// the take
This is OKTC (formerly OKExChain), OKX's own Cosmos SDK-based L1 that bolts on both an EVM and CosmWasm execution environment with full Ethereum JSON-RPC compatibility. It's for teams running validators/nodes on or building dApps against OKX's specific chain, not a general-purpose blockchain framework.
Genuinely dual-VM: the eth/net/web3/personal/txpool/filters RPC namespaces sit alongside working CosmWasm contract support (counter, cw20, cw4-stake examples), not just a README claim. There's real engineering for running at scale — parallel tx execution (app_parallel.go), an MPT/IAVL migration toolchain with pruning and snapshot commands, LRU caching in the RPC backend, and pprof wired in. CI is in place (CircleCI + GitHub Actions), with codecov and golangci-lint actually gating merges.
Last push was 9+ months ago — for a chain client that has to keep pace with upstream Cosmos SDK, CometBFT, and go-ethereum security fixes, that gap is a real operational risk, not just a quiet repo. The README is just badges and links out to separate mainnet/testnet repos; there's no architecture doc or developer getting-started path, so understanding the system means reading app/ cold. Running a node is operationally heavy — you're dealing with custom MPT-vs-IAVL storage migration, an optional RocksDB backend, and manual pruning/snapshot scripts, not a docker-compose-up chain. Despite being backed by a major exchange, it only has 584 stars and 193 forks, so most fixes and direction come from OKX internally rather than an active outside contributor base.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →