Vugar Usi, the newly appointed CEO of MEXC, has a provocative rationalization for the collapse in memecoin buying and selling: the tokens didn’t lose their enchantment, the remainder of the monetary system caught as much as them.
Gold strikes on a Trump tweet. Oil spikes on a geopolitical rumor. Equities swing on a single Fed headline.
“The whole lot has type of grow to be a meme at this level,” Usi stated in an interview with CoinDesk.
“Meme cash have been pushed by social sentiment, virality, hypothesis,” he continued, including that in the present day one in all “President Trump’s tweets does all these three.”
That thesis underpins his plan to reposition MEXC, lengthy synonymous with memecoin hypothesis, right into a broader “commerce all the things” platform spanning tokenized equities, commodities and prediction markets, constructed round a retail base that accounts for roughly 98% of exercise by his estimate.
“It’s very humorous to see that memecoins in the present day are preventing for a similar consideration that gold and silver does,” Usi stated.
The wager is that retail would not want changing with institutional stream, it wants extra issues to invest on.
Usi factors to prediction markets, the place merchants wager on the result of occasions moderately than the value of property, and to political bulletins that transfer commodities and equities earlier than many of the market has time to react — what he describes as buying and selling by folks “who’ve their shut proximity to the information.”
The entire thesis hinges on whether or not retail is fading or just migrating to no matter asset is most risky at any given second.
Betting towards the institutional pivot
That view places MEXC on a unique trajectory from its largest rivals.
Binance, OKX, and Bybit have spent the final two years courting institutional liquidity, constructing out derivatives desks, and positioning for the ETF-driven flows that more and more dominate bitcoin’s value discovery.
Usi, a Bitget veteran who helped scale that alternate to the world’s fourth-largest earlier than becoming a member of MEXC, is betting in the wrong way. At Bitget, he stated, roughly 80% of buying and selling quantity got here from establishments. At MEXC, it’s nearly fully retail, and he needs to maintain it that approach.
“Retail is our bread and butter,” Usi stated, framing MEXC’s zero-fee mannequin — which he claims returned $1.1 billion to customers in 2025 — as the actual advertising and marketing engine, in distinction to the Messi endorsements and Components One sponsorships that outlined his earlier employer’s rise.
His plan is to increase that mannequin throughout asset courses, including tokenized shares, gold, silver, prediction markets, and ultimately card and earn merchandise, positioning MEXC much less as a crypto alternate than as a retail-first Robinhood competitor working offshore taking cues from Asia’s superapps.
Fixing failures
The tougher query is whether or not MEXC can develop with out tripping over the regulatory issues which have plagued it over the previous few years.
MEXC spent a lot of 2025 managing fallout from the so-called White Whale incident, wherein a pseudonymous dealer alleged that $3 million of his funds had been frozen beneath opaque risk-control guidelines.
After months of public stress, MEXC’s chief technique officer Cecilia Hsueh issued a public apology in October, acknowledging that the corporate’s “danger, operations, and PR groups haven’t saved up” with its progress.
“We fucked up. We apologize to The White Whale, and his cash is already been launched. He can declare it at any time,” Hsueh wrote on X.
Knowledge reveals that withdrawals from MEXC surged within the aftermath and stay elevated all through 2025. However, in the previous couple of months, that pattern has reversed.
Knowledge from CoinDesk Analysis reveals MEXC commanded second place in alternate quantity on the finish of 2025 with a 5% market share, whereas CoinGecko highlights its 90% progress in quantity all year long.
“MEXC instructions a excessive market share regardless of falling within the lower-tier class (grade C). This continues to underline the disconnect between quantity seize and assessed danger/compliance amongst sure venues,” a CoinDesk knowledge alternate benchmark report from November reads.
Compliance readiness was “one of many key lacking factors in MEXC’s progress,” Usi advised CoinDesk.
He stated the alternate has “kick-started” conversations with regulators throughout Europe, the Center East, and Southeast Asia, with the objective of constructing a platform that’s “extra clear, extra compliant.”
On a possible U.S. entry, even within the occasion the CLARITY Act passes, he was noncommittal, calling the market “costly and complicated.”
That hesitation displays a deeper constraint: the pace, excessive itemizing breadth, and minimal friction that powered MEXC’s rise are the identical traits that draw regulatory scrutiny, leaving it to pursue a world “all the things app” technique with out the licenses, banking rails, or institutional shoppers its rivals are constructing round.
Can MEXC add guardrails with out dropping its edge?
There is a sure type of crypto dealer that loves all the things MEXC is and would hate to see it change.
The query is whether or not MEXC can clear up its mannequin with out dropping the memecoin chaos that made it work.
Or, is that even needed? Knowledge reveals that MEXC’s rising loyal merchants may not care.
