A Universal Exchange Coming To U.S. Soon?🚀BitGet CEO Gracy Chen INTERVIEW

I'm good. Hi. Thank you for having me.

Sure. UEX stands for Universal Exchange and that's the short term that we keep using. Well, this term comes from the idea of generally people divide crypto exchanges previously into either CEX or DEX, central exchange or decentralized exchange. Of course, these two forms still exist but in 2025 there are a few trends that we saw and we were also capturing those trends. The first trend is the integration of DEX and CEX. So I think in April 2025, which is about a year ago, we integrated our onchain ability to the CEX experience so that people can just put in the contract address of any cryptocurrency and then they can start trading it on CEX. So that's one trend that we've observed and the second trend that emerged in 2025 and that's becoming more and more obvious right now in 2026, which is the rise of RWAs, tokenized US stocks, tokenized many assets. That's just the trend not just exchanges or crypto native exchanges like us are capturing. We also saw NYSE and NASDAQ did an announcement around tokenizing all their US stocks that's available on their platform and provide 24/5 or 24/7 crypto sort of experience to their stock users. And of course we are also in discussion with them around potential collaboration. But basically the rise of RWAs and more different traditional assets like gold, oil, stocks, even forex, that's a need that our users are also looking forward to. So based on these two trends around asset coverage, we realize calling ourselves a CEX is not accurate anymore. So we came up with the term of UEX and that means we want universal asset coverage. U can stand for universal. On the other hand, you can also stand for USDT, USDC kind of stablecoin because that's just another trend we want to capture. I think there will be more people who use stablecoin for of course payment, especially cross-border transaction, but also for trading. Use USDT or USDC, this sort of stablecoin to buy or trade generally, you know, globally, universal and valuable assets again like stocks and cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, as well as forex and some commodities like gold and silver.

In terms of US, by the way, because we offer many different asset classes, each individual asset is very different. That's why I wanted to clarify whether we are talking about tokenized US stocks in general. If that's the focus now, in terms of tokenized US stocks, the major two players in the market right now are Ondo and xStocks, right? And we are collaborating with both of them. Ondo has a bigger market share and hence a bigger market share on Bitget. So we are not just one of the largest distributors, we are their largest distributor in terms of the collaboration. So back to your question, execution-wise, so right now in April 2026 we are still integrating, more like just a distributor in terms of tokenized US stocks. We're not issuing our own tokenized US stocks but that doesn't mean we don't plan to. We are in discussion and have certain plans around that. But generally right now we collaborate with Ondo and xStocks and offer them. And then in terms of liquidity, 24/5 or 24/7, by the way, for the tokenized US stocks right now, if it's spot market rather than US stocks futures, we do only offer them in 24/5 and even that's okay. So that's how you're doing it because they are 24/5, that's what I was getting at, is being able to handle that liquidity. Also not just in terms of liquidity but also for some, for example with the Blue Ocean ATS, it's the largest off-exchange platform. Basically when the US market is not open, when it's for example in Asia trading hours, like the US Eastern time zone, Sunday evening to Thursday evening, actually Sunday morning, anyway you can get the specifics around that. But basically when it's Asia time zones, Blue Ocean is another large off-exchange platform that we have a liquidity partnership with. So we do, in terms of a distributor, we do look for liquidity around everywhere to give our users the best liquidity that is available in the market. But we don't do market making ourselves. We also talking to, we actually have enabled already some crypto-specific market makers to provide liquidity on our platform. Yeah. So it's all sort of liquidity providers coming from the market, from Ondo, from traditional financial markets like Blue Ocean, from crypto-native market makers who are interested in RWAs.

Yeah. So in terms of AI agent in the world of trading or crypto trading in general, one key thing that we are thinking about is not just a chatbot, not just like an advisory sort of service that you can chat with an AI, but also execution, but also enabling AI agents to do trading on behalf of their owner or at least help whoever created that AI agent to make smarter trades. So from just answering and asking questions to execution is really, really key. And then in terms of how our users are using AI agent in different scenarios today, we have already provided something called GetAgent very early, like last year. But with OpenClaw and more AI agent tools coming out, we actually think GetAgent might be more of a past tense scenario. Although it is still being used by many of our users today. But being able to give that ability to more users in more scenarios is our new focus. What I mean by that is, GetAgent, actually I would highly recommend our users to try a new feature called the GetClaw that's just launched a few weeks ago. But only yesterday we have launched the second version which has the trading ability. So trading ability only became available yesterday. And then that can help users to trade on any platform, not just within Bitget. People can connect that to for example Telegram and putting your Telegram UID and then start trading on Telegram. You can just use TG and ask your, basically like OpenClaw. So we are building that on top of OpenClaw. But what's different, how that is different from our users, you know, starting from scratch and building their own trading tool, right, that we've already integrated 60 plus different skills on on-ramp, off-ramp, on placing orders, on certain analysis, etc. Yeah, exactly. So this part, yeah, it's called GetClaw and that's the more strategic shift of our platform in terms of going forward. We think we are just building on all the new tools for our users to use and GetClaw is the newest step.

Right now it's more on the first term that you use. By the way, I do like the term multi- or two-layer sort of operation. Global.com remains the global website and then we have individual websites in different jurisdictions. For example, EU, which will, because we are still applying for the MiCA license and it should be on the final stage and hopefully we are able to acquire it in Q2 this year, which is like this quarter. And once that license is on our hands, we want to launch Bitget EU. And by the way, it's not the specific website but it's basically in terms of structure that we want to work on. And we have been already working on that for a year because it's not just about license or compliance, it's also about the specific product offerings, about language, about the structure and order book, everything is different from the global website. So that's the EU part and then US part similarly we are acquiring. EU is faster, US is the second coming up big jurisdiction that we are aiming to launch a website end of this year. And actually right now I'm in discussion with a lot of US partners. I'm actually leading that strategy around how to provide at least spot market to our US customers.

Our goal is to launch it end of this year. If not, at least the first half of next year.

Do you actually have a slightly more realistic expectation? US has been, of course, US is a big market and everyone wants to enter it. But from our point of view, we've looked at this market for a few years and we've talked to a lot of partners. We've observed it for a while and I think because the competition is just too big. There are traditional competitors like Robinhood. There are also crypto-native competitors like Coinbase and Kraken. So entering US market doesn't mean, you know, we can immediately get a lot of users. I do have a very realistic expectation around user access to market strategies and what's the revenue and how long we can hit a profit. We do have like a maybe two, three years plan ahead rather than, you know, highly expected, okay, I'm going to win this market on day one, which is just impossible. So US is, and also we've never served the US market for the past few years. So that's another trick. Unlike EU, we've had a lot of European users, even our teams based in EU in different jurisdictions and they have a lot of partners and users already. So migrating them to the EU fully compliant website is much easier than entering the US market. So that's a huge difference there. But in general, I would say this is a trend that I observe among top, maybe top five crypto exchanges around the world including us. That for example you saw OKX got the investment from Citadel's mother company on 25 billion USDT sort of valuation and probably you've heard Bybit also discussing with some local partners. We are too, although we're not seeking for very specific strategic investment but we are definitely seeking for strategic partnerships. So that's just a trend that we are all capturing. I think this is happening based on the fact that the top exchanges have the ability to bear the very high compliance and legal cost to enter the US market as well as US being a very important strategic market for all of us not just in terms of operation and business but also in terms of for example IPO plans or the capital market in general. Yeah, that would be my two cents on this.

I think for emerging markets it's quite obvious that this is happening already. For example, in Southeast Asia, in Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. We've already enabled a lot of local payment scenarios. For example, users can just scan a QR code using the wallets, the local wallet partners we have and then they start to use Bitget wallet for cross-border transactions or just within their daily life, even non-cross-border, just like intracountry kind of transaction. It's already happening, online, offline. I think we had a journalist from Forbes News who did a research using only crypto stablecoins to survive in 30 days in I think it's Vietnam, one of the Southeast Asian countries. And for those 30 days, online payments, he even needs to do, you know, split fare with local people or other tourists. More than 93% of the scenarios it works. The other 7% that it fails are generally due to bad internet. Yeah. So payment or PayFi, stablecoin as an infrastructure is already happening in Southeast Asia especially because they have a lot of people who are unbanked and it's just very different from the US market where people in general have on average three to four credit cards, US citizens. But Southeast Asia, not a lot. Many people cannot apply for credit cards. And a lot of people on pretty much day one they have their mobile phone which may not be Apple because Apple is too expensive for them. Maybe a Xiaomi, maybe another much cheaper smartphone but they have a smartphone and they can start trading and doing daily payment on phone using crypto.

That's a great question and we've given it some thoughts. Because like you mentioned, we can easily shift or pivot to being a neobank. However, Bitget as an exchange still want to focus on trading and being the trading exchange kind of business here. Bitget Wallet on the other hand is more towards providing the crypto-driven card and also those offline QR code kind of payment scenarios together with some other ecosystem partners we have. Yeah, but Bitget is still focusing on exchange business. But in terms of Bitget Wallet and other ecosystem partners, they are definitely building a lot around cross-border transactions, around being a neobank, around a more smooth on-ramp, off-ramp experience for crypto users and non-crypto users. So we think that's a great trend that the market is observing. Bitget is not building on that. We want to, we still want to split the business and each of us have a very strong focus. Again, Bitget is focusing on being the trading platform. And another thing that a lot of people got confused for Bitget is that are we entering more in terms of only providing services to institutional clients and more traditional financial users? My answer is no. We still want to focus on crypto users. And I keep talking about U stands for USDT and USDC stablecoin is that we think blockchain has already revolutionized the traditional financial market by being the faster and cheaper settlement layer. And we don't want to go back to the infrastructure that's built half a century ago. And we want to keep on using blockchain and stablecoin to enable our users to do trading. Then that's why when you look at our tokenized solutions, sorry, our US stocks solutions, it's tokenized version of it. We're not asking our users to transfer their USDT back to USD and settle in the traditional world. We still want them to remain crypto. Not because we want to but just because crypto or blockchain is a faster and more advanced technology in our opinions.

So in 2026 I would say we still want to focus on two things. One is UEX, one is AI. But along the year we are aware there are very important events and milestones. But I guess the general idea is still focused on UEX and AI. The specific milestones that we can potentially look at this year is definitely the launch of our EU website and the US website. And then maybe mid-year when FIFA, the World Cup is happening, we want to see if there are more sports related events and even crypto tokens, fan tokens, etc. we can collaborate with. But I would say this is a very important market. There's a midterm US presidential election. There's also World Cup and right now there's geopolitical tension in the Middle East. Everything is related to each other and impacting the macroeconomics, politics, sports and cultures and that impacts our business a lot. For us we want to be prepared for any scenarios and hopefully be able to capture different growth opportunities. Yeah, so again, UEX, we've launched it last year but in my opinion there are still a lot of improvements that we can do. Just to give you a quick example, right now tokenized US stocks, they cannot offer dividend to their users and the dividend is reflected in the SPV, the vehicle that holds the individual tokenized stocks, is reflected in the price of the tokenized version of it. And hence if you see for example Meta today, for example it's traded at 500, then you will realize once it provides a dividend, the tokenized version of Meta on Ondo or xStocks will deviate from 500 because the dividend is reflected on that and then that becomes quite confusing for especially new users. They will say okay that's 500 but this is 510, what's happening here. So this kind of things are very subtle but very important to our users. So we want to see different solutions and if we can, you know, sort of solve it through another infrastructure. So that's what I mean by building on UEX. We've already had a very strong foundation, but for us, we keep thinking about how to make it a better experience for our users, more directly, you know, impacting how they feel about different product offerings, the liquidity. We're also launching a pre-IPO stock and investment opportunities for our users probably very soon in this month. So all those different scenarios are how we are evolving and continue improving on our current UEX model.

Thank you, Paul.