At Coinfest Asia 2026 in Bali this August, MEXC CEO Vugar Usi handed the Alpha Arena S03 trading competition trophy to a Japanese winner in front of traders from 12 countries and an audience of more than 10,000. Away from the stage, he said he has been focused on a more basic question: who exchanges are actually built for.
In April 2026, as MEXC marked its eighth anniversary, the platform appointed Usi as CEO and rolled out a brand refresh built around the line “Zero Fees, Infinite Opportunities.” In an interview with ChainCatcher at the event, Usi discussed why he joined MEXC, how he sees the merger of traditional finance and crypto, the business case for zero-fee trading, and how he thinks exchange competition will change over the next three years.
Why he chose MEXC after Bitget
Usi’s background spans internet companies, consulting and crypto. He has worked at Facebook, Sony and Bain, and later served as chief operating officer at Bitget. He said he moved into crypto after concluding that traditional finance and the digital world were converging far faster than many expected.
That is what drew him to MEXC. He said the platform now offers more traditional finance assets than crypto assets: more than 3,000 digital assets, more than 7,000 stocks, plus commodities and precious metals. His goal, he said, is to bring the discipline, compliance mindset and regulatory thinking of traditional finance into crypto so the company grows quickly but also sustainably.
Asked why he left Bitget for MEXC, Usi pointed to a structural issue he had been thinking about for some time. During his time as COO at Bitget, he said the user base grew from 20 million to 120 million and the platform rose to third place globally. But that experience also led him to ask who exchanges are really creating opportunities for. On top exchanges, he said, about 80% of trading volume comes from institutions. In practice, that means many of those platforms are built around institutional clients.
MEXC, he said, is different because its core users are “underdogs,” meaning ordinary investors. That is the reason he joined, and in his telling it also explains the company’s new brand direction: lower the barrier to near zero with zero fees and make access to opportunity realistic for retail users.
The next phase: a broader financial platform
Usi said MEXC is trying to become a “life on chain” platform. In his view, any part of daily financial life that can move on-chain will eventually move on-chain.
He said traders often know MEXC for list-first listings and zero fees, but the company no longer sees itself as only a crypto exchange. By adding tokenized stocks, commodities and other real-world assets, MEXC is linking traditional finance with decentralized digital markets while keeping its crypto-native roots.
On the savings side, he said the company has added products with principal protection, lower risk and a longer-term wealth-building profile, offering what he described as attractive annual percentage yields, or APY. On the spending side, the MEXC card is meant to close the loop between earning, trading, saving, investing and spending, with cashback that he also described as attractive because the platform has removed many of the intermediaries that usually take a cut.
Usi said the zero-fee model saved users about $1.1 billion in fees last year. Average savings were around $320 per person, and some large traders saved $7 million to $8 million. Rather than spend heavily on splashy campaigns or large sponsorships, he said, MEXC is trying to return that value directly to users and make that approach part of the company’s DNA.
What “Infinite Opportunities” means
Usi said the idea behind “Infinite Opportunities” came from his reflections after reading Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game. His argument is that life is not a zero-sum game in which one person has to lose for another to win. As more people take part, he said, the overall pie can grow and the amount available to each participant can grow with it.
For MEXC, he said, that means recognizing that every user’s path is different. The company wants each person who arrives on the platform to find an opportunity that fits, make money and improve life conditions. That, in his words, is the practical meaning of the slogan.
How he sees the TradFi-crypto convergence
On the overlap between crypto exchanges and traditional brokerages, Usi said the value of convergence is simple: when more asset classes sit on one platform, capital can move faster and lose less value to friction.
In the old model, he said, a single transaction could pass through banks, wealth advisers, brokerages and other intermediaries, with each layer charging fees. On MEXC, he said, users can trade tokenized stocks and even real stocks at a 1:1 exchange rate, using the same mechanics available to someone in the United States, without being limited by location or currency, and settle the trade within seconds instead of waiting days or weeks.
Usi described the current period as “the best bear market.” Even when crypto is quiet, he said, traders are still active in gold, silver, oil and equities, and he believes that capital can quickly rotate back into crypto and start a new cycle. His example was a one-day portfolio routine: rebalance BTC, buy a semiconductor theme at midday, then hedge with gold in the evening. Two years ago, he said, that could have taken a week or even 10 days.
In his view, faster capital movement combined with zero fees creates a better environment for wealth creation, and AI is accelerating that process.
MEXC’s differentiation: early listings, zero fees and building ahead of demand
Usi laid out three main factors he believes separate MEXC from peers as traditional finance and crypto move closer together.
The first is list-first access. He said MEXC tries to bring quality projects to users as early as possible, often two to three weeks or even a month before other exchanges, which makes the platform a place to discover new opportunities. He applied the same argument to equities, saying MEXC was the first platform globally to list SpaceX stock shares and plans to move early again if a new wave of AI IPOs appears.
The second is zero fees. Usi said fees are an entry barrier in themselves. They make trading more complicated and more expensive, and in some cases they can erode returns over time even when trades are profitable on paper. Zero fees, he said, allow users to participate at the lowest possible cost and act as one of the industry’s major equalizers.
The third is timing. He said MEXC tries to build infrastructure before users realize they need it. If the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq eventually shifts to 24/7 trading, he said, MEXC is already operating on that basis, and real stocks are already available to trade on the platform at any time. The goal, as he framed it, is not to follow trends but to prepare for where user demand is going.
How the zero-fee model is supposed to work
Asked how zero fees can support a sustainable business, Usi said MEXC has taken a different route by choosing not to spend heavily on marquee sponsorships.
He said the company will not spend $100 million sponsoring Formula 1 or tens of millions signing La Liga clubs or football stars. Instead, that money is effectively returned to the community through the fee policy. The roughly $1.1 billion in savings users saw last year could, in his words, have been used as a marketing budget, but the community recognized the value and kept using the platform.
He said nearly the entire spot market on MEXC is now zero-fee. In futures and digital assets, about 200 of the more than 3,000 trading pairs are zero-fee, and all stocks and tokenized stock products are zero-fee as well. That, he argued, makes MEXC one of the lowest-cost venues for users looking for new exposure and new market experiences.
Why stocks, ETFs and commodities matter for user growth
Usi said MEXC’s user acquisition strategy now runs on two tracks.
One track is crypto-native users, especially Gen Z and millennials whose first investments were digital assets. He said many of these users were previously trapped inside crypto-only cycles, focused on BTC price moves, altcoins and meme trades. Tokenization, he said, allows them to look at a wider map of capital flows and ask whether they should hold stocks or test new investment tools.
That shift helps users diversify and also gives MEXC a way to move beyond dependence on a single cycle.
The second track is traditional investors, including people who have historically invested through banks and had no easy route into newer markets. Usi said stocks and tokenized products are creating trust for this group. He also said more traditional institutions and family offices are coming in, often with a very different objective from crypto-native traders. Instead of chasing 10x or 20x returns, they may ask how to use BTC to hedge the S&P 500 and reduce portfolio risk.
When those two groups meet on one platform, he said, the result is not only a broader product set but also deeper liquidity and new capital inflows. That is the basis of what he called a next-generation financial super app.
Transparency first, then security
As MEXC tries to evolve from a trading venue into what Usi called a trusted financial gateway, he put transparency first. Since taking the role last November, he said, the company has been working with third-party firms to publish proof-of-reserves reports and has become the second exchange globally to open its books to independent verification firms.
He said MEXC maintains a 1:1 reserve commitment, with BTC and ETH reserve ratios at roughly 160% and stablecoins at about 130%.
On security, Usi said MEXC has never had a security incident, but if it wants to reach the global top three and deliver first-tier service, it has to keep investing in user protection. He said the company’s Guardian Fund started at $100 million and remained at that level for several years. MEXC has now committed to expanding it to $500 million within the next two years and has already added 1,000 BTC as part of that expansion, putting it among the largest user protection funds in the industry. He added that MEXC also has a $770 million futures insurance fund.
His expectation is that users will eventually stop asking whether MEXC is safe or transparent because those will be taken for granted. What will distinguish the platform then, he said, will be zero fees, opportunity, user experience and continued product innovation, all resting on a base of trust and security.
Where growth is coming from
Regionally, Usi said Southeast Asia remains one of MEXC’s strongest markets and will stay a priority. Turkey, Eastern Europe and the Middle East have also delivered rapid growth over the past two to three years, and he said the company has been investing heavily there.
Since becoming CEO, he said he has also put a special focus on Latin America and Africa, treating both as frontier growth markets for the next stage. He said those regions remain underdeveloped relative to their potential, while MEXC can offer a full product line spanning trading, savings, card-based investing and spending to onboard more users.
Three years out: exchanges will not only compete with exchanges
Usi’s view of the next three years is that the main battle will not simply be Coinbase versus Binance or one exchange against another. The field, he said, is widening.
Robinhood is entering. Revolut is entering. Monzo and various digital banks and trading platforms are entering as well. With banking-as-a-service models, integrations and partnerships becoming more common, he said competition will increasingly turn on connectivity, brand and trust, and on whether a company can offer the needed service by the next day.
In that setup, he said, Robinhood could become a user’s largest digital asset provider, Revolut could shift from bank to trading platform, and one of today’s major exchanges could end up acting as a mortgage provider or banking service provider in the future.
Still, he argued that whatever shape the market takes, super platforms will give users a better set of choices. He compared that future to ride-hailing, where users open Grab or Uber depending on where they are. Financial products, in his view, will also move toward one place where a user can solve multiple needs without leaving the platform.