology and long-term sustainable performance; the second step is to "harden" infrastructure such as Swap and DeFi, making users willing to put real money into on-chain interactions; the third step is to form a combination around payment infrastructure (cards, Pay, etc.), enabling wallets, DApps, payments, and chain resources to work in parallel and synergistically.
In the official description of the upgraded performance, X Layer can achieve 5,000 TPS after the PP upgrade, with a block time of about 400ms and near-zero transaction costs.
What really heated up the audience was "how to make the ecosystem run." During the Q&A session, in response to community questions about the Meme ecosystem and the implementation of support funds, Zakk provided a longer-term answer: rather than relying on constant "hype" to create short-term heat, it is more important to establish a sufficiently large project pool and incubation mechanism, allowing the ecosystem to naturally proliferate like the "AI Season" of the past. Demo Days will also be集中 presented in the future, and fund support will be more transparently implemented after projects and products are judged by the community. At the same time, he clearly welcomed more track-specific applications to grow on X Layer: from Perp DEX and prediction markets to RWA, stablecoins, payments, and AI, the space is far more than just "trading infrastructure."
Moving Towards a New Cycle Where Hundreds of Millions of Users "Use It"
Zakk positioned "stablecoins moving towards a trillion-scale" as an important era anchor at the event. His judgment is not based on a single factor but on the rising infrastructure status of stablecoins in the global financial system. As stablecoins gradually become a universal carrier for cross-border payments, on-chain transactions, and value settlement, more universal, lower-threshold product forms that balance security and recoverability are becoming key to meeting real demand.
For global crypto ecosystem builders and participants, what truly matters is whether technology, products, and the ecosystem can be advanced together: security must be able to combat real on-chain risks, the experience must be able to onboard more new users, and the ecosystem must provide builders with space, a stage, and clear incentive mechanisms to participate. OKX will continue in an open and pragmatic manner, inviting users, developers, and ecosystem partners to together push Web3 from "usable" to "easy to use, commonly used, and accessible to everyone."
