Gate CEO Dr. Han on Perpetual Trading, CeDeFi, and Crypto’s Shift in 2025

In 2025, competitors amongst centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs) started to alter. Speed and liquidity nonetheless mattered, however they have been not sufficient. Regulators drew firmer traces in main markets. Professional merchants leaned additional into derivatives. At the identical time, decentralized platforms pulled consideration, quantity, and experimentation on-chain.

For Gate, one of many oldest  exchanges nonetheless lively, the 12 months was stuffed with record-breaking headlines and structural execution. Over the course of 2025, the corporate accomplished a group-wide rebrand to Gate.com, secured the MiCA license via its Malta entity to function throughout Europe, and obtained a full operational license from Dubai’s VARA. Alongside these regulatory milestones, Gate expanded infrastructure to help institutional buying and selling workflows and on-chain participation in parallel.

In a dialog with BeInCrypto, Gate founder and CEO Dr. Han mentioned how these selections took form over the previous 12 months, how market construction has shifted because the final bull cycle, and how the corporate is positioning itself for its subsequent section in 2026.

From Retail Frenzy to Institutional Rails

The crypto market has gone via a number of bull cycles, every pushed by a special set of contributors. In 2021, the rally was largely powered by retail hypothesis. Individual merchants flooded exchanges, chasing newly listed tokens and NFT launches. Trading selections have been usually pushed as a lot by social media momentum as by value motion.

Four years later, the situations surrounding the present cycle look markedly totally different. Large asset managers have entered the market via crypto-linked ETFs, whereas main banks are exploring stablecoins and on-chain settlement. Capital is not transferring primarily via consumer-facing apps, however via institutional channels that prioritize execution high quality, capital effectivity, and system reliability.

Against this backdrop, Gate started increasing its infrastructure to help a broader vary of buying and selling behaviors. While the platform was initially constructed with retail accessibility in thoughts, 2025 noticed a deeper funding in instruments designed for skilled and institutional workflows.

“The skilled dealer and institutional clients really must commerce via a extra skilled interface, like API. So, we offer them API,” Dr. Han informed BeInCrypto. “They additionally want extra different choices, like quicker connection, low latency, very high velocity of buying and selling, we name it high frequency buying and selling. We want to offer companies for them like this.”

One concrete final result of that effort was the launch of CrossEx in October 2025. Designed for skilled buyers, quantitative groups, and institutional purchasers, CrossEx capabilities as a cross-exchange buying and selling and clearing platform that enables customers to handle execution and capital throughout a number of venues via a single system.

According to Dr. Han, the product was developed in response to how skilled merchants really function. Many commerce concurrently throughout a number of exchanges, managing fragmented balances and collateral in parallel. CrossEx addresses this by providing a unified interface and unified API, permitting customers to deploy their crypto property extra effectively throughout platforms.

“At the identical time, they will additionally switch the asset from a special form of platform immediately. They not should withdraw, deposit on totally different platforms like earlier than,” he mentioned.

Where Retail Trading Went in 2025

While institutional capital turned the first driver of market liquidity in 2025, retail exercise continued to affect the place consideration and narratives have been heading. Dr. Han pointed to a number of patterns that stood out over the 12 months. In addition to buying and selling blue-chip property like Bitcoin and Ethereum, meme cash remained “highly regarded and lively,” based on him.

Pointing to the surge in politically themed meme cash earlier this 12 months, he cited the Trump meme token as one instance.

“Remember the Trump meme coin? Because of that, many different meme cash got here up. People commerce them actively. They wish to commerce meme cash as a result of meme cash have extra new concepts, extra alternatives,” he argued.

Another pattern he highlighted was the rising recognition of perpetual buying and selling, notably amongst skilled merchants. Dr. Han attributed this pattern to the broader vary of instruments now obtainable to merchants.

“When they commerce perps, they will have extra choices. They can use bigger leverage, making their property extra environment friendly when buying and selling. Many years in the past, most customers stayed with spot buying and selling as a result of they didn’t have many choices. But right now, you’ve gotten extra choices, extra companies,” he mentioned.

Dr. Han additionally pointed to extra customers transferring from centralized finance towards decentralized platforms. Over the 12 months, a rising share of retail buying and selling exercise has concentrated on decentralized venues. These platforms supplied quicker entry to new markets, earlier publicity to newly issued tokens, and direct execution via self-managed wallets. 

Using meme coin buying and selling for instance, he famous that almost all meme coin buying and selling quantity now happens on DeFi. He added that perpetual buying and selling itself has additionally been transferring on-chain rapidly this 12 months.

Extending Infrastructure Beyond the Centralized Exchange

Rather than pulling customers away completely, the rise of decentralized platforms created a possibility for centralized exchanges to increase their choices and retain retail engagement throughout each environments. Gate was no exception. Over the 12 months, the corporate expanded its basis to help customers who most well-liked direct interplay with on-chain markets with out giving up the efficiency and reliability related to centralized methods.

In October 2025, Gate launched Gate Layer, a Layer 2 community constructed on Optimism Stack and absolutely EVM-compatible. Gate positioned the community because the infrastructure layer for its broader on-chain technique, supporting merchandise resembling Gate Perp DEX, an on-chain perpetuals platform, alongside different Web3 instruments like Gate Fun, a zero-code token launchpad on Gate Layer, to seize new customers. The intention was to supply decentralized entry with out forcing customers to compromise on execution velocity, price effectivity, or market breadth.

Summing up the strategy, Dr. Han mentioned the purpose was to help each centralized and decentralized customers inside the identical ecosystem.

“For Gate, we have to construct a really sturdy platform for each CEX and DEX customers. For CEX customers, they’re already used to utilizing the platform. It’s user-friendly. At the identical time, if customers need to discover extra alternatives at an early stage, we are able to additionally present DEX alternatives for them,” he mentioned.

Building Trust Through Verifiable Reserves and User Control

No matter how aggressively centralized exchanges expanded merchandise or tailored to shifting market situations in 2025, safety and transparency remained non-negotiable. The business has lengthy repeated the phrase “not your keys, not your cash,” however that precept didn’t absolve centralized platforms of duty for person fund security. That expectation solely intensified after a collection of hacks concentrating on main exchanges and, most notably, the collapse of FTX in 2022.

In that context, proof of reserves turned a baseline requirement slightly than a differentiator. For Gate, nonetheless, this was not a reactive measure. The trade carried out proof of reserves as early as 2020, effectively earlier than the observe entered mainstream dialogue.

As a part of its transparency framework, Gate mixed Merkle tree verification with zero-knowledge proofs, permitting customers to confirm that their property have been absolutely backed with out exposing delicate account info. The system was open-sourced and externally audited.

“We did the Merkle tree plus zero-knowledge know-how. We printed the open-source code. At the identical time, we additionally did the audit. We labored with Hacken for the audit of our supply code. We let folks be sure that we now have carried out it in the appropriate approach,” Dr. Han mentioned.

As of September 2025, Gate’s proof of reserves lined roughly $12 billion in property.

Alongside its proof-of-reserves framework, the trade targeted on giving customers extra direct management over asset safety. Earlier in September, Gate launched a vault account system designed for property not supposed for each day buying and selling. Built on multi-party computation (MPC) know-how, the vault capabilities as a multi-chain pockets the place property can’t be moved with out specific person authorization.

“This is a self-contained resolution. We can’t contact their property with out their permission. They must signal the transactions from their very own aspect earlier than we are able to transfer their property out,” Dr. Han defined.

Additional safeguards have been embedded into the withdrawal course of. Assets held in vault accounts are topic to time delays earlier than withdrawal, that means that even when an account have been compromised, funds couldn’t be instantly drained. The delay offers customers with time to intervene, safe their accounts, or cancel unauthorized exercise.

What Gate Is Building Toward in 2026

2025 marked a 12 months of execution for Gate, spanning regulatory progress, product growth, and infrastructure improvement. But the work is way from completed. Dr. Han described Gate as persevering with to “construct new capabilities rapidly each month, yearly,” whereas reassessing how customers really work together with each centralized and decentralized platforms.

The challenge, as he sees it, just isn’t an absence of instruments. It is friction. As exchanges and DeFi ecosystems added extra merchandise, interfaces turned more and more troublesome to navigate, particularly for customers who knew their purpose however not the steps required to achieve it.

For 2026, Gate’s precedence is to simplify that have throughout each CEX and DEX environments. Dr. Han pointed to synthetic intelligence as one potential course for reducing these obstacles.

Drawing from how folks already work together with AI instruments, he defined that as an alternative of navigating complicated interfaces, customers might state their intention and enable the system to deal with execution.

“For instance, customers can inform us they need to purchase one Bitcoin,” he mentioned. “They don’t want to position an order or perceive all of the instruments behind it. We discover the perfect value, the perfect place to execute, and full the duty with the bottom price.”

The identical strategy, he added, might lengthen to extra superior requests, lowering the necessity for customers to know each underlying mechanism earlier than taking motion.

“That’s the best way we’re interested by change in the longer term, for customers and for the crypto business,” he mentioned.

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