Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining the Exchange 2.0 discussion. I am particularly very excited to talk about how exchanges have evolved over the years. I've been working at exchanges for the last five years, just recently joined on. So I have seen and witnessed the evolution in terms of how exchange platforms have adapted into truly a super app. You're able to do literally everything within an exchange platform right now. You can invest, there's wealth management, there are bots already in it, and now we're introducing tokenized stocks and ETFs. So now we are seeing this blurring between TradFi platforms and a DeFi platform. So with me we have leaders in the industry. So I will ask them to introduce themselves.
Great. Well, thanks for having me today. I appreciate it. My name is Peter. I'm the CEO and founder of Blockchain.com. We've been helping people and then later institutions be part of the crypto financial system since 2012. So, we've been at it for quite a while now, as I'm reminded sometimes. And today we have about 40 million retail customers around the world, about 2,000 institutions that we do various sort of business for, and we transact about one to one and a half trillion in volume a year. We're also a major supplier of liquidity across the ecosystem. And we have sort of helped incubate, invest in or launch a lot of the sort of more successful projects and companies across the space today. And so yeah, we have a pretty broad sort of view across the whole ecosystem. And one of the things that we're most excited about is bringing sort of more assets from the traditional finance world into the crypto world. Particularly the sort of really interesting and high quality assets that our customers are eager to have access to.
Hi everyone, I'm Gracie Chen. I'm CEO of Bitget. Bitget is a top crypto exchange established seven years ago. According to CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, we are typically top five in terms of trading volume among other offshore exchanges. So one key strategic change that we are having right now or facing in this industry is exactly what the title points out: from crypto to stocks. As Michael pointed out, we are all partners with them and Bitget partnered with mainly on being one of the distributors for their tokenized US stocks and ETFs. And I think according to your data published in December, we contribute about 90% of that volume. So that's definitely a lot of traction that we are seeing from our retail users who are interested in trading tokenized US stocks and ETFs. We have 120 million users coming from more than 100 countries. So definitely also want to explore other opportunities with you guys, audience, anyone who wants to expand or collaborate with an exchange like us.
Thanks. Thanks for having us. Michael Shaulov, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks. We provide infrastructure for institutions and enterprises, mostly financial institutions. Over 2,600 financial institutions are using our platform, and that includes everything from wallet settlement technology, tokenization, and access to DeFi orchestration and many other things. So, you know, we basically last year there was about $6 trillion worth of transaction volume that went through our platform, and about 40% of our client base are what you would define as like exchanges, super apps, neobanks, basically the category that is financial institutions that are facing retail clients. I think like, you know, when you aggregate probably over a billion retail clients across all those platforms, and definitely kind of what we've seen front and center in the last 12 months or so is the convergence or basically the adoption of traditional assets into those platforms, which I think makes a lot of sense for anyone who is able to offer a digital-first experience. And also probably something we're going to talk about is a bit of how the incumbents, right, the old school TradFi, are currently looking at it and what are they going to do about it.
Thank you very much. Peter, diving straight in, right? You've been sort of like in this industry for quite some time, right? Since 2011. So you have seen across the various cycles, you have seen the evolution in terms of how exchanges have adapted over the years. What is your perspective with regards to how are the platforms evolving and now integrating tokenized stocks and ETFs into offering? How are you seeing the competitive landscape with say TradFi super apps?
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think, you know, crypto exchanges are for the most part in the business of growing and harvesting sort of retail trading flow, so almost like a payment for order flow model. And, you know, with that said, like most of the real liquidity in sort of the top five digital assets is predominantly, you know, in one or two derivative markets and increasingly for Bitcoin it's in the CME. So what we see is, you know, sort of with tokenized equities, the liquidity obviously for those assets is in the traditional financial markets and to some extent, you know, you see these assets issued on chain and then they're going to be distributed to retail through the sort of exchanges, brokerages like ourselves, etc. But the real liquidity for those assets will remain sort of where it's always been. And so one of the things that we think will be an interesting transition to watch is sort of the transition of liquidity of crypto assets moving away from a lot of the sort of cloud-based, more retail-oriented exchange platforms back into the sort of on-prem traditional finance trading venues. Which whenever I say that, the crypto people kind of in the room get a little upset. But we're already seeing that transition happen live in the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Price discovery is almost exclusively on the CME at this point and I think we'll continue to see that across any assets that are very successful. I think for assets like, you know, that are smaller, like a new project or a new ICO, of course the liquidity for those will predominantly be in crypto-native exchanges and I think that will predominantly happen on DEXes actually. But I think for assets that really get to scale, you'll basically see them almost emulate what we see in tokenized stocks. And so I tell people that like as a platform offering tokenized stocks, getting good at setting up that infrastructure, hedging across TradFi and crypto-native venues is super important because I think that that's probably how price action develops across the entire market.
Thanks. And Gracie, I know that Bitget's focus has been kind of like launching what you call the universal exchange, right? Can you talk a little bit about that sort of like initiative at Bitget? And then how have you sort of like prioritized TradFi integrations within the platform?
Sure. So in the crypto world there are two terms: CEX and DEX, centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges. A little bit like bipolar and people just think it's either CEX or DEX. In our opinion it doesn't really explain what we do anymore since 2025. We still hold very high security, you know, all of our users need to do KYC, that kind of standard that's very similar like a CEX, but at the same time, we offer lots of onchain tokens, including of course tokenized stocks and ETFs, but at the same time actually millions of onchain DEX kind of trading assets as far as they are launched on top five public chains that we integrated including Ethereum, BSC and Solana etc. They are tradable, like our users can just put their contract address of this token and start to trade it using the USDT and USDC etc, the infrastructure on exchanges. So we feel either DEX or CEX can't explain what we do now and we came up with this term UEX, universal exchange. It's not just a marketing term. That's something I want to highlight. Although it sounds very much just like you guys created a new term. It is a trend. What I mean by that is if you look at the exchanges, we are all sort of offering more assets. It's not just Bitget, but Bitget is leading this conversation. Coinbase, the everything exchange, they're also exploring offering stocks and crypto as well as some other RWA products. Binance wallet also listed those stocks. But that is a trend that lots of offshore exchanges are heading to. We just tend to call it universal exchange to explain what we do exactly. So universal exchange means universal asset coverage at the same time using for example AI as a tool to help our users gather information, place some trades and also still hold very high standard for security and protection. We have actually the second largest protection fund in our industry which is 700 million sort of fund. So that as an insurance kind of establishment there just in case any of our users were hacked or lost money due to instable system. That has been very, very important, like holding the trust and the credibility as well as being able to offer a good amount of products to our users have been the key focus for us. But we just feel universal exchange is a good term to summarize what we do now and I think it is a trend for the whole industry.
And Michael, like Fireblocks serves what, 2,600 institutions you mentioned, so that spreads amongst neobanks, wallets, exchanges and so forth, right? How have you seen that demand in terms of tokenized stocks and ETFs amongst those platforms?
Yeah, so I actually like the UEX because we call it the everything exchange, but it's the same thing. Yeah, it's a better term by the way. So, we'll start using it because we have a blog about it. Love it. Thank you. Yeah. But look, I mean it is a trend, right? The trend right now is that I think anyone who has any form of financial app that is targeting retail users is trying to expand to a horizontal offering that includes everything, right? I think that probably like, you know, Coinbase definitely like kind of were the one to maybe set the marketing tone but I think that there are actually quite a lot of different providers that are to a certain degree front-running them. You know, from our standpoint, first of all our goal was to actually set up the infrastructure for them to be able to do it. We recently acquired a company called Dynamic that is doing onchain wallets for exchanges and retail apps and fintechs that is actually a critical component to do this successfully. So you can have basically a segregated account that is kind of non-custodial account that also eases the regulatory experience with a custodial account and of course the access across all the different blockchains. I think the maybe like, you know, the biggest brand that maybe front-running a lot of it right now we've seen is like Robinhood. So they clearly came to all this from the very traditional space of competing with the Interactive Brokers and E-Trade and so on. And I think when they were solely in the United States it was very clear that stock trading is done through the brokerage in the very traditional way. But they also had a very robust infrastructure to power crypto. When they decided to expand to Europe through the acquisition of Bitstamp and also probably soon into Canada, they figured out that actually doing it through a tokenized formulation gives them the ability to go into this, basically acquire license but then immediately deploy the technology and immediately deploy the capabilities. So if you're actually now downloading a Robinhood app in Europe, the experience from user experience looks the same trading Apple stock, but you actually see this kind of chain icon on the left corner, top left corner of their screen, and if you click on it, you can actually see the onchain transaction for the settlement. So I think that this is the direction of travel pretty much for everyone. I think that there will be probably a bit of a mix based on the demographic of the users that you are servicing, what type of tokenized assets outside of stablecoins, which I think like stablecoins is like ubiquitous, right? But like what other assets people will start offering successfully on their platforms.
And Michael, you touch upon sort of like infrastructure, right? So like stablecoins has obviously scaled because the infrastructure has been there, right? You know, like what do you look at from an infrastructure lens standpoint for us to be able to really scale in terms of adoption across tokenized stocks and ETFs?
Yeah, I mean my observation and again I think that Gracie and Peter, you guys probably will have a more nuanced view on that from a technical standpoint. My sense is the infrastructure is actually there or at least like, you know, in our layer of the stack the infrastructure is there because the same technology pretty much that we provide people to deal with stablecoins or with any other so to speak RWA is actually suitable for dealing with tokenized stocks. It's actually asset agnostic. It seems to be that the main difference is actually the regulatory treatment that is happening across different jurisdictions and liquidity, right? But I'll leave it to...
