MEXC product chief Vivien Lin used an interview at Coinfest Asia 2026 in Bali to explain how the exchange is repositioning itself as competition across the centralized exchange sector changes, with some older players leaving the field and product depth mattering more than it did in earlier cycles.
The conversation with Odaily came after Alpha Arena S03, a trading tournament backed by MEXC Ventures, wrapped up on site. The event brought together 20 traders from 12 countries in a live demo environment. Japanese trader Arumando won the title, with contestants from the Philippines and South Korea finishing second and third. A $100,000 prize pool was awarded, and MEXC CEO Vugar attended the ceremony, saying support for Alpha Arena was a key step in finding talent and pushing innovation.
Lin, who oversees global product planning, strategy and execution at MEXC, said the exchange business should no longer be viewed simply through the lens of profitability. In her view, centralized exchanges now show stronger network effects than before. User demand has changed, and platforms built around a narrow narrative or a simple product menu are under pressure.
Why some older exchanges are falling behind
Asked why a group of older players, including BitMEX, exited in July, Lin said the market has moved away from the conditions that worked around 2020. Back then, narratives carried more weight. Now, as traditional finance and crypto draw closer, users care more about whether they can access assets with real investment value, and that has become a core factor in where they choose to trade.
She said exchanges with a larger user base, deeper product accumulation and stronger liquidity tend to enter a positive loop. More users lead to better liquidity, which in turn gives the platform more resources, a stronger community and more room to build out products. Newer venues or those that failed to think far enough ahead on product and business strategy can run into the opposite cycle: fewer users, thinner liquidity and fewer resources to invest in products that may pay off later.
Lin said MEXC’s earlier spending on technology, products and global user expansion is now showing results. In a market environment she described as less than friendly, those forward-looking investments have helped move the exchange into a stronger position.
MEXC wants to move beyond its old image
MEXC has long been known for listing a large number of smaller tokens quickly. Lin said that reputation was not entirely wrong, but the company realized early that breadth alone would not be enough. The platform also needed more depth in trading systems and product design.
As crypto moved from a niche market toward the mainstream, she said the standard for exchanges changed. The old contest was about listing speed. The current one is about asset selection and whether a platform can bring users assets that actually have value. With compliance advancing and the US regulatory tone turning more constructive, the user base is becoming more diverse, which puts pressure on the system itself to support a broader range of needs.
That was one reason MEXC started upgrading its system ahead of time, Lin said. The exchange worked on execution speed, smoother interaction and liquidity quality. When TradFi opportunities appeared, it could respond faster at both the technical and product levels and launch products that matched market conditions and user demand.
Her point was straightforward: when business is good, an exchange still has to think one or two steps ahead and prepare for future market and regulatory shifts.
TradFi volume up 100x since January 2025
Lin said TradFi has become one of MEXC’s main areas of focus. She gave two figures to illustrate the shift. From January 2025 to the time of the interview, MEXC’s TradFi trading volume increased 100x. From last November to now, over a period of more than half a year, the increase was more than 60x.
She attributed that expansion to close coordination among product, research and development, operations and marketing teams. MEXC has already listed more than 350 TradFi assets, she said, and plans to keep adding quality assets within a compliance framework as user demand and market themes evolve.
One-stop does not mean cramming in features
MEXC has been pushing a one-stop platform strategy, but Lin rejected the idea that one-stop should mean an increasingly crowded product interface. For her, the term starts with the technical base. A one-stop platform has to rest on a robust system foundation and a stable lower-level product architecture.
Before 2023, she said, it was still common in the industry to treat one global product set as sufficient for all markets. That approach broke down once regulation began to diverge more sharply by region. A single solution could no longer fit every jurisdiction. At the same time, users became more varied. Traders with different levels of experience and different risk tolerance want different things.
That shifts the core questions for product teams. Is the lower-level system solid enough? Is risk control complete? Is performance stable? Is latency low enough? Lin said those are the real foundations of product decisions.
At the user level, she said MEXC is trying to break the experience into atomic components. KYC can be split into modules such as facial recognition and address recognition. Order execution can be broken into components including T-Wap, V-Wap and Iceberg. Once those pieces are atomic, they can be recombined much more flexibly for different user groups and regulatory requirements.
She said this is especially valuable on the deployment side. Operations, growth and compliance teams can work with modules that can be rearranged. One market may allow high leverage, another may not. One may support derivatives, another may be spot only. In the past that could require building separate sites for each market. With a modular structure, the same components can be reassembled to launch a compliant local version more quickly.
Lin described the result from two angles. From the platform side, it is a one-stop base layer. From the user side, it is one entry point that reveals a different information world depending on who is looking. A beginner may see simple prompts such as BTC moving higher or what Donald Trump said the previous day. A more experienced trader may see open interest, funding rates or a MACD strategy prompt.
Zero fees, speed and AI
Asked what could help MEXC stand out as exchanges compete around traditional assets and similar product sets, Lin said the company rarely talks internally about “winning” as a concept. The focus is on securing a distinct place in users’ minds. She pointed to three main levers.
The first is the global zero-fee strategy. She called it a forward-looking market expansion method designed to let more retail users worldwide enter the MEXC ecosystem at very low cost and experience its product suite directly. The interview introduction described that strategy as reaching 40 million users globally.
The second is speed. Lin said the company often talks about “MEXC speed,” meaning close alignment across product, engineering and marketing. In her view, that level of coordination is unusual in crypto. When a new opportunity opens, the company can align internally and move fast. She used TradFi as the example: once that window opened, MEXC moved quickly to list real stocks and shift key resources toward assets such as gold, silver and crude oil.
The third is AI, which she said is one of the company’s biggest resource commitments today. MEXC has broken its AI strategy into four or five layers covering front-end user experience, internal operating efficiency and lower-level systems infrastructure. The plan began late last year, and Lin said users can already see visible changes when they open the platform, from a cleaner interface to more efficient interaction. The more important shift, she said, is that AI now sorts users by trading behavior and asset preference, then presents different information and tools to beginners and advanced traders.
She said that if MEXC can integrate AI early, deeply and broadly into product design and business development, it can build a high barrier over the medium and long term.
AI on the surface and behind the scenes
Lin divided AI applications at MEXC into two buckets: visible and invisible.
On the visible side, she listed a tool matrix that includes AI News, Smart Search, Smart Line, Smart Chart and MEXC AI. Users encounter these tools across the platform journey, she said, and they help extract key market information, surface assets of interest and match users with relevant campaigns or benefits.
She used AI-powered news reading as an example. According to Lin, MEXC’s AI bot does not just produce text summaries. It combines text with images, making the experience easier to consume. Trading is serious, she said, but the platform still wants users to feel more than efficiency alone. Multimodal interaction is one area the company is exploring, and she said MEXC hopes that sense of easier interaction becomes part of its brand imprint.
On the invisible side, AI sits in the back end. Lin said the exchange’s operating configuration system has already gained efficiency from AI and big data. More importantly, the platform can pick up user sentiment in finer detail. In volatile markets, she said, it can detect hesitation or fear and lower users’ psychological barriers through benefit-based products such as first-order loss protection. Her framing was simple: AI helps the platform understand users better and provide what they actually want.
How users navigate more than 3,000 assets
MEXC now offers more than 3,000 digital assets, and Lin said one of the main discovery tools is AI Search, built directly into the search box. In the past, typing BTC would mostly return static categories such as spot and futures. Now, she said, the same query can produce a market sentiment snapshot, the three most important live news items and proactive recommendations for related products and campaigns.
The product is designed to answer the user’s most basic immediate question within limited screen space: what can I do right now to participate?
Lin tied that design choice to MEXC’s eighth-anniversary slogan, “Infinite Opportunities.” The phrase does not mean infinite products, she said. The goal is not to stack assets forever, but to keep shortening the distance between users and market opportunities. That only works if the platform understands real user needs in a given market phase.
She said the same logic applies to TradFi asset selection. MEXC looks not only at asset popularity and investment value, but also at the fit between user profiles and asset types. Because MEXC’s core user group is largely retail rather than institutional, that user profile shapes the listing strategy. Lin said both the 3,000-plus asset categories already on the platform and the more than 350 RWA products added over the past year were arranged with that user profile in mind.
Product priorities start with user problems, not user-proposed fixes
When asked how MEXC ranks competing product priorities internally, Lin said the logic comes back to one point: user-centric allocation. The real question is not what the platform wants to build, but what users actually need at a given moment.
That creates different tasks for different teams. Operations teams need to understand the market deeply, while product managers have to prepare for future trends. Lin said MEXC has built a feedback loop covering communities, business development, affiliates and customer service to collect large volumes of user input.
Still, she said product managers follow a strict rule when they look at that feedback: listen to what users say, but watch what they do. Users often bring what they believe is a solution. If a product team simply accepts those suggested solutions one by one, the system becomes overloaded and the architecture loses control.
The better approach, in her telling, is to define the core problem first and only then look for a design path where one solution can cover several related problems.
Copy trading: the problem is selection cost
Lin used copy trading to illustrate that approach. The feature is already widespread across other platforms, but she said MEXC has moved more cautiously. The reason is that the real user pain point is not a shortage of lead traders. It is the cost of choosing among them. Users struggle to identify a trustworthy master trader and can lose money after repeatedly following the wrong one.
Trying to solve that by simply adding more master traders would only create another crowded race, she said.
MEXC’s answer has two parts. First, it brought AI into the process. Lin said the company formed a dedicated product team to systematically review the theories of classic investment masters dating back to the 1990s, then combine those ideas with current market data for backtesting and strategy fitting. AI is then used to screen for strategies that better match the volatility profile of crypto markets. Those are offered to users as AI strategies.
Second, the platform is trying to improve how strong master traders present themselves. Lin said many of them are good at trading but not good at marketing themselves. MEXC wants to create more display windows for those traders so their investment thinking can reach users more directly and build greater confidence in copy trading.
Asked how profitable those distilled strategies or recommended master traders have been, Lin did not provide performance figures. Instead, she stressed that even widely recognized investment masters cannot guarantee profit on every trade. AI should improve the user’s decision-making ability, she said, not replace the user’s own judgment. No system can make the right decision on someone else’s behalf.
For that reason, MEXC encourages users considering copy trading to start with their own risk tolerance. The platform can present complete data including historical drawdowns and risk ratings, but users still need to answer three questions for themselves: can they withstand that drawdown, does the strategy’s risk profile match their capital size, and does the trade logic fit their own investment philosophy. Lin said the first threshold in investing is always honesty with oneself.
What a TradFi background adds to crypto product work
Before entering crypto, Lin spent nearly nine years as a trader in traditional finance across commodities, foreign exchange, equities and private debt. She said that period gave her a sharp eye for detail. Work in derivatives, in particular, meant facing Greek-letter risks directly and operating in settings where higher-order risks could not easily be hedged. That shaped her instinctive understanding of volatility, exposure and maximum drawdown.
Another piece she carried over from traditional finance, she said, was an attachment to best practice: the discipline of pursuing the best possible user experience and a lasting respect for regulation and markets.
Once she moved into crypto, the first difference she felt was speed. Product cycles in traditional finance often run from six months to a year. In crypto, she said, some products can go live within a week. One of the main things she believes she can contribute from her TradFi background is a willingness to remind people about risk when everyone else is moving very fast.
Now that MEXC is entering TradFi more directly, Lin said the company sits at the meeting point of two financial worlds. The goal is not to rebuild a traditional financial system inside crypto, but to find interoperability between the two and transfer experience and resources from one side to the other. She said the perspective she brings is an understanding of financial fundamentals and trading psychology.
She added that when she first entered crypto, she was responsible for trading products, which naturally pushed her to think from the user’s perspective: how candlestick charts should be shown more clearly, what analysis tools are needed and what support functions traders actually use. That hands-on market experience continues to shape how she interprets user intent and behavior.
A product team should stay one step ahead
Lin said one core part of her role as product chief is to stabilize what MEXC already does well in product and engineering and make sure the company continues to deliver at least the current level of experience, or something better, to its global users. That is the baseline.
Beyond that, she wants the product team to stay one step ahead of the market. She said MEXC encourages broad learning, not only from direct competitors and peers but also across industries. In operations-related product work, for example, the team studies how ecommerce companies run operations and how short-video platforms such as TikTok approach similar problems.
She also said the team needs to become more specialized because the competition is no longer just crypto exchanges competing with one another. Robinhood and Coinbase are now fighting in overlapping markets as well. In her words, this is professional competition against professional competition, not just a race of speed but a race of expertise plus speed. Product teams have a duty to help the company prepare early for the next era and the next product direction.
Crypto products are now in a one-stop phase
In Lin’s view, crypto products have entered a period where the one-stop narrative is spreading broadly across the industry. The catch is that exchanges do not all mean the same thing when they use that label.
MEXC’s version, she said again, is a unified technical base plus a modular product layer that can be recombined flexibly while keeping the lower-level system consistent. That is the company’s main product answer to the current competitive environment.
She also pointed to the broader field. Robinhood is pushing into crypto more aggressively. Coinbase and Kraken are adding more weight behind perpetual markets. That means the competitive set is no longer limited to crypto-native firms. Lin said that supports the view MEXC formed earlier: an exchange in today’s market cannot afford obvious weaknesses, but it also needs clear strengths. For MEXC, she named three of them: zero fees, sustained human and technical investment in AI, and a consistent user-first approach built around solving core user needs.
Signs of TradFi-crypto convergence appeared in 2023
Lin said MEXC began noticing signs in 2023 that TradFi users were trying to enter crypto. At that point, the industry broadly believed the two markets were moving toward integration. Her own reading was that the period was more of a transition in which the two sides were colliding without fully connecting. She said the real opening between the two started this year.
She tied that shift to regulation, especially friendlier crypto signals from the United States. Many bills have entered the discussion process, and some have already passed, she said, which has strengthened confidence across the ecosystem. Traditional financial institutions and long-term capital have become more open in how they evaluate crypto service providers, including exchanges such as MEXC.
At the same time, she cautioned that TradFi users do not move into crypto without friction. Their familiar trading logic does not always match how crypto markets actually operate. Even so, she said, their learning curve has been steep, and they bring deep knowledge of the traditional financial system with them. Beyond BTC and ETH, they are also pursuing arbitrage opportunities in TradFi assets across traditional and crypto trading venues.
Lin said flows from traditional finance seeking arbitrage could become one of the key drivers of exchange trading-volume growth in the period ahead.
Perpetual futures as a defining crypto innovation
Asked whether crypto products are simply copying old TradFi structures, Lin said one of crypto’s clearest genuine innovations has been the perpetual futures contract.
Her reasoning was that perpetuals offer retail users a direct form of leverage access that resembles prime brokerage services. In traditional markets, low-cost leverage has usually been reserved for VIP clients, institutions or even larger institutions. Retail traders often could not get comparable leverage on single-name products.
Perpetual futures changed that, she said, by giving all users access to leverage in a more immediate and more equal form. She also pointed to funding rates as an example of a design feature that differs from the one-off rolling costs of traditional futures, which can be harder for retail users to understand and accept. From a product standpoint, she said, perpetuals improve on several weaknesses in traditional financial structures.
That does not mean crypto is building from scratch. In risk control systems and mathematical models, Lin said, the industry still relies heavily on mature frameworks tested in traditional finance over many decades. Her view is that crypto should continue to stand on those shoulders while producing restrained, constructive innovations like perpetuals.
If she had to recommend one product to TradFi friends
Lin said that if she were recommending a crypto product to friends from traditional finance, she would point them to MEXC’s AI Strategy. She has personal experience as a strategy trader, she said, and knows how much time and effort it takes to build a quantitative strategy from zero.
What stands out in AI Strategy, in her description, is that it lowers strategy construction to natural language. A user can type a simple instruction such as wanting to buy when RSI reverses and sell when RSI reverses again. The system parses the intent, connects to the API and completes the backtest. Once the user confirms the setup, a bot can run it until the user decides market conditions have changed and wants to stop.
For a trader who already has ideas, she said, that removes a significant amount of cost and effort.
Her market view on Bitcoin
Lin also addressed the market outlook. From a fundamental perspective, she said Bitcoin appears to have formed effective support in the $55,000 to $60,000 range, a view she said is backed by capital-flow and volatility indicators.
She pointed to positive comments from Donald Trump on crypto a few days earlier, especially supportive signals around Bitcoin and Ethereum, as a direct catalyst for market sentiment. According to Lin, BTC rose by nearly $8,000 within 48 hours, while annualized volatility climbed from 30% to about 40%. She also said the fear index had returned to a relatively comfortable range, leaving the market in what she described as a healthy state capable of evolving on its own.
Over the medium to long term, Lin said she is clearly bullish on crypto. Her reasoning goes beyond her professional background, she said. In equities, the market has entered a stage of sector rotation, with incremental capital slowing and existing capital shifting among sectors. Crypto assets, by contrast, have already gone through nearly nine months of weakness. In classic cross-asset rotation logic, she said, the market may now be in what she called a “golden pit” zone. Liquidity has not yet recovered in a major way, but volatility metrics have already built strong support, and upward trading momentum appears stronger than downward selling pressure.
She also stressed that risks remain. The Federal Reserve could still raise rates later this year, and the Bank of Japan could tighten earlier under pressure from global central banks. She expects monetary-policy uncertainty to last through the rest of the year and said investors should stay cautious during the September-to-November window.
The interview was reported by Odaily’s Qin Xiaofeng and published on Sept. 4, 2026.