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 event connecting the team, community, and partners. It is not just a "reunion dinner," but also an end-to-end alignment of industry trends, product roadmaps, and community consensus: OKX hopes to clearly explain those things that "truly need to be implemented" and solidly implement those things that "can be accomplished together."
At the event, Zakk, head of OKX Wallet, systematically shared OKX Web3's core methodology and key directions for the next few years: taking security and self-custody as the foundation, product experience as the bridge, and ecosystem and infrastructure as the driving force, ultimately pushing crypto assets from "professional tools" to "everyday life".
To achieve the "ultimate" Web3 experience
In Zakk's explanation, "the ultimate Web3 experience" is not just a slogan, but a set of verifiable and continuously iterative product standards —first and foremost security and self-hosting, and secondly, "leaving complexity to the system and simplicity to the user." He emphasizes the underlying principle of self-hosting: Not your key, Not your asset, which has been the long-term guiding principle for OKX Wallet's design and trade-offs.
What's even more relatable is his explanation, based on personal experience, of why security capabilities must be integrated into the product: For example, the common blockchain phenomenon of "similar address poisoning" quickly generates highly similar addresses and initiates small transfers after a large transaction, tricking users into "copying the wrong address" when copying their history. In response, OKX Wallet explicitly identifies "similar address fraud" as a key risk in its official security content, providing protection strategies such as similar address warnings and address tags on transfer pages. The core goal is to reduce irreversible losses caused by "misreading a single character."
On the topic of "self-hosting should be more secure and easier to use," Zakk further breaks down OKX Wallet's capabilities into two parts:
Firstly, there's the "security and self-hosting" system, which includes open source, third-party audits, and continuous security governance. He mentioned that OKX's self-hosting system adheres to open source and multi-party audits, which are core principles. This aligns with the approach disclosed on OKX's official "Security Audit Report Collection" page: OKX Wallet's front-end, mobile app, SDK components, etc., have undergone third-party audits, and the relevant reports and audit scope are publicly summarized.
Secondly, there's "parsing and aggregation," which transforms fragmented on-chain information into a unified experience that users can directly understand and operate. Zakk presented a set of core capability metrics at the event: supporting approximately 140 public chains and aggregating approximately 500 DEX protocols. He emphasized that this is not simply about stacking resources, but about improving transaction speed and quote quality through intelligent routing and global deployment.
The three product lines all point to one goal: " easy to use " 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 being pursued in parallel, all pointing to the same goal: to make Web3 products "easy for professionals to use" while also ensuring that "beginners can use them easily."
First, there's OKX Wallet's Smart Account. Zakk clearly divides the evolution of wallets in the industry into generations: the early stage was based on "direct interaction between the client and the blockchain, open source and auditable" as the foundation of trust; then it entered the stage of "automatic parsing and a more user-friendly experience"; and OKX is exploring the third-generation wallet, which aims to integrate "single-point technologies" such as AA, MPC, and seed phrase free features into a fully functional product capability, with the core being the introduction of stronger automated trading and strategy capabilities under the premise of self-custody.
Smart accounts emphasize using TEEs to provide "cryptographic vault" level isolation and protection for private keys, and bring advanced trading capabilities (such as limit orders, stop-loss and take-profit orders) previously found more often on centralized platforms into the self-hosted experience. Zakk particularly emphasizes the direction of "intent verification": allowing users' instruction intent to be verified on the client side to prevent tampering when passing through the service layer, and plans to promote open source and drive industry standardization.
The second line of thought is CeDeFi. Zakk's assessment is very "trend-oriented": he believes 2026 may be the "year of novice users." 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 could be a Pay, a wallet, or a new entry point connecting CEXs and DEXs. OKX's first key product under construction is a CeDeFi wallet form aimed at exchange users, allowing them to "embrace on-chain": based on the TEE architecture, it achieves "more decentralization and no need for seed phrase," and allows CEXs and DEXs to work together within the same framework. In the future, it will also expand to more on-chain asset types (including Meme, RWA, etc.).
The third line is OKX Pay. Zakk positioned it as a key product to "embrace hundreds of millions of users" at the event, and put forward a very everyday product vision: to further integrate payments with DeFi, making it possible for crypto products to be integrated into daily life - only in this way can the industry have the opportunity to break through the long-term ceiling of niche communities.
X Layer and the OKX Web3 Ecosystem: The Cornerstone for Continued Progress
If wallets and payments address "entry points and scenarios," then X Layer addresses "speed, cost, and scalability." Zakk directly defined X Layer's role at the event: it must first fulfill its "historical responsibility," solidifying its technological foundation to be accountable to the community in the long term; and summarized its current stage as "the cornerstone of continuous progress."
Regarding the three-step approach to the "foundation," Zakk presented a more engineering-oriented path at the event: The first step is to solidify the technology and ensure long-term sustainable performance; the second step is to "lay the groundwork" with infrastructure such as Swap and DeFi, so that users are willing to put real money into on-chain interactions; the third step is to form a combination of measures around payment infrastructure (cards, Pay, etc.), so that the resources of wallets, DApps, payments, and the chain can work together in parallel.
According to the official description of the upgraded performance, X Layer can achieve 5,000 TPS, a block time of about 400ms, and near-zero transaction costs after the PP upgrade.
What truly energized the audience was the question of "how to get the ecosystem running." During the Q&A session, Zakk, addressing community questions about the Meme ecosystem and the implementation of support funds, offered a longer-term solution: rather than relying on constant hype to create short-term buzz, it's more important to build a sufficiently large project pool and incubation mechanism, allowing the ecosystem to naturally flourish, much like the "AI Season" of the past. Demo Days will be held in the future, and funding support will be implemented more transparently after projects and products are evaluated by the community. He also explicitly welcomed more niche applications to grow on the X Layer: from Perp DEX and prediction markets to RWA, stablecoins, payments, and AI, the potential extends far beyond just "trading infrastructure."
Towards a new cycle of getting hundreds of millions of users to "use" it
At the event, Zakk cited the "trillion-dollar scale of stablecoins" as a significant milestone. His assessment wasn't based on a single factor, but rather on the rising infrastructure status of stablecoins within the global financial system. As stablecoins gradually become a universal medium for cross-border payments, on-chain transactions, and value settlement, their more universal, lower-barrier-to-entry, and secure/recoverable nature is becoming crucial for meeting real-world demand.
For global crypto ecosystem builders and participants, what truly matters is the ability to continuously advance technology, products, and the ecosystem together: security must be able to withstand real-world on-chain risks, the user experience must be able to attract more new users, and the ecosystem must provide builders with space, a platform, and definite incentive mechanisms to participate. OKX will continue to invite users, developers, and ecosystem partners to work together in an open and pragmatic manner to push Web3 from "usable" to "easy to use, frequently used, and accessible to everyone."
