Bringing Web3 into "Everyday Life": Zakk Explains the "Next Phase" of OKX Web3

On January 24, 2026, the OKX "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 milestone connecting the team, 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 hopes to clarify what needs to be "truly implemented" and solidify what can be "done together."

At the event, Zakk, the head of OKX Wallet, shared the core methodology and key directions for OKX Web3 products in the coming years: rooted in security and self-custody, bridged by product experience, and propelled by ecosystem and infrastructure, ultimately pushing crypto assets from "professional tools" to "everyday life."

Achieving the "Ultimate" Web3 Experience

In Zakk's explanation, "ultimate Web3 experience" is not just a slogan, but a set of verifiable, sustainably iterative product standards—first is security and self-custody, and second is "leave the complexity to the system and the simplicity to the user." He emphasized the underlying principle of self-custody: Not your key, Not your asset, which serves as a long-term guideline for the design and trade-offs of OKX Wallet.

More "down-to-earth" is his personal experience explaining why security capabilities must be built into the product: for example, the common on-chain "similar address poisoning," which can quickly generate highly similar addresses and initiate small transfers after you complete a large transfer, tempting users to "copy wrong" when duplicating historical records. In response, OKX Wallet has clearly identified "similar address scams" as one of the key risks in its official security content, providing protective ideas such as similar address prompts and address labels on the transfer page, with the core goal of reducing irreversible losses caused by "misreading a single character."

On the proposition of "self-custody being safer and easier to use," Zakk further broke down the capabilities of OKX Wallet into two parts:

First, the "security and self-custody" system, which includes 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 as core principles. This aligns with the roadmap disclosed on OKX's official "Security Audit Report Collection" page: the front end, mobile end, SDK components, etc., of OKX Wallet have undergone third-party audits, and relevant reports and audit scopes are publicly summarized.

Second, "analysis and aggregation," which means transforming fragmented on-chain information into an integrated experience that users can directly understand and operate. Zakk provided a set of core capability indicators on-site: supporting about 140 public chains and aggregating around 500 DEX protocols, emphasizing that this is not just simple stacking, but aims to enhance transaction speed and quote quality through smart routing and global deployment.

Three Product Lines Pointing to One Goal: "User-Friendly" and "Accessible to Everyone"

The information density of this "New Year's Eve Dinner" is concentrated 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 "convenient for professionals" while also ensuring "ease of use for beginners."

First is the Smart Account of OKX Wallet. Zakk provided a clear generational evolution of industry wallets: the early stage was based on "direct interaction with the chain on the client side, open-source and auditable" as the trust foundation; then it entered a phase of "automatic parsing and more user-friendly experience"; and the third-generation wallet that OKX is exploring aims to integrate "single-point technologies" like AA, MPC, and mnemonic-free into a practical, unified product capability, with the core focus on introducing stronger automated trading and strategy capabilities under the premise of self-custody.

The smart account emphasizes providing "cryptographic vault" level isolation and protection for private keys using TEE, 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": allowing users' command intentions to be verified on the client side to avoid tampering during service layer processing, and 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 could be the "year of the novice user," as more regional regulatory frameworks are implemented and the scale of stablecoins continues to expand, the market will need a more widely accepted product form—it can be Pay, a wallet, or a new entry connecting CEX and DEX. The first key product that OKX is building is a CeDeFi wallet aimed at exchange users, allowing them to "embrace on-chain": based on TEE architecture, achieving "more decentralization without requiring a mnemonic," and enabling CEX and DEX to work together within the same framework, with plans to expand to more on-chain asset types (including Meme, RWA, etc.) in the future.

The third line is OKX Pay. Zakk positioned it as a key product for "embracing hundreds of millions of users," proposing a very everyday product vision: further integrating payments and DeFi, making it possible for crypto products to blend into daily life—only in this way can the industry have the opportunity to break through the long-standing ceiling of circles.

X Layer and OKX Web3 Ecosystem: The Foundation for Continuous Progress

If wallets and payments solve the "entry and scenario," then X Layer addresses "speed, cost, and scalability." Zakk directly positioned X Layer on-site: 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 progress."

For the "foundation," Zakk provided a more engineering-oriented path: the first step is to solidify technology and long-term sustainable performance; the second step is to "harden" the infrastructure for Swap, DeFi, etc., so that users are willing to put real money on-chain for interaction; the third step is to form a combination around payment infrastructure (cards, Pay, etc.) so that wallets, DApps, payments, and chain resources can work in parallel.

In the official description of the upgraded performance, X Layer can achieve 5,000 TPS, approximately 400ms block time, and nearly zero transaction costs after the PP upgrade.

What really excited the audience was "how to get the ecosystem running." In the Q&A session, when Zakk faced community questions about the Meme ecosystem and the implementation of support funds, he proposed a more long-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, with Demo Days to be presented in the future, and making funding support more transparently implemented after projects and products are evaluated by the community. At the same time, he also clearly welcomed more track-type applications to grow on X Layer: from Perp DEX, prediction markets to RWA, stablecoins, payments, and AI, the space is far beyond just "trading infrastructure."

Moving Towards a New Cycle for Hundreds of Millions of Users to "Use"

Zakk highlighted "stablecoins reaching a trillion scale" as an important era anchor point. His judgment is not based on a single assessment, but stems from the continuously rising infrastructure status of stablecoins in the global financial system. As stablecoins gradually become the common carrier for cross-border payments, on-chain transactions, and value settlements, a more universal, lower-threshold product form that also considers security and recoverability is becoming key to meeting real demand.

For global crypto ecosystem builders and participants, what truly matters is whether technology, products, and ecosystems can be continuously advanced together: security must be able to counter real on-chain risks, the experience must be able to accommodate more new users, and the ecosystem must provide builders with space, a stage, and a clear incentive mechanism to participate. OKX will continue to invite users, developers, and ecosystem partners to collaboratively push Web3 from "usable" to "user-friendly, commonly used, and accessible to everyone" in an open and pragmatic manner.