After more than a month of technical polishing and security upgrades, OKX DEX officially returned on May 5, 2025, bringing users a more efficient and reliable trading experience. As a one-stop DEX aggregator, OKX DEX relies on its self-developed X Routing algorithm to find optimal liquidity among more than 130 chains and over 500 DEXs, helping users complete trades with lower fees and less slippage.
For this product return, we have specially invited Yue Xiaoyu, a deep user of OKX DEX who is a former product manager at a well-known internet company and currently a Web3 product manager, to have an in-depth dialogue with Shawn, the person in charge of OKX DEX. Together, they will analyze the product thinking and user value insights of this return and explore how to create truly user-centric Web3 products, thereby gaining actionable product inspiration to further enhance user experience.
Next, let's dive into this in-depth conversation and hear their perspectives and thoughts. This is the first part.
Why did I become a deep user of OKX DEX?
1. What was the opportunity for your first contact with OKX DEX? What core factors prompted you to quickly grow into a deep user?
Yue Xiaoyu: Compared to many industry OGs, I actually entered the field relatively late, only truly entering this industry at the end of the 2022 bull market and the beginning of the bear market. It has only been about three years since then, and I have not yet experienced a complete bull-bear cycle. However, from my first day in this field, I knew I wanted to be an on-chain player, not just a retail trader on an exchange. Because only by becoming a real user of blockchain and obtaining first-hand experience and information can I truly understand this industry and seize opportunities that belong to me. This may be my habitual way of thinking; I often express skepticism toward second-hand information and place more trust in my own experiences and perceptions. You will never learn to swim if you don't jump into the water.
The first step into the chain world is naturally to first have a wallet. After all, the wallet is the entry point to the Web3 world; it is the first blockchain application that every ordinary user uses. In the last cycle, MetaMask was undoubtedly the essential wallet for on-chain players, affectionately known as the little fox wallet. My first wallet was also the little fox wallet. However, the little fox wallet was merely 'usable,' with overly simplistic functions and frequent lags, falling far short of being 'user-friendly.' So later, I wanted to find a multi-chain wallet that could conveniently manage assets across multiple chains, and thus began trying out different wallets.
After trying many wallets for a period, I found that the best one is still OKX Wallet. On the one hand, it is quite friendly to newcomers, with a low entry threshold and an overall design that is very smooth and easy to use. On the other hand, as my on-chain experience increased, I explored different projects across various chains and increasingly felt that OKX Wallet offers many excellent, native, and advanced features.
I have multiple identity labels on-chain: airdrop player, DeFi player, Meme coin player. My first identity is as an airdrop player. When I experienced different projects, I found that I could also earn airdrop rewards, which opened up a new world for me. I learned, experienced, and played with various products through grabbing airdrops, thus obtaining first-hand information and the most intuitive understanding. Because of grabbing airdrops, I became a deep user of OKX Wallet. It can be said that OKX is the most suitable wallet for grabbing airdrops. For airdrop players, the biggest pain point is how to unify the management of assets scattered across various chains and protocols, and OKX can be said to be the best choice on the market right now. Whether it’s the number of public chains supported, the number of DeFi protocols analyzed, or the response speed to new public chains and protocols, it is absolutely leading.
Looking back on my growth journey, I can see that my identity has undergone multiple transformations: from the initial airdrop player, gaining profits while learning about projects; to later becoming a DeFi player, further deepening my understanding of protocols and on-chain operations, mining for profits; and now as an on-chain trading player, chasing hot narratives and seeking wealth secrets on-chain. This has been my entire growth path, and the useful tool that is OKX Wallet has made my efforts much more effective. This is the path I took, and it is also my story with OKX.
2. During the more than a month of service suspension, what key matters did the OKX DEX team primarily advance?
Shawn: During this period, our entire team did not stop, but rather became busier than usual.
On the one hand, while maintaining daily functions, we have also increased upgrades to the security and risk control system of trading products, which are very important tasks. Now our risk control system is more powerful than before, capable of real-time interception. In the industry, very few platforms can achieve real-time interception of black market attacks; we can do this thanks to our technological accumulation. On the other hand, when we return after completing product upgrades, everyone will feel a significant improvement in trading speed. The team has made substantial progress in the underlying trading capabilities, including trading speed, anti-slippage capabilities, and the degree of intelligence in smart slippage.
We have some internal testing data, and we can now achieve rapid deployment. In specific scenarios, we can even complete copy trading operations within the same block. For example, when we receive a signal and confirm the address we want 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 continuously launch new features, such as the influencer leaderboard signals and wallet tracking, and our page richness has significantly improved. From the initial simple interface to the rich features today, we have made great progress. In the future, we will also introduce more new functionalities, covering trading and analytical capabilities, all of which are 'black technologies' in the industry. The specific details are temporarily confidential, but everyone will see them soon.
3. What are your feelings about the OKX DEX upgrade before and after the service suspension? Did you find suitable alternative products?
Shawn: During the suspension of OKX DEX, my daily 'grabbing' operations were significantly affected. Normally, I would use OKX Wallet to manage dozens of addresses, perform cross-chain transfers, swap, and join various projects' LPs, all completed in one interface. After the suspension, I had to manually compare prices and perform repetitive operations across the official or third-party cross-chain bridges of each ecosystem, which was time-consuming and labor-intensive, increasing slippage and fees, making for a painful experience.
I have tried several mainstream wallets and professional tools, such as various wallets, on-chain monitoring, and trading tools, and found that they are difficult to replace OKX DEX in the following aspects: multi-address management, as most wallets only support a single address and cannot create and manage hundreds of addresses in bulk. Trading route aggregation, which lacks OKX DEX's self-developed X Routing algorithm, cannot automatically optimize transactions between hundreds of DEXs, leading to high cross-chain costs. Mobile responsiveness, although there are specialized trading tools, they lack optimization for mobile platforms, making operations not smooth enough, severely limiting scenarios that require high time sensitivity like 'trading while walking' or 'quickly entering within half an hour.'
Based on the above experience, I believe that OKX DEX can continue to deepen in the following directions: introduce more intelligent coin selection indicators, combine with AI algorithms to provide warnings and target screening for 'chain-sweeping' users, reducing information noise. Upgrade the copy trading and risk control functions to support automatic copy trading, profit-taking and stop-loss strategies, and push notifications, helping users better manage their positions. Strengthen address and asset monitoring, provide finer-grained multi-address monitoring, fund flow visualization, and anomaly warnings to meet the needs of professional short sellers.
4. What has increased 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 deeply admire this company from the bottom of my heart. When I first used OKX Wallet, I researched the wallet application and saw on its official website that the wallet's private key module had undergone multiple code security audits. Many wallet products have had issues, so I do not trust many well-known wallets, but this action by OKX Wallet gave me a strong sense of trust.
Later, our industry opened up a Meme coin craze, and many Meme coin trading tools emerged, among which various TG Bots (trading robots in Telegram) became particularly popular. TG Bots can provide faster trading speeds and have a rich variety of trading strategies, such as various take-profit and stop-loss orders, and strategy-triggered orders. These features are quite important, as most people cannot monitor the market every day, and since Meme coins prioritize speed, it is impossible to manually operate every day, hence the need for such automated tools. However, OKX has yet to launch a limit order service, which is a relatively advanced offering.
Later, OKX DEX finally launched its limit order service, which is entirely different from the TG Bot tools on the market. OKX's limit order is a completely decentralized service. The biggest problem with these trading tools, like TG Bots, is that they require custodial private keys, meaning these platforms generate wallets for you, and the private keys are managed by these applications. When the trading trigger conditions are met, they use the private key to sign and initiate the transaction. Since the private key is not in the user's hands but stored on the trading platform's servers, the risk is very high; if the GMGN Bots are hacked, everything could be compromised, and the hacker would obtain the private keys, thus accessing all assets. OKX DEX's limit order is non-custodial; after placing an order on-chain, the transaction is executed by a smart contract, directly solving the biggest problem of TG Bots. Therefore, it can be seen that, although OKX knows that creating TG Bots could rapidly implement product features, it opted for a more complex but safer solution.
This is what is known as 'persistently doing the right and difficult thing'! User trust in the product is accumulated and strengthened in such small details. Currently, I have placed most of my assets from hot wallets into OKX Wallet, and OKX DEX is also the feature I use most frequently in my daily activities.
User-centric Web3 products
5. During peak traffic times, did you actively 'pause' out of fear of losing market share?
Shawn: Regarding market share, that’s a very good question. Since we started the service suspension, people may have been discussing why we made such a decision and whether we are afraid of losing market share. To be honest, as employees, market share is indeed an important indicator for our business assessment.
But from the tweets Star usually posts and the thoughts he communicates internally, it is clear that we believe corporate values and social responsibility are more important than market share; this is what we should do. Therefore, I think this is an important reason why we can actively hit the pause button.
In the future, our overall strategy will not change significantly; we remain committed to serving our users well. Of course, our entire team, including myself, is now more mature than before. In the past, we might have thought that a certain function was sufficient, but after engaging deeply with user communities and communicating with many experts, we realized that it was far from enough. Now, the whole team's mindset has changed; we will develop features that are more aligned with user scenarios rather than making assumptions.
6. Do Web3 products need to provide Web2-like product experiences? How do you view the Web2-like interaction design of OKX DEX?
Yue Xiaoyu: Web3 products need to provide experiences similar to Web2. The biggest challenge our industry faces right now is how to continuously attract external traffic and increase the positive externalities of our industry; this is also a core issue for our industry and the most urgent problem at present. Our industry cannot simply remain at a basic PVP level, where players merely cut each other's profits; we need to create more things that truly impact the real world and bring value to it. Here I want to share a theory from Mr. Meng Yan, the founder of ERC-3525 and a well-known expert in the Chinese blockchain industry, which has greatly influenced me:
Web3 is not just a technological revolution; it is also a social movement that follows three stages of social movements: positive (idealistic stage), negative (alienation stage), and coalescence (integration with reality stage).
(1) The positive stage of Web3: Driven by idealists like Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik, who proposed a decentralized and transparent value system.
(2) Negative stage: Witnessing the alienation of this ideal—deviating from its own goals, leading to the present 'exploitation' phenomenon.
(3) Coalescence stage: Emphasizes that Web3 needs to integrate with the real world, combining ideals with traditional approaches to reform and integrate into reality.
Historical experience tells us that the 'negative' stage often incurs enormous costs, leading to numerous issues and contradictions, while the 'coalescence' stage is usually an effective means to ultimately achieve goals. Web3 is currently in a 'negative' stage characterized by conflicts between ideals and reality, as well as an explosion of various problems and contradictions. However, we cannot remain in this state for long, as it essentially exploits idealistic slogans to achieve unfair personal or small group goals. This approach not only deviates from the original intention of Web3 but will also severely harm the healthy development of the entire ecosystem.
Ordinary users would rather have a centralized giant committing evil from a thousand kilometers away than have a thousand small rogues causing harm within a kilometer. Web3 aims to deconstruct centralized fiat currencies and the traditional financial system, but it has resulted in a host of scams that exploit users, with the performance of the vast majority of projects far inferior to 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 Web2-like product experience, lowering the entry barrier for external users. The Web2.5 stage will continue 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 came first, the chicken or the egg?' Do you think OKX DEX should focus on product development first or user growth?
Yue Xiaoyu: The product is the primary driving force behind product growth. Discussing growth without the product is like a tree without roots or water without a source. Throughout the history of Web3 development, many products believe that miracles come from brute force, directly seizing market share from competitors through operational and marketing means. However, the end result is often fleeting; only market players who truly excel in their products can survive longer.
A typical example is Uniswap and Sushiswap. Because the leading DEX protocol, Uniswap, has not issued tokens for a long time, Sushiswap launched a 'vampire attack,' attracting users and funds from its competitor using token issuance. If you are not issuing tokens, then I will issue tokens; everyone come use my product, and I will reward them with tokens. In a short time, Sushiswap achieved great success, with trading volumes at one point surpassing Uniswap. However, looking back today, how many people still know about Sushiswap? Meanwhile, Uniswap continues to lead innovation, having gained market recognition with V2, and then launching V3 with concentrated liquidity, improving capital efficiency, and introducing V4's hooks, allowing developers to flexibly customize various logic types to expand DEX functions. Uniswap has become the infrastructure of DeFi and the industry, and no one doubts its product status. Returning to OKX DEX, it is similar; it still comes back to the product itself. When a product is good enough, it can achieve user growth driven by the product.
8. How do you view the necessity of OKX Wallet's commitment to a one-stop Web3 entry point? What does it mean for users and the industry?
Yue Xiaoyu: It is very necessary for OKX Wallet to strive for a one-stop Web3 entry point. The current multi-chain landscape has led to fragmented liquidity and a disjointed on-chain interaction experience, so there is a pressing need for a unified Web3 entry point to provide users with one-stop services. When ordinary users come on-chain and enter the Web3 world, the first major hurdle they encounter is the experience fragmentation caused by the multi-chain ecosystem: Why are there so many chains? What are the differences between different chains? What is the Gas for different chains, and how should assets be transferred between different chains? Since our industry is still in its infancy, with unstandardized underlying protocols and a competitive landscape in full bloom, there is an urgent market demand to provide users with a unified user experience.
Before OKX Wallet appeared, what was the user experience like? When users played in the EVM ecosystem, they had to download one wallet, and when they played in the Solana ecosystem, they had to download another wallet. When the TON ecosystem became popular, they had to download yet another wallet. Users also had to find a way to leave Gas on different chains and transfer assets across different chains. The whole process was excruciating; every time a new ecosystem appeared, a new wallet and tool were needed. At this point, the necessity of a multi-chain wallet like OKX Wallet and a one-stop entry emerged, allowing users to avoid downloading multiple wallets and seeking cross-chain bridges everywhere. This is why OKX Wallet was able to quickly occupy a significant market share.
Looking back at the rise of OKX Wallet, we can also see the importance of quickly supporting different ecosystems for product growth. We can see that May 2023 was a key month; the key event that took place at that time was the Bitcoin inscription craze, and OKX Wallet supported it very quickly, providing a very smooth experience, making it one of the few wallets that supported inscriptions on the market. It was thanks to this wave of Bitcoin inscriptions that OKX Wallet captured a massive influx of users, as virtually all users engaging with inscriptions were using OKX Wallet. Many users started using OKX Wallet because of inscriptions, leading it to occupy an absolute market share in Bitcoin wallets; and since OKX Wallet is a multi-chain wallet, once users develop a habit of using it, they can easily manage Ethereum ecosystem assets with OKX Wallet, resulting in rapid growth of Ethereum ecosystem data.
Each public chain ecosystem actually represents a user layer. Creating a unified entry point and one-stop platform is to aggregate these dispersed users and liquidity; the compounded effect will result in exponential user growth.
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