Vugar Usi, the newly appointed CEO of MEXC, has a provocative explanation for the collapse of memecoin trading: the tokens did not lose their appeal, the rest of the financial system caught up with them.
Gold moves after Trump tweet. Oil rises due to a geopolitical rumor. Stocks swing on a single Fed head.
“Everything has become kind of a meme at this point,” Usi said in an interview with CoinDesk.
“Meme coins were driven by social sentiment, virality and speculation,” he continued, adding that today one of “President Trump’s tweets does all three.”
That thesis underpins his plan to reposition MEXC, long synonymous with memecoin speculation, into a broader “all-trading” platform encompassing tokenized stocks, commodities and prediction markets, built around a retail base that accounts for about 98% of the activity by his estimate.
“It’s really fun to see memecoins today fighting for the same attention as gold and silver,” Usi said.
The bet is that retail trading doesn’t need to be replaced by institutional flow, but rather more things to speculate on.
Usi points to prediction markets, where traders bet on the outcome of events rather than the price of assets, and political announcements that move commodities and stocks before most of the market has time to react: what he describes as trades made by people “who are very close to the news.”
The whole thesis depends on whether retail is fading or simply migrating to whichever asset is most volatile at any given time.
Betting against the institutional pivot
That vision places MEXC on a different trajectory than its largest competitors.
Binance, OKX and Bybit have spent the last two years seeking institutional liquidity, creating derivatives desks and positioning themselves for the ETF-driven flows that increasingly dominate bitcoin price discovery.
Usi, a Bitget veteran who helped scale that exchange to the world’s fourth-largest before joining MEXC, is betting in the opposite direction. At Bitget, he said, about 80% of the trading volume came from institutions. At MEXC, it is almost exclusively retail and wants to keep it that way.
“Retail is our bread and butter,” Usi said, framing MEXC’s zero-fee model (which he says returned $1.1 billion to users in 2025) as the real marketing driver, in contrast to the Messi endorsements and Formula One sponsorships that defined his previous employer’s rise.
Their plan is to extend that model to all asset classes, adding tokenized stocks, gold, silver, prediction markets, and eventually cards and earnings products, positioning MEXC less as a crypto exchange than as a retail competitor to Robinhood operating offshore following the lead of Asia’s super apps.
Fixing bugs
The tougher question is whether MEXC can expand without running into the regulatory problems that have plagued it in recent years.
MEXC spent much of 2025 managing the fallout from the so-called White Whale incident, in which a pseudonymous trader alleged that $3 million of his funds had been frozen under opaque risk control rules.
After months of public pressure, MEXC Chief Strategy Officer Cecilia Hsueh issued a public apology in October, acknowledging that the company’s “risk, operations and public relations teams have not kept pace” with its growth.
“We screwed up. We apologize to The White Whale and your money has already been released. You can claim it at any time,” Hsueh wrote on X.
Data shows that MEXC withdrawals subsequently increased and remain elevated through 2025. But, in recent months, that trend has reversed.
Data from CoinDesk Research shows that MEXC ranked second in exchange volume at the end of 2025 with a 5% market share, while CoinGecko highlights its 90% growth in volume for the full year.
“MEXC has high market share despite falling into the lower tier (grade C) category. This continues to underline the disconnect between volume capture and risk/compliance assessed among certain venues,” reads a CoinDesk data exchange benchmark report from November.
Compliance readiness was “one of the key points missing in MEXC’s growth,” Usi told CoinDesk.
He said the exchange has “boosted” conversations with regulators in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, with the goal of building a platform that is “more transparent and more compliant.”
Regarding a possible entry into the United States, even if the CLARITY Act is approved, he did not commit himself and described the market as “expensive and complex.”
That hesitancy reflects a deeper constraint: The speed, extreme listing breadth and minimal friction that fueled MEXC’s rise are the same traits that attract regulatory scrutiny, allowing it to pursue a global “apps for everything” strategy without the licenses, banking rails or institutional clients that its competitors are building around.
Can MEXC add guardrails without losing its edge?
There is a certain type of cryptocurrency trader that loves everything MEXC is and would hate to see it change.
The question is whether MEXC can clean up its model without losing the memecoin chaos that made it work.
Or is that even necessary? The data shows that MEXC’s increasingly loyal traders might not care.
