In 2025, competition among centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs) began to change. Speed and liquidity still mattered, but they were no longer enough. Regulators drew firmer lines in major markets. Professional traders leaned further into derivatives. At the same time, decentralized platforms pulled attention, volume, and experimentation on-chain.
For Gate, one of the oldest exchanges still active, the year was filled with record-breaking headlines and structural execution. Over the course of 2025, the company completed a group-wide rebrand to Gate.com, secured the MiCA license through its Malta entity to operate across Europe, and obtained a full operational license from Dubai’s VARA. Alongside these regulatory milestones, Gate expanded 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 those decisions took shape over the past year, how market structure has shifted since the last bull cycle, and how the company is positioning itself for its next phase in 2026.
From Retail Frenzy to Institutional Rails
The crypto market has gone through multiple bull cycles, each driven by a different set of participants. In 2021, the rally was largely powered by retail speculation. Individual traders flooded exchanges, chasing newly listed tokens and NFT launches. Trading decisions were often driven as much by social media momentum as by price action.
Four years later, the conditions surrounding the current cycle look markedly different. Large asset managers have entered the market through crypto-linked ETFs, while major banks are exploring stablecoins and on-chain settlement. Capital is no longer moving primarily through consumer-facing apps, but through institutional channels that prioritize execution quality, capital efficiency, and system reliability.
Against this backdrop, Gate began expanding its infrastructure to support a broader range of trading behaviors. While the platform was originally built with retail accessibility in mind, 2025 saw a deeper investment in tools designed for professional and institutional workflows.
“The professional trader and institutional customers actually need to trade through a more professional interface, like API. So, we provide them API,” Dr. Han told BeInCrypto. “They also need more other options, like faster connection, low latency, very high speed of trading, we call it high frequency trading. We need to provide services for them like this.”
One concrete outcome of that effort was the launch of CrossEx in October 2025. Designed for professional investors, quantitative teams, and institutional clients, CrossEx functions as a cross-exchange trading and clearing platform that allows users to manage execution and capital across multiple venues through a single system.
According to Dr. Han, the product was developed in response to how professional traders actually operate. Many trade simultaneously across several exchanges, managing fragmented balances and collateral in parallel. CrossEx addresses this by offering a unified interface and unified API, allowing users to deploy their crypto assets more efficiently across platforms.
“At the same time, they can also transfer the asset from a different kind of platform instantly. They no longer have to withdraw, deposit on different platforms like before,” he said.
Where Retail Trading Went in 2025
While institutional capital became the primary driver of market liquidity in 2025, retail activity continued to influence where attention and narratives were heading. Dr. Han pointed to several patterns that stood out over the year. In addition to trading blue-chip assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, meme coins remained “very hot and active,” according to him.
Pointing to the surge in politically themed meme coins earlier this year, he cited the Trump meme token as one example.
“Remember the Trump meme coin? Because of that, many other meme coins came up. People trade them actively. They like to trade meme coins because meme coins have more new ideas, more opportunities,” he argued.
Another trend he highlighted was the growing popularity of perpetual trading, particularly among professional traders. Dr. Han attributed this trend to the broader range of tools now available to traders.
“When they trade perps, they can have more options. They can use larger leverage, making their assets more efficient when trading. Many years ago, most users stayed with spot trading because they didn’t have many options. But today, you have more options, more services,” he said.
Dr. Han also pointed to more users moving from centralized finance toward decentralized platforms. Over the year, a growing share of retail trading activity has concentrated on decentralized venues. These platforms offered faster access to new markets, earlier exposure to newly issued tokens, and direct execution through self-managed wallets.
Using meme coin trading as an example, he noted that most meme coin trading volume now occurs on DeFi. He added that perpetual trading itself has also been moving on-chain quickly this year.
Extending Infrastructure Beyond the Centralized Exchange
Rather than pulling users away entirely, the rise of decentralized platforms created an opportunity for centralized exchanges to extend their offerings and retain retail engagement across both environments. Gate was no exception. Over the year, the company expanded its foundation to support users who preferred 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 Optimism Stack and fully EVM-compatible. Gate positioned the network as the infrastructure layer for its broader on-chain strategy, supporting products such as Gate Perp DEX, an on-chain perpetuals platform, alongside other Web3 tools like Gate Fun, a zero-code token launchpad on Gate Layer, to capture new users. The aim was to offer decentralized access without forcing users to compromise on execution speed, cost efficiency, or market breadth.
Summing up the approach, Dr. Han said the goal was to support both centralized and decentralized users within the same ecosystem.
“For Gate, we need to build a very strong platform for both CEX and DEX users. For CEX users, they’re already used to using the platform. It’s user-friendly. At the same time, if users want to find more opportunities at an early stage, we can also provide DEX opportunities for them,” he said.
Building Trust Through Verifiable Reserves and User Control
No matter how aggressively centralized exchanges expanded products or adapted to shifting market conditions in 2025, security and transparency remained non-negotiable. The industry has long repeated the phrase “not your keys, not your coins,” but that principle did not absolve centralized platforms of responsibility for user fund safety. That expectation only intensified after a series of hacks targeting major exchanges and, most notably, the collapse of FTX in 2022.
In that context, proof of reserves became a baseline requirement rather than a differentiator. For Gate, however, this was not a reactive measure. The exchange implemented proof of reserves as early as 2020, well before the practice entered mainstream discussion.
As part of its transparency framework, Gate combined Merkle tree verification with zero-knowledge proofs, allowing users to verify that their assets were fully backed without exposing sensitive account information. The system was open-sourced and externally audited.
“We did the Merkle tree plus zero-knowledge technology. We published the open-source code. At the same time, we also did the audit. We worked with Hacken for the audit of our source code. We let people make sure that we have done it in the right way,” Dr. Han said.
As of September 2025, Gate’s proof of reserves covered approximately $12 billion in assets.
Alongside its proof-of-reserves framework, the exchange focused on giving users more direct control over asset security. Earlier in 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 explicit user authorization.
“This is a self-contained solution. We cannot touch their assets without their permission. They need to sign the transactions from their own side before we can move their assets out,” Dr. Han explained.
Additional safeguards were embedded into the withdrawal process. Assets held in vault accounts are subject to time delays before withdrawal, meaning that even if an account were compromised, funds could not be immediately drained. The delay provides users with time to intervene, secure their accounts, or cancel unauthorized activity.
What Gate Is Building Toward in 2026
2025 marked a year of execution for Gate, spanning regulatory progress, product expansion, and infrastructure development. But the work is far from finished. Dr. Han described Gate as continuing to “build new functions quickly every month, every year,” while reassessing how users actually interact with both centralized and decentralized platforms.
The issue, as he sees it, is not a lack of tools. It is friction. As exchanges and DeFi ecosystems added more products, interfaces became increasingly difficult to navigate, especially for users who knew their goal but not the steps required to reach it.
For 2026, Gate’s priority is to simplify that experience across both CEX and DEX environments. Dr. Han pointed to artificial intelligence as one possible direction for lowering those barriers.
Drawing from how people already interact with AI tools, he explained that instead of navigating complex interfaces, users could state their intention and allow the system to handle execution.
“For example, users can tell us they want to buy one Bitcoin,” he said. “They don’t need to place an order or understand all the tools behind it. We find the best price, the best place to execute, and complete the task with the lowest cost.”
The same approach, he added, could extend to more advanced requests, reducing the need for users to understand every underlying mechanism before taking action.
“That’s the way we’re thinking about change in the future, for users and for the crypto industry,” he said.
Source: https://beincrypto.com/gate-ceo-han-perpetual-trading-cedefi-2025/