Crypto exchange Gate has marked its 13th anniversary with a public letter from founder and CEO Dr. Han, who used the occasion to revisit the company’s path from an early-stage crypto venture to a platform serving tens of millions of users globally. In the letter, he described 2025 as a year of structural advancement rather than simple expansion, and said the company has grown from a one-person start into a global organization of nearly 3,000 employees.
Leaving a conventional academic path for blockchain
Dr. Han said that 13 years ago he was working overseas in postdoctoral research in optoelectronics, a track he described as clear and highly predictable. He chose to leave that route and move into blockchain at a time when the sector lacked broad consensus, mature infrastructure, and clear reference points. According to the letter, the early stage came without a ready-made roadmap or major resources, beginning instead with one person and then a small team of more than a dozen people.
He framed that choice as part of a long-standing preference for understanding underlying systems rather than accepting predefined answers. The letter also revisited his early interest in computers and programming, then linked that mindset to later work built around experimentation, design, debugging, and validation. Dr. Han said that same rhythm carried into Gate’s product development, including what he called the company’s Intelligent Web3 R&D effort, where the team worked intensively for nearly two months.
Discipline through the cycle
Looking back on the company’s early years, Dr. Han wrote that blockchain was an unproven field with few rules, little infrastructure, and limited trust, making long-term commitment a risk in itself. He said the company often chose paths with few participants and acknowledged that the process included mistakes and imperfect decisions. One line in the letter stated that the cost of paying for those mistakes exceeded $1 billion.
Still, he argued that what determines how far a platform can go is not expansion during favorable cycles, but discipline during unfavorable ones: restraint in the face of temptation, clarity in moments of risk, and adherence to core logic during uncertainty. In his account, Gate did not lose basic judgment during the industry’s hottest periods and did not abandon long-term investment during more pessimistic stretches.
2025 priorities extend beyond trading
On strategy, Dr. Han said the sector is moving from a narrative-driven phase toward one centered on infrastructure, with competition shifting away from individual products and raw scale toward system capability, structure, and standards. Against that backdrop, Gate sees 2025 as a deliberate stage of structural progress.
The letter said the company will keep improving depth, efficiency, and risk controls in its two core markets, spot and futures. It also pointed to licensing and localization work pursued over the past year under a broader compliance and globalization framework. Outside trading, the letter listed several areas of focus: RWA, TradFi, expansion from CeFi to DeFi, and the use of AI to reshape trading, risk management, and decision-making efficiency.
Dr. Han closed by saying the 13th year is not simply a continuation for Gate but a new starting point. He described the company as entering a phase where it seeks not only to follow rules, but to help define them through its next set of products and strategic moves.