Deep Dive
1. X Layer PP Upgrade (5 August 2025)
Overview: This major network upgrade significantly boosted performance and reduced costs for users. It makes transactions faster and cheaper while deepening OKB's integration across OKX's products.
The upgrade fully integrated the latest Polygon CDK (Chain Development Kit), transforming X Layer into a high-throughput Ethereum Layer 2. Key technical improvements include increasing throughput to approximately 5,000 transactions per second and reducing gas fees to negligible levels. It also enhanced security and Ethereum compatibility for developers. The upgrade enabled deep integration with OKX Wallet, Exchange, and Pay, making X Layer the default network for OKX Pay and introducing features like 0-gas fast withdrawals.
What this means: This is bullish for OKB because it dramatically improves the user experience on its native blockchain, making transactions faster and virtually free. It strengthens OKB's utility as the essential gas token for a more powerful and widely used ecosystem, potentially driving greater demand from developers and everyday users. (Source)
2. Historic Token Burn & Supply Cap (13–15 August 2025)
Overview: This was a pivotal change to OKB's token economics, creating permanent scarcity by dramatically reducing and capping the total supply, similar to Bitcoin's model.
OKX executed a one-time burn of 65,256,712.097 OKB from its historical repurchase and treasury reserves on 15 August. This action followed the cessation of OKT trading and the phasing out of the older OKTChain on 13 August. The burn permanently reduced the total supply from the original 300 million to a fixed 21 million tokens, a reduction of over 65 million OKB.
What this means: This is extremely bullish for OKB because it introduces a hard cap on supply, creating a deflationary pressure that can support its value over the long term. With no new tokens to be minted, increasing demand must be met from a finite circulating supply, a fundamental shift in its economic model. (Source)
3. OKB Smart Contract Upgrade (18 August 2025)
Overview: This technical upgrade made the new supply cap immutable by altering the token's fundamental code, ensuring the burn mechanism could not be reversed.
The upgrade involved deploying a new smart contract for OKB that removed the functions allowing for the minting (creation) and burning (destruction) of tokens. This change was executed on 18 August 2025, effectively "locking" the total supply at 21 million and making the historic burn permanent at the protocol level.
What this means: This is bullish for OKB because it codifies the scarcity promise into the token's very foundation, providing long-term certainty for holders. It eliminates any future possibility of the supply being altered, making OKB's scarcity a guaranteed and verifiable feature of its design. (Source)
Conclusion
The latest codebase updates fundamentally reposition OKB from a simple exchange utility token to a scarce, high-utility asset anchored to a scalable Layer 2 blockchain. The combined effect of enhanced network performance and verifiable, permanent scarcity creates a stronger long-term value proposition. How will developer adoption and DeFi activity on X Layer evolve to harness this new technical foundation?