A DEX with an off switch

This morning I was reading the news and suddenly came across a post from the OKX CEO announcing that OKX DEX is back online. My reaction: “Wait, what? They have a DEX?!”

So I started digging in. Turns out, back in March, OKX shut it down after hackers tried to launder funds stolen from Bybit through the platform.

But... hold on. How do you “shut down” a DEX? That’s the whole point of being decentralized - there’s no off switch!

Well, as it turns out, OKX DEX isn’t really a DEX. It’s just the name of a Web3 platform OKX built to access various DEXs and dApps. The platform itself is fully centralized - it just happens to have “DEX” in the name.

Is it technically a lie? Not really. But posts like that one give people the wrong idea. They start to think that “shutting down a DEX” is a normal thing. Next thing you know, we’re calling platforms like Hyperliquid “DEXs” too - even though everything there is controlled by a small group of handpicked validators.

So why pretend to be a DEX in the first place?

• Sure, centralized platforms have their weaknesses. In 2020, millions of OKX users couldn’t withdraw their funds for 2.5 months because their CEO was detained.
• But they also have strengths: OKX gives you a unified gateway to everything from futures and options to investment tools — thanks to that same centralization.

Take Rabbit Swap, for example. I’d never call it a DEX - and I don’t need to. All swaps go through one portal: rabbit.io. But that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. If something ever goes wrong or you have questions, you know exactly where to reach us - and we’ll help.

At the same time, we don’t hold your funds. Everything gets sent to you right away. That means we can’t “lock up” assets of millions of users - as OKX did.