Bitget’s effort to combine cryptocurrency, U.S. equities, gold, ETFs and foreign exchange under one account marks a bid to compete on platform breadth and professional trading infrastructure rather than individual product launches, according to market participants reflecting on the industry’s evolution since the 2018 bear market.
The strategy, branded by Bitget as the UEX “panoramic exchange” model, was launched in September 2025 and is designed to give users access to multiple asset classes without moving funds between separate brokerage and cryptocurrency accounts. The company is pairing that expansion with VIP services, quantitative trading tools and capital programs aimed at market makers and asset managers.
That approach reflects a much different competitive environment from 2018, when centralized exchanges were still fighting for users through token listings, derivatives products and basic trading features. Participants in the discussion described the current contest as one centered on custody practices, execution quality, customer support and the ability to retain active users through volatile market cycles.
From feature launches to operating reliability
Hang, a user who began following newer trading platforms during the 2018 downturn, said the largest venues often felt broadly similar in daily use at the time. As the market developed, he focused on copy trading, which allows users to automatically replicate another trader’s positions, as a feature that could make active trading more accessible to newcomers.
His longer-term view was that features alone rarely determine whether a platform keeps users. Service quality, support during disruptions and systems that continue to work through changing market conditions increasingly shape where users keep their trading activity, he said.
The 2018 downturn followed the collapse of the initial coin offering boom and produced a prolonged decline in cryptocurrency prices and trading activity. Many retail participants stepped away, while exchanges continued to test products and expand internationally. The period also preceded the growth of decentralized finance and the later entry of more traditional financial firms into digital-asset markets.
Dylan, described as a VIP user on several venues, said his own platform selection process became more demanding after the 2022 failure of FTX. He evaluates custody arrangements and incident responses first, then considers order-book depth and execution speed for larger trades, followed by practical details such as account tools and service responsiveness.
Dylan said he once held about half of his funds on Bitget, citing dedicated account support and quicker responses to routine problems. The comment illustrates how exchanges are increasingly competing for higher-volume clients with relationship-management models long associated with brokers and prime services.
Quantitative firms seek standardization
Jessie, who has an institutional background and works in quantitative strategy research, said her team does not attempt to identify market bottoms before adding or evaluating a venue. It instead applies pre-trade checks focused on fund security, the consistency of strategy execution and the platform’s ability to handle larger volume.
After upgrading its trading system, Jessie’s team expanded the number of venues it tested, including platforms ranked among CoinMarketCap’s top 10. She said the most useful tests came during periods of sharp volatility, when risk controls, API stability and response times are put under pressure.
An API, or application programming interface, allows trading software to send orders and receive market data directly from an exchange. For systematic traders, inconsistent API fields or changing order formats can create operational risk even if a platform has adequate liquidity. Jessie said her team has pushed internally for standardized API fields to make execution cleaner across venues.
The focus on technical reliability places exchanges under pressure to serve two very different groups at once: retail users who want simple tools and responsive support, and professional firms that need predictable systems capable of processing automated orders at scale.
Bitget cites growth in multi-asset activity
Bitget said its rToken product reached 1.2 million cumulative transactions and more than $200 million in assets under management by August 2026. The company also said its TradFi contracts — products linked to traditional financial instruments — recorded more than 250 million cumulative trades that month.
According to Bitget’s figures, monthly trading volume in TradFi contracts remained above $100 billion for two consecutive months, while non-crypto products accounted for as much as 40% of total platform trading volume at their peak. The company said 52% of users held positions spanning both cryptocurrencies and U.S. equities.
Those figures, if sustained, would indicate that a meaningful portion of activity is moving beyond single-asset cryptocurrency trading. A combined account can simplify collateral management and reduce the number of platforms a trader must monitor, though it also concentrates operational exposure at one provider. The quality of custody arrangements, liquidation rules and outage procedures becomes more consequential when a platform holds several types of assets for the same customer.
Link, a blogger who said he sold 2,000 ETH and 90 BTC to buy a home in 2018, described a separate test for deciding whether to cooperate with an exchange or product provider. He looks at whether products can withstand scrutiny, whether a company’s public positioning aligns with basic compliance expectations and whether its team keeps adapting as market demand changes.
He also pointed to the influence of Chinese-speaking founders, operators and trading communities within centralized cryptocurrency markets. Their presence has helped shape product development, customer acquisition and derivatives trading across global platforms, even as regulatory requirements differ sharply by jurisdiction.
Capital program targets market makers and quant firms
Bitget is also using financing to deepen its professional trading network. Xie, the company’s Chinese-language lead who joined on Jan. 2, 2024, said Bitget’s Archimedes Plan allocates $300 million for quantitative trading firms, asset managers and market makers.
The plan includes $100 million for market-neutral emerging and growth-stage quantitative teams, along with $200 million in interest-free funding for firms with established strategies and defined scale. Bitget expects the program to support more than 50 projects within six months, Xie said.
Market makers and quantitative firms can improve quoted liquidity and tighten the difference between buy and sell prices, but their participation also depends on reliable systems, clear margin rules and rapid support when markets move abruptly. The Archimedes Plan therefore connects Bitget’s funding program to its wider effort to build institutional trading infrastructure.
Xie said Bitget has expanded VIP-style service coverage through a network of more than 20 “angels” operating across over 1,000 WeChat groups. Their role is to gather user feedback and route problems toward resolution, a structure aimed at shortening the gap between customer complaints and product teams.
The model is a response to a market in which platform failures can quickly become financial events. As exchanges add stocks, commodities and currency products beside cryptocurrency, they are moving closer to the operational expectations faced by multi-asset brokers — while retaining the faster product cycles and higher volatility of digital-asset markets.
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