Vugar Usi, the newly appointed CEO of MEXC, has a provocative explanation for the collapse in trading of memecoin: tokens did not lose their appeal, the rest of the financial system caught up with them.
Gold moves on a Trump tweet. Oil spikes on a geopolitical rumor. Stocks swing on a single Fed headline.
“Everything has become a meme at this point,” Usi said in an interview with CoinDesk.
“Meme coinage was driven by social sentiment, virality, speculation,” he continued, adding that one of “President Trump’s tweets today does all three.”
This thesis supports his plan to reposition MEXC, long synonymous with memecoin speculation, into a broader “trade everything” platform spanning tokenized stocks, commodities and prediction markets, built around a retail base that accounts for about 98% of activity by his estimate.
“It’s very funny to see that today memecoins are fighting for the same attention that gold and silver do,” said Usi.
The bet is that retail does not need to be replaced with institutional flows, it needs 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 to political announcements that move commodities and stocks before most of the market has time to react — what he describes as trading by people “who have their proximity to the news.”
The entire thesis hinges on whether retail trade fades or simply migrates to the asset that is most volatile at any given time.
Bets towards the institutional focal point
That point of view puts MEXC on a different path than its biggest competitors.
Binance, OKX and Bybit have spent the past two years courting institutional liquidity, building derivatives desks and positioning themselves for the ETF-driven flows that increasingly dominate bitcoin’s 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 trading volume came from institutions. At MEXC, it is almost exclusively retail, and he would like to keep it that way.
“Retail is our bread and butter,” said Usi, who framed MEXC’s zero-fee model — which he claims returned $1.1 billion to users by 2025 — as the real marketing engine, in contrast to the Messi endorsements and Formula One sponsorships that defined his former employer’s rise.
His plan is to expand this model across asset classes, adding tokenized stocks, gold, silver, prediction markets and eventually card and earn products, positioning MEXC less as a crypto exchange than as a retail-first Robinhood competitor operating offshore and taking cues from Asia’s superapps.
Correction of errors
The tougher question is whether MEXC can expand without stumbling over the regulatory issues that have plagued it over the past few years.
MEXC spent much of 2025 managing the fallout from the so-called White Whale incident, in which a pseudonymous trader claimed $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 PR teams have not kept up” with the growth.
“We are fucked. We apologize to The White Whale and his money has already been released. He can claim it anytime,” Hsueh wrote on X.
Data shows that withdrawals from MEXC increased in the aftermath and will remain elevated through 2025. However, in the past few months, this trend has reversed.
Data from CoinDesk Research shows that MEXC came in second in exchange volume at the end of 2025 with a market share of 5%, while CoinGecko highlights its 90% growth in volume throughout the year.
“MEXC commands a high market share despite declines in the lower category (grade C). This continues to highlight the disconnect between volume capture and assessed risk/compliance among certain venues,” reads a CoinDesk data exchange benchmark report from November.
Compliance readiness was “one of the key missing points in MEXC’s growth,” Usi told CoinDesk.
He said the exchange has “kick-started” talks with regulators across Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia with the goal of building a platform that is “more transparent, more compliant.”
On potential U.S. entry, even if the CLARITY Act is passed, he was noncommittal, calling the market “expensive and complex.”
This hesitation reflects a deeper limitation: the speed, extreme breadth of listings and minimal friction that drove MEXC’s rise are the same attributes that are drawing regulatory scrutiny, leaving it to pursue a global “all-app” strategy without the licenses, bank connections or institutional clients around which its rivals build.
Can MEXC Add Guardrails Without Losing Its Edge?
There is a certain type of crypto 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 it even necessary? Data shows that MEXC’s growing loyal retailers may not care.
