In 2025, competition among centralized crypto exchanges (CEX) begins to change. Speed and fluidity are still important, but they are no longer enough. Regulators drew firmer lines in key markets. Professional traders turned even more towards derivatives. At the same time, decentralized platforms have gained traction, increased volume, and started experimenting on-chain.
For Gate, one of the oldest exchanges still in operation, it’s been a year filled with record headlines and structural execution. The company completed its group-wide rebranding to Gate.com during 2025, secured a MiCA license to operate across Europe through its Maltese entity, and obtained a full operating license from VARA in Dubai. In parallel with these regulatory milestones, Gate expanded its infrastructure to support institutional trading workflows and on-chain participation in parallel.
In a conversation with BeInCrypto, Gate founder and CEO Dr. Han discussed how these decisions have taken shape over the past year, how the market structure has changed since the last bull cycle, and how the company is positioning itself for the next phase in 2026.
From retail frenzy to institutional rails
Cryptocurrency markets have experienced multiple bullish cycles, each driven by different participants. The 2021 rally was mainly supported by retail speculation. Individual traders flocked to exchanges to chase the launch of newly listed tokens and NFTs. Trading decisions were often driven not only by price action but also by social media momentum.
Four years later, the circumstances surrounding the current cycle look markedly different. Major asset managers are entering the market through crypto-linked ETFs, and major banks are exploring stablecoins and on-chain payments. Capital is no longer moving primarily through consumer apps, but through institutional channels that prioritize execution quality, capital efficiency, and system reliability.
Against this backdrop, Gate has begun expanding its infrastructure to support a wider range of trading activities. The platform was originally built with retail accessibility in mind, but in 2025 we’ve made further investments in tools designed for professional and organizational workflows.
“Professional traders and institutional customers actually need to trade through a more specialized interface, like an API. So we are providing an API to them,” Dr. Han told BeInCrypto. “They also need other options, such as faster connections, low latency, and very fast trading (we call this high-frequency trading). We need to provide them with these services.”
One concrete outcome of that effort was the launch of CrossEx in October 2025. Designed for professional investors, quantitative teams, and institutional investors, CrossEx serves as a cross-exchange trading and clearing platform that allows users to manage execution and capital across multiple exchanges through a single system.
According to Dr. Han, this product was developed based on how professional traders actually operate. Many trade simultaneously on multiple exchanges and manage fragmented balances and collateral in parallel. CrossEx addresses this issue by providing a unified interface and unified API, allowing users to more efficiently deploy crypto assets across platforms.
“At the same time, you can also instantly transfer assets from different types of platforms. There is no longer a need to withdraw or deposit to different platforms as before,” he said.
What retail trade will look like in 2025
While institutional investors became the main driver of market liquidity in 2025, retail activity continued to influence attention and narrative. Dr. Han pointed to several patterns that have stood out over the past year. He said that in addition to trading in blue-chip assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, memecoins remain “very active and active.”
He pointed to the proliferation of politically-themed meme coins earlier this year, citing the Trump meme token as an example.
“Remember the Trump meme coin? That is why many other meme coins have appeared. People are actively trading them. They prefer trading meme coins because there are newer ideas and more opportunities in meme coins,” he claimed.
Another trend he highlighted is the growing popularity of perpetual trading, especially among professional traders. Dr. Han attributes this trend to a wider range of tools available to traders.
“When you trade perp, you can have more options. You can use greater leverage, which increases the efficiency of your assets when trading. Years ago, most users stayed with spot trading because there were not many options. But today, there are more options and more services,” he said.
Dr. Han also pointed out that more users are moving from centralized finance to decentralized platforms. Throughout the year, the concentration of retail trading activity on decentralized exchanges has increased. These platforms provided faster access to new markets, early exposure to newly issued tokens, and direct execution through self-managed wallets.
Citing memecoin trading as an example, he pointed out that most of the memecoin trading volume is currently taking place in DeFi. He added that perpetual transactions themselves are also rapidly moving on-chain this year.
Extend your infrastructure beyond centralized exchanges
The rise of decentralized platforms has created an opportunity for centralized exchanges to expand their offerings and maintain engagement with retailers across both environments, rather than alienating users entirely. Gate was no exception. The company has expanded its base over the year to support users who prefer direct interaction with on-chain markets without giving up the performance and reliability associated with centralized systems.
In October 2025, Gate launched Gate Layer, a Layer 2 network built on the Optimism Stack and fully compatible with EVM. Gate positioned the network as an infrastructure layer for a broader on-chain strategy and supported products such as Gate Perp DEX, an on-chain persistence platform, alongside other Web3 tools such as Gate Fun, a zero-code token launch pad on top of the Gate layer, to acquire new users. The aim was to provide users with decentralized access without forcing them to compromise on execution speed, cost efficiency, or market breadth.
Dr. Han summarized the approach and said the goal is to support both centralized and decentralized users within the same ecosystem.
“For Gate, we need to build a platform that is very powerful for both CEX and DEX users. For CEX users, they are already accustomed to using the platform and it is user-friendly. At the same time, if users want to find more opportunities early on, we can also provide them with DEX opportunities,” he said.
Building trust with verifiable reserves and user controls
No matter how aggressively centralized exchanges expanded their offerings or adapted to changing market conditions in 2025, security and transparency remained non-negotiable. The industry has long repeated the phrase “not the key, not the coin,” but this principle did not absolve centralized platforms of responsibility for the safety of user funds. Those hopes were further strengthened after a series of hacks targeting major exchanges, most notably the collapse of FTX in 2022.
In that context, proof of reserves became a fundamental requirement rather than a differentiating factor. But for Gates, this was not a reactive measure. The exchange had already introduced proof of reserves in 2020, long before the practice entered mainstream discussion.
As part of its transparency framework, Gate has combined Merkle tree validation with zero-knowledge proofs to enable users to verify that their assets are fully backed without exposing sensitive account information. The system is open sourced and externally audited.
“We introduced Merkle trees and zero-knowledge technology. We published open source code. We also did an audit at the same time. We worked with Hacken on the source code audit. We got people to confirm that it was done the right way,” Dr. Han said.
As of September 2025, Gate’s proof of reserves contained approximately $12 billion in assets.
The exchange focuses on giving users more direct control over the security of their assets, alongside a proof-of-reserve framework. In early September, Gate introduced a vault account system designed for assets not intended for daily trading. Built on Multi-Party Computation (MPC) technology, the vault functions as a multi-chain wallet where assets cannot be moved without the user’s explicit approval.
“This is a self-contained solution. We cannot touch their assets without their permission. They have to sign the transaction on their own side before we can move their assets,” Dr. Han explained.
Additional safeguards have been incorporated into the withdrawal process. Assets stored in a vault account take time to be withdrawn, so even if your account is compromised, your funds won’t be immediately gone. This delay gives users time to intervene, secure their accounts, or cancel unauthorized activity.
What is Gate building for 2026?
2025 has been a year of execution for Gate, with regulatory developments, product expansion, and infrastructure development. But the work is not done yet. Dr. Han explained that Gate continues to “rapidly build new capabilities month after month and year after year,” while reevaluating how users actually interact with both centralized and decentralized platforms.
The problem, he says, is not a lack of tools. It’s friction. As exchanges and the DeFi ecosystem add more products, the interface has become increasingly difficult to navigate, especially for users who know their goal but not the steps required to get there.
For 2026, Gate’s priority is to simplify the experience in both CEX and DEX environments. Dr. Han cited artificial intelligence as one possible direction for lowering these barriers.
Drawing on the way people already interact with AI tools, he explained that instead of navigating through complex interfaces, users can express their intentions and let the system handle the execution.
“For example, a user can tell us they want to buy one Bitcoin,” he said. “They don’t have to order it or understand all the tools behind it. We find the best price, the best place to run it, and complete the task at the lowest cost.”
He added that the same approach can be extended to more advanced requests, reducing the need for users to understand all the underlying mechanisms before taking action.
“That’s how we think about the future changes for our users and the cryptocurrency industry,” he said.
