OKX Opened Its X Layer Ethereum Scaling Network to the Public

OKX announced the public-mainnet launch of X Layer on April 16, 2024, opening an exchange-affiliated Ethereum scaling network to general users after a testnet phase that began in November 2023.

The company’s distributed release was timestamped 03:36 GMT on April 16. Contemporaneous Blockworks reporting described the network as having gone live late on Monday, April 15 in the United States. This reconstruction uses April 16 because that is the date of OKX’s formal public announcement, while recognizing that the technical activation crossed a timezone boundary.

The launch mattered because OKX was trying to turn the distribution of a large centralized exchange and wallet into demand for a separate onchain environment. It also put another major exchange behind an Ethereum layer-two strategy, following models such as Coinbase’s Base while choosing a different technical stack.

What OKX opened

X Layer was built with Polygon’s Chain Development Kit and designed to run Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible applications. OKX said zero-knowledge proofs would support transaction validity and that its OKB platform token would pay network gas fees. EVM compatibility meant developers could deploy applications using familiar Ethereum tooling, although compatibility alone did not guarantee that every Ethereum application would operate without changes or new risks.

OKX’s April 16 release said users could transfer assets, deposit and withdraw through OKX, and access more than 170 decentralized applications for swaps, staking and smart-contract interactions. Those figures and capabilities were company claims, not an independent measurement of active users or application usage.

A separate OKX wallet notice dated April 16 confirmed support for tracking X Layer assets, using OKX’s decentralized-exchange interface for swaps and cross-chain transactions between X Layer and Ethereum, and discovering applications. The notice said X Layer support would reach the OKX NFT marketplace on April 16, while additional DeFi functionality was still described as forthcoming. That distinction shows that a public-mainnet launch did not make every planned service available at once.

The architecture—and its limits

Contemporaneous Blockworks reporting identified X Layer as a zkEVM validium built on Polygon CDK. In a validium design, transaction data availability is handled outside Ethereum rather than fully published to Ethereum itself. That can lower costs, but it gives users different data-availability and recovery assumptions from a rollup that posts its transaction data to Ethereum.

X Layer was also presented as part of Polygon’s AggLayer plan for connecting separate chains and reducing fragmented liquidity. On April 16, however, an OKX spokesperson told Blockworks that asset transfers between the then-connected AggLayer networks were not yet available. The launch therefore established a live chain and integrations, not the completed shared-liquidity experience described in the broader roadmap.

The company claimed more than 50 million global users, making the exchange a potentially powerful source of onboarding. That number described OKX’s stated global user base, not X Layer adoption. No evidence reviewed for April 16 showed that 50 million users had bridged assets, executed a transaction or controlled an X Layer address.

What the launch established

The verified development was narrower than the promotional vision: OKX publicly opened X Layer, connected it to its exchange and wallet products, used OKB for gas, and launched with an ecosystem of applications and infrastructure partners.

The surviving event-day record does not independently establish transaction volume, total value locked, unique active addresses, fee savings, sequencer decentralization, bridge security or application safety. No token-price or market-return claim is made because no controlled window could isolate the launch from broader cryptocurrency trading. X Layer’s significance on April 16 was institutional and architectural: a major exchange had committed its distribution and brand to a Polygon-based Ethereum scaling network, while important adoption and interoperability claims remained unproven.