On January 24, 2026, around the Lunar New Year, OKX officially disclosed the X Layer three-phase construction plan and the general path for the incentive fund at its own New Year's Eve dinner event, led by Zakk Wang, the product head of OKX Wallet. This timing and setting were not merely ceremonial choices but embedded the release of the technical roadmap within the festive narrative and community gathering, amplifying the information through offline events and media matrices, deliberately creating a collective memory of "new year, new infrastructure."
Regarding X Layer, OKX is attempting to find a new balance between "technical accumulation" and "ecological expansion": on one hand, emphasizing high performance, stability, and low-cost underlying metrics; on the other hand, using hackathons, community activities, and incentive fund commitments to warm up future developers and project implementations. The main line of the three phases is roughly clear: first, establish underlying performance, then lay out the ecosystem and tools, and finally, through community and university hackathons, release incentive funds, transforming technical topics into incremental projects and users. This article will discuss the true intentions of this plan from the perspective of OKX's Web3 infrastructure strategy, as well as its position and uncertainties in the path toward the public chain of trading platforms.
Breaking the Ice: From Trading Platform to Public Chain Foundation
● Web3 wallets and infrastructure have been one of the main axes for OKX's continuous expansion in recent years. From multi-chain wallet access to cross-chain bridges, DApp aggregation, and the self-developed public chain X Layer, OKX has been extending the closed loop of "account-asset-application" from centralized trading platforms to the on-chain world. Therefore, X Layer is not just a new chain but is positioned at the foundational level of the entire Web3 product matrix, serving as the infrastructure for carrying assets, traffic, and developers.
● Zakk Wang threw the statement "X Layer is an important cornerstone for OKX's continuous advancement in Web3" to the audience at the New Year's Eve dinner, effectively giving X Layer a high strategic weight. This "cornerstone-level" positioning means it is not a short-term marketing project but aims to be interconnected with OKX Wallet, account systems, and on-chain products in the long term, becoming a technical foundation for expanding application boundaries and accommodating more trading scenarios, rather than a dispensable trial product.
● In the industry, there are precedents and successful examples of centralized trading platforms building their own public chains: some quickly boosted TVL through high subsidies but struggled to retain liquidity after the subsidy tide receded; others, leveraging strong trading entry points and stable tech stacks, have cultivated a batch of leading on-chain applications. Compared to these paths, OKX's choice to launch X Layer in 2026 and provide a "three-phase + hackathon" medium to long-term plan seems more like a deliberate extension of the rhythm after reviewing the cycles of similar public chains, downplaying the explosive nature of one-time subsidies and emphasizing a combination of "technology + community interaction."
● Therefore, the core question facing OKX is whether X Layer is merely a natural extension of existing business—diverting traffic for trading and adding an "official chain" option for wallets—or if it attempts to redefine OKX's boundaries and reconstruct a new ecosystem centered on developers and applications on-chain. The former implies a relatively controllable incremental attempt, while the latter requires accepting challenges that are not entirely compatible with the logic of traditional trading platforms in governance, resource investment, and ecological openness.
Phase One: Betting on Performance and Cost
● According to reports from Deep Tide TechFlow, the first phase of X Layer is clearly anchored on high performance, stability, and low cost, focusing on optimizing consensus mechanisms, transaction throughput, and controlling Gas fees to "solidify the foundation." This is similar to the current paths of multiple new public chains competing for the "low Gas, high TPS" narrative, attempting to alleviate potential high concurrency scenarios and large-scale application migration pressures through technical metrics, providing a bearable operating environment for subsequent ecological construction.
● However, in today's public chain arms race, pure performance and cost have already become highly homogenized: many L1 and L2 chains claim millisecond-level confirmations, ultra-high TPS, and "almost zero" transaction costs, and user sensitivity to these metrics is declining. Using benchmark performance as a selling point makes it difficult to form sharp differences in narrative; when all projects talk about "speed and affordability," performance advantages quickly become just an "entry ticket," rather than a unique resource that constitutes a moat.
● In this context, OKX still repeatedly emphasizes the technical foundation in the first phase, which is less about market rhetoric and more a response to the characteristics of its trading platform business. As a trading platform facing high-frequency matching and extreme market conditions, OKX's tolerance for system stability and high concurrency is much higher than that of typical public chain projects. It hopes that X Layer can still support high-intensity asset circulation and cross-chain interaction in extreme market environments, reducing the systemic risk of "application explosion—performance collapse," which aligns with its consistent risk control and technical culture.
● Nevertheless, even so, the conversion of performance narrative into developer and user stickiness remains questionable. Developers ultimately care more about development thresholds, toolchain maturity, user acquisition channels, and long-term incentive expectations, rather than a single TPS number; ordinary users are more easily driven by asset returns, application gameplay, and social narratives. Whether the technical metrics polished in the first phase of X Layer can be successfully "translated" into more user-friendly tools, more stable application experiences, and more convenient asset inflows and outflows will determine whether it can escape the typical public chain dilemma of "good technology but a cold ecosystem."
The Arrival of Incentive Funds: Betting on Hackathons in Phase Three
● According to reports from PANews and Deep Tide TechFlow, the third phase of the X Layer plan will gradually release the previously promised incentive funds to developers and project teams through community and university hackathons. Hackathons are seen as a means to promote rapid prototyping and on-chain launches, providing participants with funding and resource support on one hand, and accumulating a batch of "native projects" and experimenters for X Layer on the other, creating a pool for subsequent ecological selection and amplification.
● The core focus of the hackathon and university route is to capture three key groups: early developers, student teams, and local communities. Early developers are more willing to experiment with unverified mechanisms and business models on new chains, student teams have characteristics of low cost, fast learning, and high sensitivity to new technologies, while local communities can provide stronger support in terms of language, culture, and offline activities. By releasing incentives aimed at these groups, OKX intends to build a "bottom-up" project incubation soil, rather than relying entirely on top-down migration of large institutional projects.
● However, as of now, X Layer has not disclosed the specific scale and distribution mechanism of the incentive funds, neither announcing the total amount nor providing detailed reward rules. This information gap initially helps maintain flexibility but also brings challenges in expectation management: developers find it difficult to assess potential returns before investing, and the community can only speculate on the "value" of the hackathon based on media and official statements. If there is a gap between actual disbursement and early expectations in the future, it may undermine trust in the platform's credibility.
● From industry experience, the effectiveness of hackathons in "real landing" and "long-term retention" is not stable. In the short term, they can indeed create activity and topics on-chain, generating a large number of demo-level products and conceptual projects, but a significant portion will quickly fade after the event ends and funds are exhausted. For X Layer, what truly matters is not just the number of registrations and submitted projects during the hackathon, but how many teams are willing to continue maintenance after the competition, and whether they can gain sustained traffic, follow-up financing, and on-chain resource support; otherwise, the hackathon may turn into a "lively KPI show," leaving many GitHub repositories but failing to establish truly vital ecological pillars.
Building a Foundation or Seizing Market Windows
● Around the conflict of "technical accumulation vs. market expansion," the three-phase plan of X Layer attempts to provide a "both ends balanced" answer: the first phase emphasizes performance, stability, and cost control, setting a premise of "technical pass"; the middle phase lays out a more developer-friendly environment through toolchain improvement and ecological access; and in the third phase, hackathons and incentive funds are introduced to drive concentrated project explosions. This rhythm design essentially states: first solidify the foundation, then frame it, and finally focus on decoration and investment, trying to avoid sacrificing long-term sustainability for short-term popularity.
● Choosing to release the three-phase plan at the Lunar New Year, during the New Year's Eve dinner event, and amplifying it through multiple mainstream Chinese crypto media outlets is clearly a carefully orchestrated brand and narrative marketing effort. The festive atmosphere provides a natural emotional amplifier for the "new chain launch," while the offline setting strengthens relationship signals with core users and partners; the simultaneous voice of the media matrix ensures that X Layer gains sufficient exposure density in the information flow, preemptively occupying mental space for subsequent hackathons and ecological plans, creating a collective impression of "OKX betting on a new chain in the new year."
● From a strategic perspective, X Layer's choice to use hackathons and ecological incentives as the focal point of the third phase has similarities with the ecological subsidy plans commonly adopted by other public chains, while also attempting to make limited differentiation. Traditional subsidies often directly provide liquidity incentives or project funds to existing teams, while X Layer targets earlier developers through the "university + community hackathon" path, attempting to lock them into this chain at the initial formation stage of the project. This "pre-locking" approach, if combined with exchange entry and wallet distribution, has the potential to reduce project migration costs, but its true degree of differentiation compared to other public chains still needs to be tested in practice.
● At the same time, OKX inevitably faces multiple risks. The first is resource consumption: from technical research and development to ecological incentives, and then to offline activities and media placements, X Layer requires a long-term investment in multi-line operations. The second is the developer competition: almost all emerging public chains are vying for the same batch of quality teams and developers, making it challenging to form advantages in budget, narrative, and support intensity. The third is regulatory uncertainty: the relationship between trading platforms and their own public chains may face compliance pressures regarding asset cross-chain, incentive distribution, and even certain application forms if re-examined in some jurisdictions, requiring OKX to find an acceptable boundary between expansion and compliance.
The Real Test After the Three-Phase Blueprint
Starting from solidifying underlying performance, X Layer outlines a standardized path "from technology to application" by laying out tools and ecosystems, and using hackathons and incentive funds as explosion points. In OKX's overall strategy, it is clearly defined as "an important cornerstone for the continuous advancement of Web3," bearing multiple roles of accommodating overflow traffic from the trading platform, deepening wallet product capabilities, and reserving imaginative space for future on-chain businesses, rather than just a conceptual project aligned with market conditions.
The current biggest suspense centers on three dimensions: first, the yet-to-be-disclosed details of the incentive funds—including total amount, disbursement rhythm, and specific rules, which determine the upper limit of developers' willingness to invest in this chain; second, the real participation of developers, whether spontaneous projects and external quality teams can continue to flow in beyond the hackathon; third, the project retention cycle, whether X Layer can avoid the fate of "prosperity during the event, silence afterward," and truly establish applications and communities for long-term operation.
In the coming year, key indicators to observe for this chain will include: whether on-chain daily active users and transaction volume can break away from the "activity-driven" model to form a smoother growth curve; the number and types of quality projects emerging on-chain, whether they can cover multiple verticals such as DeFi, gaming, and social, rather than being limited to a single track; and the depth of interaction between these projects and OKX's existing business, such as whether stable asset inflow and outflow channels and mechanisms for listing and liquidity support are established, thereby transforming the combination effect of "public chain + exchange + wallet" into a true business closed loop.
Before these uncertainties are gradually revealed, the journey from "important cornerstone" to "growth engine" for X Layer is far from complete. The blueprint has been drawn, but the real challenge lies in execution: can the technical team continue to iterate under pressure, can the ecological team maintain patience in the developer competition, and can the governance model balance platform efficiency with decentralization expectations? Only by providing solid answers on these levels can X Layer have the opportunity to be more than just a cornerstone in OKX's Web3 strategy, but a key driving force in reshaping its business structure and boundaries.
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