Yue Xiaoyu talks with OKX Wallet: What are we doing after suspending services for a month?

For this product return, we specially invited an in-depth user of OKX DEX, Mr. Yue Xiaoyu (@yuexiaoyu111), who was formerly a product manager at a well-known Internet company and is currently the Web3 product manager, to have an in-depth conversation with Shawn, the head of OKX DEX, to jointly analyze the product ideas and user value insights of this return, and to discuss in depth how to create a Web3 product that truly meets user needs, so as to draw inspiration for feasible products and further enhance the user experience.

Next, let us go into this in-depth conversation and listen to their views and thoughts. This is the first part.

Why did you become an intensive user of OKX DEX?

1. What was your first exposure to OKX DEX? What core factors prompted you to quickly become a deep user of it?

Yue Xiaoyu: Compared with many industry OGs, I actually entered the circle relatively late. I really entered this industry at the end of the bull market and the beginning of the bear market in 2022. It has only been 3 years since then, and I have not experienced a complete round of bull and bear markets. But on the first day I entered the circle, I knew that I wanted to be an on-chain player, not just a leek speculating on coins on the exchange. Because only by becoming a real user of blockchain and getting first-hand experience and information can I truly understand this industry and seize my own opportunities. This may be my own inertia of thinking. I often doubt second-hand information and believe in my own experience and perception. If you don't get in the water, you will never learn to swim.

The first step to enter the chain is naturally to have a wallet. After all, the wallet is the entrance to the Web3 world, and it is the first blockchain application used by every ordinary user. In the last cycle, MetaMask was a must-have wallet for chain players, and everyone affectionately called it the Metamask Wallet. My first wallet was also a Metamask Wallet. But the Metamask Wallet was just "usable", with overly simple functions and frequent freezes, which was far from "easy to use". So later, I wanted to find a multi-chain wallet that could easily manage multi-chain assets. From this, I started to try different wallets.

After trying many wallets for a while, I found that OKX Wallet is the best. On the one hand, it is very friendly to beginners, with a low threshold for use, and the overall design is very smooth and easy to use. On the other hand, as my experience on the chain increases, I go to different chains to play different projects, and then I can feel more and more that OKX Wallet can provide a lot of very useful, native, and advanced functions.

I have multiple identity tags on the chain: airdrop player, DeFi player, Meme coin player. My first identity is an airdrop player. When I was experiencing different projects, I found that I could also get airdrop rewards, which opened up a new world for me. I learned, experienced, and played with different products through airdrops, thereby obtaining first-hand information and the most intuitive cognition. It is precisely because of airdrops that I became a deep user of OKX Wallet. It can be said that OKX is the most suitable wallet for airdrops. For airdrop players, the biggest pain point is how to uniformly manage assets scattered across various chains and protocols, and OKX can be said to be the best choice on the market. Whether it is the number of public chain supports, the number of DeFi protocol resolutions, or the response speed of new public chains and new protocols, they are all absolute leaders.

Looking back on my growth path, I can find that my identity has changed many times: from an airdrop player at the beginning, I could earn income while experiencing the product learning project; to a DeFi player later, I further understood the protocol and on-chain operations, and earned income by mining everywhere; to today's on-chain trading player, I catch up with popular narratives and look for wealth codes on the chain. This is my entire growth path, and the useful tool OKX Wallet makes me get twice the result with half the effort. This is the way I came here, and it is also my story with OKX.

2. During the more than one month of suspension of service, what key issues has the OKX DEX team mainly promoted?

Shawn: During this period, our entire team did not stop, but was busier than usual.

On the one hand, while maintaining daily functions, we have increased the upgrade of trading product security and risk control systems, which are very important tasks. Now our risk control system is more powerful than before and can intercept in real time. In the industry, there are not many platforms that can intercept black market attacks in real time. We can do this thanks to our accumulation of technology. On the other hand, when we return after the product upgrade is completed, everyone will feel the significant improvement in transaction speed. The team has made significant improvements in the underlying trading capabilities, including transaction speed, anti-pinch order capabilities, and the intelligence level of smart slippage.

We have some test data internally, and now we can basically achieve rapid launch. In certain scenarios, we can even complete the copy operation within the same block. For example, when we receive a signal and determine the address to follow, we can complete the transaction with that address within the same block.

In addition, our market products and token analysis capabilities have not stopped. We continue to launch new features, such as the top ranking signals and wallet tracking, and our page richness has also been greatly improved. From the initial simple interface to the rich functions today, we have made great progress. In the future, we will also launch more new features, covering trading capabilities and analysis capabilities. These features are the "black technology" in the industry. The specific details are confidential for the time being, but everyone will see them soon.

3. What are your feelings before and after the OKX DEX upgrade and service suspension? Have you found a suitable replacement product?

Shawn: During the suspension of OKX DEX service, my daily “money-making” operations were significantly affected. I usually use OKX Wallet to manage dozens of addresses, cross-chain transfers, swaps, and join LPs of various projects, all in one interface. After the suspension, I had to go to the official or third-party cross-chain bridges of each ecological chain, manually compare prices one by one, and repeat operations, which was time-consuming and labor-intensive, and increased slippage and handling fees. The experience was very painful.

I have tried several mainstream wallets and professional tools, such as various wallets, on-chain monitoring tools, and coin trading tools, and found that they are difficult to replace OKX DEX in the following aspects: Multi-address management, most wallets only support a single address, and cannot batch create and manage hundreds of addresses. Transaction routing aggregation, lacking the X Routing routing algorithm independently developed by OKX DEX, cannot automatically find the best among hundreds of DEXs, and the cross-chain cost is high. Mobile terminal fluency, although there are also special coin trading tools, the mobile terminal is not optimized, the operation is not smooth enough, which seriously limits the "walking and playing" and "quickly get on the bus within half an hour" scenarios with extremely high timeliness requirements. Based on the above experience, I think OKX DEX can continue to deepen in the following directions: introduce more intelligent coin selection indicators, combine AI algorithms, provide early warnings and target screening for "chain scanning" users, and reduce information noise. Upgrade the copy and risk control functions, and support automatic copy, stop-profit and stop-loss strategies and push reminders on the basis of "smart money" to help users better manage their positions. Strengthen address and asset monitoring, provide more fine-grained multi-address monitoring, fund flow visualization and abnormal warning to meet the needs of professional short players.

4. What increases your trust in OKX DEX?

Yue Xiaoyu: My trust in OKX DEX comes from OKX's commitment to decentralization, which is also the core reason why I sincerely admire OKX from the bottom of my heart. When I first used OKX Wallet, I was researching this wallet application and saw that its official website disclosed that the private key module of the wallet had undergone multiple code security audits. You know, many wallet products have problems, so I don't trust many well-known wallets, but this move by OKX Wallet gave me a great sense of trust.

Later, our industry started the Meme coin craze, and many Meme coin trading tools appeared on the market, among which various TG Bots (trading robots in Telegram) were popular. TG Bot can provide faster trading speeds and a wide range of trading strategies, such as various stop-profit and stop-loss orders, strategy-triggered orders, etc. These functions are still very important. Most people cannot watch the market every day, and Meme coins are the fastest, and it is impossible to operate manually every day, so this kind of automated tools is needed. However, OKX has been slow to launch relatively advanced services such as limit orders.

Later, OKX DEX finally launched its own limit order service, which is completely different from the TG Bot tool on the market. OKX's limit order is a completely decentralized service. The biggest problem with these trading tools, TG Bot, is that they all need to host private keys, which belong to private key hosting wallets. That is, these platforms help you generate wallets, and the private keys are managed by these applications. When the trigger conditions of the transaction are met, they use the private keys to help you sign and initiate transactions. Since the private keys are not in the hands of the users themselves, but are placed on the server of the trading platform, the risk is very high. Once Bots such as GMGN are hacked, they may be wiped out. If the hackers get the private keys, they get all the assets. The limit orders of OKX DEX are non-custodial. After placing orders on the chain, the transactions are finally executed by smart contracts, which directly solves the biggest problem of TG Bot. Therefore, from here we can see that even if OKX knows that TG Bot can realize product functions at the fastest speed, it has chosen a more complex but safer solution.

This is what is called "persisting in doing the right and difficult things"! Users' trust in the product is accumulated and strengthened in such little things. At present, I have put most of my hot wallet assets in OKX Wallet, and OKX DEX is also the function I use most frequently in daily life.

Web3 products that meet user needs

5. Actively "pause" during peak traffic hours. Are you afraid of losing market share?

Shawn: Regarding market share, this is also a good question. Since we started to suspend services, everyone may have been discussing why we made such a decision and whether we are afraid of losing market share. To be honest, as an employee, market share is of course an important indicator for our business assessment.

But from Star's usual tweets and the ideas he conveyed internally, we can see that we believe that corporate values ​​and social responsibility are more important than market share, and this is what we should do. So, I think this is an important reason why we can take the initiative to press the pause button.

In the future, our overall strategy will not change much, and we are still committed to serving our users. Of course, now our entire team, including myself, is more mature than before. In the past, we may think that a certain function is enough, but when we go deep into the user community and communicate with many experts, we realize that this is far from enough. Now, the mentality of the entire team has changed, and we will develop functions more in line with user scenarios, rather than taking it for granted.

6. Do Web3 products need a Web2-like product experience? What do you think of OKX DEX’s Web2-like interaction design?

Yue Xiaoyu : Web3 products need to provide a product experience similar to web2. The biggest problem facing our industry is how to continuously attract traffic outside the circle and increase the positive externalities of our industry. This is also a core proposition of our industry and the most pressing issue at present. Our industry cannot just stay at simple PVP and simple player-to-player trade-offs. We need to do more things that truly impact the real world and bring value to the real world. Here I would like to share a theory by Mr. Meng Yan, the founder of ERC-3525 and a well-known Chinese blockchain industry expert who has had a great influence on me:

Web3 is not just a technological revolution, but also a social movement. It follows the three stages of social movements: positive (idealism stage), negative (alienation stage), and integration (integration with reality stage).

(1) The positive stage of Web3: driven by idealists such as Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik, who proposed a decentralized and transparent value system.

(2) The anti-stage: witnessing the alienation of this ideal - deviating from its own goal and moving towards its opposite, which is the current "cutting leeks" phenomenon.

(3) Integration stage: emphasizes that Web3 needs to be integrated with the real world, combined with tradition, and use idealistic things to transform and integrate the real world.

Historical experience tells us that the "anti" stage often requires a huge price and will produce many problems and contradictions, while the "cooperation" stage is usually an effective way to achieve the goal. Web3 is currently in the "anti" stage, which is characterized by the conflict between ideals and reality, as well as the concentrated outbreak of various problems and contradictions. However, we cannot stay in this state for a long time, because this is essentially using idealistic slogans to achieve the improper goals of individuals or small groups. This practice not only deviates from the original intention of Web3, but also seriously damages the healthy development of the entire ecosystem.

Ordinary users would rather see a centralized giant a thousand kilometers away do evil than a thousand small hooligans within a kilometer do evil to us. Web3 aims to deconstruct centralized fiat currencies and traditional financial systems, but a lot of scams have been created, and the performance of most projects is far worse than traditional finance. Therefore, we must have a very clear understanding of these issues before we can take this step forward. The first step is to provide a product experience similar to Web2 and lower the entry threshold for external users. The Web2.5 stage will last for a long time, so it is very important to provide a Web2-like product experience in Web3 products.

7. Web3 products often face the dilemma of "which comes first, the chicken or the egg?" Do you think OKX DEX should focus on product development or user growth first?

Yue Xiaoyu: Products are the first driving force for product growth. Talking about growth without products is like a tree without roots and water without a source. Throughout the history of Web3 development, there are many products that believe in miracles through hard work and directly grab the market share of competitors through operations and marketing. However, the final result is often short-lived. Only market players with truly good products can survive longer.

Typical examples are Uniswap and Sushiswap. Since Uniswap, the leading protocol of DEX, has been slow to issue tokens, Sushiswap launched a "vampire attack", that is, to attract users and funds of competitors by issuing tokens. Aren't you not going to issue tokens? Then I will issue tokens, and if everyone uses my products, I will give everyone token rewards. In a short period of time, Sushiswap has achieved great success, and its trading volume once exceeded Uniswap. But looking at it today, how many people still know about Sushiswap? However, Uniswap itself continues to lead innovation. When V2 has been recognized by the market, V3 launched centralized liquidity to improve the efficiency of capital utilization, and launched V4 hooks (Hooks), which supports developers to flexibly customize various custom logics and expand the functions of DEX. Uniswap has become the infrastructure of DeFi and the infrastructure of the industry, and no one will doubt the product status of Uniswap. Back to OKX DEX, it is actually the same. It still returns to the product itself. When the product is good enough, product-driven user growth can be achieved.

8. What do you think about the necessity of OKX Wallet to be a one-stop Web3 portal? What is its significance to users and the industry?

Yue Xiaoyu: It is very necessary for OKX Wallet to be committed to a one-stop Web3 portal. The current multi-chain landscape has caused the fragmentation of liquidity and the separation of the on-chain interactive experience, so there is a great need for a unified Web3 portal to provide users with one-stop services. When ordinary users come to the chain and enter the Web3 world, the first big hurdle they encounter is the experience fragmentation caused by the multi-chain ecosystem: why are there so many chains, what is the difference between different chains, what is the Gas of different chains, how to transfer assets between different chains, etc. Since our industry is still in its very early stages, the underlying protocol standards are not unified, and it is still in a competitive landscape of flourishing, so the market has an extremely urgent need to provide a unified user experience for the user side.

What was the user experience like before the OKX Wallet? Users had to download a wallet when playing the EVM ecosystem, another wallet when playing the Solana ecosystem, and another wallet when the TON ecosystem became popular. Then users had to find a way to keep Gas on different chains and transfer assets on different chains. The whole process can be said to be painful. Every time a new ecosystem appears, a new wallet and new tools must be used. At this time, the necessity of multi-chain wallets and one-stop entrances such as OKX Wallet emerged. Users no longer have to download wallets for multiple chains, nor do they have to look for cross-chain bridges everywhere. This is why OKX Wallet can quickly occupy an absolute market share.

Looking back at the history of the rise of OKX Wallet, we can actually find the importance of quickly supporting different ecosystems for product growth. We can see that May 2023 is a critical month. The key event that occurred at this time point was the Bitcoin inscription craze. OKX Wallet supported it very quickly and the experience was very smooth. It is one of the few wallets on the market that supports inscriptions. It is precisely relying on this wave of Bitcoin inscription craze that OKX Wallet has taken on huge traffic. Basically, users who play inscriptions use OKX Wallet. Many users started using OKX Wallet because of the inscriptions, and OKX Wallet has thus occupied an absolute market share of Bitcoin wallets; and OKX Wallet is a wallet that supports multiple chains. Once the user's usage habits are formed, it is easy to use OKX Wallet to manage the assets of the Ethereum ecosystem at the same time, and then you can see the rapid growth of data in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Behind each public chain ecosystem, there are actually user circles. To create a unified entrance and a one-stop platform is to aggregate these scattered users and dispersed liquidity, and the effect of superposition is exponential user growth.