OKX executives depart from exchange while its XLayer Chain goes live

• Two senior executives of OKX departed the exchange as it pursues consolidation efforts, says CoinDesk.
• OKX joins the likes of Coinbase with its XLayer L2 launch.
• Chainlink, CurveFinance, and Eigenlayer are among the top protocols already deployed on XLayer.

Two senior executives at crypto exchange OKX, Tim Byun and Wei Lan, have left the company after years of heading key roles, according to a CoinDesk source. However, the company is making expansion moves through the launch of its own Layer 2 (L2) chain.

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OKX executives depart exchange

Tim Byun served as the CEO of the company's US division, Okcoin, for two years before moving to the role of global government relations at OKX. Tim had also previously worked as the Chief Compliance Officer at BitPay, a Bitcoin payment firm. Wei Lan was the head of product and managed OKX's trading desk, said CoinDesk.

This follows the departure of Patrick Donegan, OKX Global Compliance Chief, from the company earlier in January, barely six months after joining.

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OKX launches XLayer Mainnet

Despite the recent departures, OKX is expanding as it launched its exchange Layer 2 chain XLayer to the public Mainnet on Monday. XLayer was built with the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK) to allow developers to build on a zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine (zkEVM) compatible environment.

"Builders can access shared users and liquidity via the AggLayer, and users can transact across chains without bridging. Dozens of core infra providers & dApps are already integrated," said Polygon. The AggLayer would also enable XLayer to support OKB as its official gas token in a bid to onboard OKX's more than 50 million users on-chain.

OKX Chief Marketing Officer Haider Rafique said in a press release, "We envision X Layer and other layer-2 chains as the highway infrastructure of the Web3 world, with dApps as the marketplaces and self-hosted wallets as the vehicles that take you there."

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According to an official announcement by XLayer on X, over 200 decentralized applications, including Chainlink, CurveFinance, Eigenlayer, Etherfi, and Renzo, are already building on the platform.

OKX's XLayer launch places it alongside Coinbase, whose Base chain launched in August 2023 and has recorded several milestones in volume, revenue, project launches, and total value locked (TVL).