Why We Made TradFi a Main Course — Not a Side Dish

Over the past year, I've watched more and more crypto exchanges add traditional financial products to their platforms. Stocks. Indices. Gold. Forex. In many ways, this is a positive signal. It tells me the industry is maturing, and it validates something I've believed for a long time: the endgame of this industry isn't TradFi versus crypto—it's TradFi on crypto rails.

But as this trend takes shape, I've noticed a pattern that feels incomplete.

Most platforms are adding TradFi, but they're not truly integrating it. Stocks and gold get tucked into existing crypto menus. TradFi products are either mixed into spot lists or buried on subpages. The message, whether intentional or not, treats these products as a feature rather than a foundation.

Crypto is roughly a $2.4 trillion market today. Traditional assets by comparison represent nearly $900 trillion. Annual stock trading volume sits around $100-130 trillion, and by 2030, projections put it closer to $160–200 trillion. If crypto were only about speculative tokens, those numbers wouldn’t matter. But if crypto is becoming part of global financial infrastructure, they matter a great deal.

Treating TradFi as a short-term retention tool, something to keep users engaged when crypto volumes soften, is a defensive mindset. It misses the deeper shift happening in user behavior and asset demand.

The Fine Line Between Crypto and TradFi

What we are witnessing isn't another crypto cycle, it's a migration.

Two forces are converging. First, the crypto industry is entering a new phase as solutions like RWAs mature and regulatory clarity improves. Second, user demand is changing. Crypto users are not just interested in CEX's altcoins listing. Instead, they want access to onchain trading, decentralized liquidity, and increasingly, traditional financial assets. This isn't forced adoption, but rather it's a natural evolution in how users want to manage their portfolios.

For centralized exchanges, expanding asset coverage isn't just about growth. It also helps smooth crypto's pronounced bull-and-bear cycles, giving users more diversified and flexible allocation options. As institutions bring treasuries, equities, funds, and commodities onchain, crypto-native infrastructure increasingly becomes the settlement and distribution layer. Not ideology, plumbing.

By 2030, it’s realistic that 20-40% of global stock trading could route through crypto-native rails via tokenized equities, onchain settlement, and stablecoin liquidity. That represents a $32–80 (160*20%=32, 200*40%=80) trillion flow moving through crypto market infrastructure. Our UEX strategy is built around supporting that migration at scale, with the ambition to handle a meaningful share of tokenized stock activity as it moves onchain.

Product Evolution is Earned, Not Announced

That belief shaped a major decision that we made at Bitget. On February 12, we rolled out a major structural update to the Bitget app. On the surface, it looks like an interface upgrade, but in reality, it's a statement about how we see the future of exchanges.

From a product standpoint, it took us roughly a year to build toward this moment. We started by adding onchain trading to our platform, then introduced early stock-token perpetual contracts. In Q4 last year, we launched CFD products, and in January this year we opened them fully to users. Each step was deliberate, designed to ensure that depth, liquidity, and execution quality matured alongside access.

On the execution side, we entered the RWA space through partnerships like Ondo, leveraging onchain trading infrastructure and aggregated liquidity to enable seamless trading across more than 200 RWA tokens (mainly U.S. stocks and ETFs). Our CFD products, settled in stablecoins with top-tier market-maker liquidity and 24/7 trading, reflect a clear differentiation from traditional brokers in both access and efficiency.

By the time we reached this stage, TradFi on Bitget had formed a complete and coherent framework across spot-like token structures and multiple derivative formats. That maturity made one thing clear: it was time to communicate the shift more explicitly.

Why UI Is Strategy

We consolidated crypto first. Spot and futures trading now live under a single Trade tab, reflecting how users actually move across crypto products without artificial boundaries.

More importantly, we elevated TradFi. For the first time, TradFi has its own standalone, top-level tab in the core navigation, placed directly alongside Trade. CFDs, Stock perps, and Stock tokens are no longer secondary menus or sub-categories. They are first-class citizens.

Internally, we refer to this as a "super version" of the platform. Not because it adds more features, but because it marks a transition to the next stage of what an exchange is meant to be. When users open the app now, the shift is immediately visible; TradFi is no longer hidden. It stands alongside crypto, with equal strategic weight and visibility.

Crypto trading and TradFi trading are not the same. Behaviours differ, and so do risk frameworks. People's views on leverage, hedging, and exposure differ. Forcing them into the same interface creates clutter and cognitive overload. In practical terms, that also means TradFi products now receive millions of additional user impressions each month. To our knowledge, we are among the first major exchanges to make this structural move.

From Competition to Co-Evolution

A natural question is whether exchanges and traditional brokers will ultimately compete or collaborate but the reality is more nuanced. We're moving toward a phase of two-way integration. Crypto platforms are expanding into TradFi assets, while traditional brokers are increasingly offering crypto and stablecoin support. I see this less as a threat and more as a signal that markets are converging.

Our core advantage remains being crypto-native. Blockchain-based settlement, high-performance trading systems, and the programmability of tokens are deeply embedded in how crypto platforms operate. These are not superficial advantages, they represent a generational shift in how markets function.

At the same time, cooperation with traditional institutions is inevitable. Brokers bring deep experience in liquidity channels, product mechanics, and fundamental research. There's a lot to learn on both sides. Rather than simple replacement, the next few years are likely to be defined by collaboration and co-existing.

Offensive, Not Defensive

Giving TradFi equal strategic status isn't about today's volumes. It's about where growth comes from next.

We believe the next phase of exchanges will be defined less by what assets they list and more by how coherently they organize them. Fragmented interfaces reflect fragmented thinking. Unified structure reflects conviction. The Universal Exchange, what we've come to call UEX, isn't about turning crypto into TradFi or TradFi into crypto. It's about allowing both to coexist as first-class citizens, each with the depth and clarity they deserve.

That's why we didn't just add another button. We rethought the foundation.

The update comes from users who don't identify as "crypto traders" or "stock traders", but simply as participants in global markets. It comes from portfolios that hold BTC alongside equities, gold alongside stablecoins. It comes from a world where markets are always on, assets are tokenized, and boundaries are increasingly removed.

This update is one step, but an important one. It's us saying, clearly and boldly, that TradFi is no longer a supplement. It is our core growth engine in the UEX era, and the exchanges that recognize that early won't just survive the next cycle, they'll help define what comes after it.

Gracy Chen