In 2025, competition among centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs) began to change. Speed and liquidity were still important, but no longer sufficient. Regulators drew clearer lines in major markets. Professional traders increasingly used derivatives. At the same time, decentralized platforms attracted attention, volume, and experimentation towards on-chain solutions.
For Gate, one of the oldest exchanges still active, the year was filled with record-breaking headlines and structural steps. Throughout 2025, the company completed a comprehensive rebranding to Gate.com, secured the MiCA license through its Malta entity to operate across Europe, and received a full operational license from VARA in Dubai. In addition to these regulatory milestones, Gate expanded its infrastructure to support both institutional trading workflows and on-chain participation simultaneously.
In a conversation with BeInCrypto, Gate founder and CEO Dr. Han discussed how these decisions took shape over the past year, how the market structure has changed since the last bull market, and how the company is positioning itself for the next phase in 2026.
From retail frenzy to institutional rails
The crypto market has experienced multiple bull cycles, each with different participants as driving forces. In 2021, the rally was mainly due to speculation from individuals. Individual traders flocked to exchanges, hunting for new tokens and NFT launches. Trading decisions were often influenced as much by social media hype as by price developments.
Four years later, the circumstances of this cycle are very different. Large asset managers have entered through crypto-linked ETFs, while major banks are exploring stablecoins and on-chain settlement. Capital is now primarily flowing through institutional channels that focus on execution quality, efficiency, and system reliability, rather than through consumer-focused apps.
Against this backdrop, Gate began to build its infrastructure to enable a broader range of trading behaviors. While the platform was initially focused on accessibility for individuals, Gate invested more in tools for professional traders and institutional workflows in 2025.
“The professional trader and institutional clients need to trade through a more professional interface, like an API. So we offer them an API,” Dr. Han told BeInCrypto. “They also need other options, such as faster connections, low latency, and very high speed for trading, that is called high-frequency trading. We need to provide such services for them.”
A concrete result of this was the launch of CrossEx in October 2025. This platform is built for professional investors, quant teams, and institutional clients, and functions as a cross-exchange trading and clearing platform allowing users to manage their transactions and capital across multiple exchanges through one system.
According to Dr. Han, the product was developed because it aligns with how professional traders actually work. Many of them trade simultaneously on different exchanges and manage multiple balances and collateral side by side. CrossEx solves this by providing one central platform and one API, allowing users to deploy their crypto assets more efficiently across different exchanges.
“At the same time, they can also directly transfer assets from one platform to another. They no longer have to constantly withdraw or deposit on different platforms, as was previously necessary,” he said.
Where retail trading was headed in 2025
Although institutional capital became the main factor behind market liquidity in 2025, retail activity continued to influence where the attention went and which narratives played out. Dr. Han saw several clear trends over the past year. Aside from blue-chip cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, meme coins, in his view, remained “very popular and active.”
As an example, he mentioned the rise of politically-themed meme coins, such as the Trump meme coin earlier this year.
“Do you remember the Trump meme coin? That led to many other meme coins afterwards. People are trading here very actively. They enjoy trading meme coins because meme coins offer more new ideas and more opportunities,” he noted.
Another trend he observed was the growing popularity of perpetual trading, especially among professional traders. Dr. Han linked this development to the greater availability of tools that traders have today.
“When they trade in perps, they get more options. They can work with more leverage, making their assets more efficiently deployed during trading. Previously, most users stuck to spot trading because there were few choices. But now there are many more options and services,” he said.
Dr. Han also pointed out that more and more users of centralized finance are transitioning to decentralized platforms. In the past year, a larger share of retail trading activity has taken place on decentralized platforms. There, users gained faster access to new markets, could buy new tokens earlier, and trade directly via their own wallet.
With meme coin trading as an example, he said that the majority of trading volume in meme coins is now on DeFi. Perpetual trading has also rapidly shifted to on-chain this year.
Expanding infrastructure beyond the centralized exchange
Instead of completely pulling users away, the rise of decentralized platforms allowed centralized exchanges to expand their offerings and continue serving retail users on both platforms. Gate was no exception. Over the course of the year, the foundation was expanded to support users who want to trade directly on-chain, without giving up the performance and reliability of centralized systems.
In October 2025, Gate launched the Gate Layer, a Layer 2 network built with Optimism Stack and fully EVM-compatible. Gate sees this network as the infrastructure layer for the broader on-chain strategy and supports products such as Gate Perp DEX, an on-chain perpetuals platform. Tools like Gate Fun, a zero-code token launchpad on Gate Layer, were also introduced to attract new users. The goal is to provide decentralized access without compromising on speed, cost, or the range of markets.
Dr. Han summarized: the goal is to support both centralized and decentralized users within the same ecosystem.
“For Gate, we need to build a very strong platform, both for CEX and for DEX users. CEX users are already accustomed to the platform. It is user-friendly. At the same time, if users are looking for opportunities at an early stage, we can offer them DEX capabilities,” he said.
Building trust with verifiable reserves and user control
No matter how much centralized exchanges expanded their products or adapted to changing market conditions in 2025, security and transparency remained essential. The phrase “not your keys, not your coins” has been echoed in the industry for a long time, but that does not absolve centralized platforms of their responsibility to keep users' funds safe. That expectation only grew after a series of hacks at major exchanges, particularly with the collapse of FTX in 2022.
In that context, proof of reserves became a baseline requirement instead of a distinguishing feature. However, for Gate, this was not a reaction to events. The exchange implemented proof of reserves back in 2020, well before it became common in the industry.
As part of their transparency framework, Gate combined Merkle tree verification with zero-knowledge proofs. This allows users to verify that their assets are fully backed, without revealing sensitive account information. The system has been made open-source and externally audited.
“We used the Merkle tree together with zero-knowledge technology. We published the open-source code. At the same time, we also had an audit performed. For the audit of our source code, we worked with Hacken. This way, people can be sure that we are doing it the right way,” Dr. Han said.
As of September 2025, Gate's proof of reserves covered approximately $12 billion in assets.
Together with the proof-of-reserves system, the exchange focused on giving users more direct control over their asset security. Earlier in September, Gate introduced a vault account system specifically for assets that are not traded daily. This vault is based on multi-party computation (MPC) and acts as a multi-chain wallet where assets can only be moved with explicit user consent.
“This is a standalone solution. We cannot touch their assets without their permission. They must sign the transactions themselves before we can move their assets,” Dr. Han explained.
Additional securities have been built into the withdrawal process. Assets held in vault accounts have a time delay before they can be withdrawn. This means that even if an account is hacked, the money is not immediately taken. That delay gives users time to intervene, secure their accounts, or cancel unauthorized actions.
Where Gate is building towards in 2026
2025 was a year of execution for Gate, with steps in regulation, product expansion, and infrastructure development. But the work is not yet finished. Dr. Han described that Gate “continues to build new features quickly every month, every year,” while it keeps looking at how users interact with both centralized and decentralized platforms.
The problem, according to him, is not the lack of tools but friction. As exchanges and DeFi ecosystems offered more products, the interfaces became increasingly difficult, especially for users who knew their goal but not what steps to take to get there.
For 2026, Gate's priority is to simplify that experience, both at CEX and DEX. Dr. Han sees artificial intelligence as one of the directions to lower these barriers.
He indicated that people are already working with AI tools simply by stating their intent, and the technology automatically aligns the execution accordingly instead of users having to use complicated interfaces.
“Users can simply state that they want to buy one Bitcoin,” he said. “They do not need to place an order or understand all the tools behind it. We find the best price, the best place to execute it, and complete the task at the lowest cost.”
The same approach can also work for more advanced requests, allowing users not to have to understand everything before they trade something.
“This is how we think about change in the future, for users and for the crypto industry,” he said.
