On January 24, 2026, the OKX 'New Year's Eve Dinner' event took place as scheduled. For OKX, the 'New Year's Eve Dinner' has entered its second year, gradually becoming an important annual node 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 roadmap, and community consensus: OKX hopes to clarify what needs to be realized and solidify what can be accomplished together.
At the event, Zakk, the head of OKX Wallet, shared the core methodology and key directions for OKX's Web3 products in the coming years: rooted in security and self-custody, bridging with product experience, and leveraging ecosystem and infrastructure, ultimately pushing crypto assets from a 'professional tool' to 'everyday life'.
Achieving an 'ultimate' Web3 experience
In Zakk's explanation, 'ultimate Web3 experience' is not just a slogan, but a set of verifiable and sustainably iterative product standards—first is security and self-custody, followed by 'leave the complexity to the system and the simplicity to the users'. He emphasizes the underlying principle of self-custody: Not your key, Not your asset, which is the long-term guiding principle 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 on-chain common 'similar address poisoning' can quickly generate highly similar addresses and initiate small transfers after you complete a large transfer, tempting users to 'copy incorrectly' when copying historical records. In response, OKX Wallet has clearly identified 'similar address scams' as one of the key risks in its official security content and provided similar address prompts and address labels on the transfer page as protective measures, with the core goal of reducing irreversible losses caused by 'misreading a single character'.
On the proposition that 'self-custody must be safer and easier to use', Zakk further broke down the capabilities of OKX Wallet into two parts:
Firstly, it is the 'security and self-custody' system, including open source, third-party audits, and continuous security governance; he mentioned that OKX's self-custody system insists on open source and multi-party audits, which is a core principle. This is consistent 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 publicly aggregated relevant reports and audit scopes.
Secondly, it is 'parsing and aggregation', which means transforming fragmented on-chain information into an integrated experience that users can directly understand and operate. Zakk presented a set of core capability indicators at the scene: supporting about 140 public chains, aggregating about 500 DEX protocols, and emphasized that this is not simple stacking, but aims to enhance transaction speed and quote quality through intelligent routing and global deployment.
Three product lines point to one goal: 'easy to use' and 'available for everyone'
The information density of this 'New Year's Eve dinner' is concentrated in three key products: Smart Account, CeDeFi, OKX Pay. These three lines are advancing in parallel, pointing to the same goal: to make Web3 products 'easy for professionals to use' while also accommodating 'easy for novices to use'.
First, it is the Smart Account of OKX Wallet. Zakk provides a clear generational division of the evolution of industry wallets: the early stage was based on trust with 'direct interaction with the chain on the client side, open-source and auditable'; then entered the stage of 'automatic parsing, more user-friendly experience'; and the third generation wallet that OKX is exploring aims to integrate 'single-point technologies' such as AA, MPC, and no mnemonic phrases into a viable integrated product capability, with the core being to introduce stronger automated trading and strategy capabilities under the premise of self-custody.
Smart Accounts emphasize using TEE to provide isolation and protection at the level of a 'cryptographic vault' for private keys, and bring advanced trading capabilities (such as limit orders, take profit and stop loss) that previously appeared more on centralized platforms into the self-custody experience. Zakk particularly emphasizes the direction of 'intent verification': allowing the user's intent to be verified at the endpoint, avoiding 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 may 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, it can be a wallet, or it can be a new entry connecting CEX and DEX. The first key product that OKX is building is a CeDeFi wallet form aimed at exchange users to allow them to 'embrace on-chain': based on TEE architecture, achieving 'more decentralization without the need for mnemonics', and enabling CEX and DEX to work collaboratively 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 scene as the key product to 'embrace hundreds of millions of users' and proposed a very daily product imagination: further integrating payments and 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-standing layer ceiling.
X Layer and OKX Web3 ecosystem: the cornerstone of continuous progress
If wallets and payments address 'entry and scenarios', then X Layer addresses 'speed, cost, and scalability'. Zakk directly positioned X Layer at the scene: it must first fulfill its 'historical responsibility', solidify the technological foundation, and be accountable to the community in the long term; and summarizes the current stage as 'the cornerstone of continuous progress'
For the three-step approach to the 'cornerstone', Zakk provided a more engineering-oriented path: the first step is solid technology and long-term sustainable performance; the second step is to 'harden' the infrastructure of Swap, DeFi, etc., so that users are willing to put real money for on-chain 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 and collaboratively.
In the official description of the upgraded performance, X Layer can reach 5,000 TPS, about 400ms block time, and nearly zero transaction costs after the PP upgrade.
What really got the audience excited was 'how to get the ecosystem running'. In the Q&A session, Zakk responded to community questions about the Meme ecosystem and support fund landing, proposing a more long-term answer: rather than relying on constantly 'injecting adrenaline' to create short-term hype, 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, and Demo Day will also be presented in the future, allowing financial support to transparently land after projects and products are evaluated by the community. At the same time, he also clearly welcomes more track-type applications to grow in X Layer: from Perp DEX, prediction markets to RWA, stablecoins, payments, and AI, the space is far more than just 'trading infrastructure'.
Moving towards a new cycle that enables hundreds of millions of users to 'use it'
Zakk identified 'the stablecoin moving towards a trillion scale' as an important era anchor at the scene. His judgment is not based on a single assessment, but comes from the rising infrastructure position of stablecoins in the global financial system. As stablecoins gradually become the universal carrier for cross-border payments, on-chain transactions, and value settlement, a more universal, lower-threshold product form that also balances security and recoverability is becoming the key to meeting real demand.
For builders and participants in the global crypto ecosystem, 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, stage, and a clear incentive mechanism to participate. OKX will continue to invite users, developers, and ecosystem partners to work together in an open and pragmatic manner, pushing Web3 from 'usable' to 'good to use, commonly used, available to everyone'.