Thinking through OKX Product Strategy

Monday, November 4th 2024

An interesting exercise, either as a thought exercise or as an onboarding exercise, is the product strategy.

My recent experience where neither Head of Product nor CEO had a coherent product strategy and, when presented with one, couldn't align is very telling of the churn and pain.

I'll talk about why this is in another note, The Value, Violence, and Valleys of Product Strategy.

So today I'm going to try to reverse engineer a product strategy for an interesting company, OKX.

I am basing this on listening to a number of interviews with the CEO, the mission statement, my understanding of the current state of the product, and the ecosystem.

What is the Mission?

From the website:

Take care of our team, promote and advance crypto globally, and empower every individual in the world.

This means that the product must:

  1. Increase adoption globally;
  2. By enabling easy access and regular, daily usage by individuals

What are the core components of OKX now?

  1. Trading platform (CEX);
    1. API
  2. Web3 Wallet;
    1. Swap
    2. Bridge
  3. DeFi Earn
    1. Liquidity Pool Deposits
  4. DEX
    1. Swap
    2. (Liquidity Pool Deposits)

Direct Product Experience

Adding USDC to Yei

The process of doing this involved:

  1. going to the wallet to make an "investment" in WSEI. This was how to get the address.
  2. I didn't see Invest but a saw a + which seems to add it to my account; there I could see the address:
  3. This ended up being the same as going to the wallet and changing the network to SEI.
  4. I used the Stargate bridge to do this, but tried another bridge, Across and it didn't support SEI.
  5. The way I found a bridge. that could work was from OKX Sei DeFi Season Campaign Tutorial | by Yei Finance | Sep, 2024 | Medium -- it wasn't intuitive
  6. I am getting a "Transaction Failed" error when trying to bridge from USDC on Base to USDC on SEI. I don't know how to fix this.
  7. The instructions directed me to go to the "Bridge" tab on the DeFi web page; but there was no SEI bridge.
  8. Went to the Yei Finance bridge, also based on going back to the Medium article, ready to bridge, but the Base chain is not an available source chain
  9. The Sei app directed me to an external bridge
  10. Jumper is the bridge I am using, but it says that I am using Stargate which is what I had tried before at Step 4.
  11. On Jumper, it appears that I am having a little bit more success. The gas was paid in BASE_ETH automatically, which was nice.