Vugar Usi, the new CEO of MEXC, has a provocative explanation for the collapse of memecoin trading: the tokens have not lost their appeal, the rest of the financial system has caught up.
Gold moves following a tweet from Trump. Oil soars on geopolitical rumor. Stocks swing on one Fed headline.
“At this point, everything has kind of become a meme,” Usi said in an interview with CoinDesk.
“The meme pieces were driven by social sentiment, virality, and speculation,” he continued, adding that today, one of “President Trump’s tweets does all three of those things.”
This thesis underpins his plan to reposition MEXC, long synonymous with memecoin speculation, into a broader “all-trade” platform spanning tokenized stocks, commodities and prediction markets, built around a retail base that accounts for about 98% of the activity by his estimate.
“It’s very funny to see that memecoins are fighting today for the same attention as gold and silver,” Usi said.
The bet is that retail doesn’t need to be replaced by institutional flow, it needs more things to speculate on.
Usi points to prediction markets, where traders bet on the outcome of events rather than asset prices, 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 hinges on the question of whether retail is disappearing or simply migrating to the most volatile asset at any given time.
Betting against the institutional pivot
This view places MEXC on a different trajectory than its larger 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 price discovery.
Usi, a Bitget veteran who helped grow that exchange to the fourth largest in the world 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’s almost all retail, and he wants to keep it that way.
“Retail is our bread and butter,” Usi said, describing MEXC’s no-fee model – which he said brought in $1.1 billion to users in 2025 – as the real marketing engine, unlike the Messi endorsements and Formula 1 sponsorships that defined his previous employer’s rise.
His plan is to expand this model across all asset classes, adding tokenized stocks, gold, silver, prediction markets and, eventually, cards and earnings products, positioning MEXC less as a crypto exchange and more as a retail Robinhood competitor operating overseas taking inspiration from Asian superapps.
Fixing failures
The tougher question is whether MEXC can grow without stumbling over the regulatory issues that have plagued it in recent years.
MEXC spent much of 2025 dealing with the aftermath of the so-called White Whale incident, in which a pseudonymous trader claimed $3 million of its funds had been frozen under opaque risk control rules.
After months of public pressure, Cecilia Hsueh, MEXC’s chief strategy officer, issued a public apology in October, acknowledging that the company’s “risk management, operations and public relations teams had failed to keep up” with its growth.
“We screwed up. We apologize to The White Whale, and his money has already been released. He can claim it back at any time,” Hsueh wrote on X.
Data shows that MEXC withdrawals subsequently increased and remain high throughout 2025. But, in recent months, this trend has reversed.
Data from CoinDesk Research shows that MEXC was in second place in terms of trading volume at the end of 2025 with a 5% market share, while CoinGecko highlights its 90% growth in volume throughout the year.
“MEXC holds high market share despite being in the lower category (grade C). This continues to highlight the disconnect between volume capture and risk/compliance assessment between certain venues,” reads a November CoinDesk data exchange benchmark report.
Compliance readiness was “one of the major missing points in MEXC’s growth,” Usi told CoinDesk.
He said the exchange had “initiated” conversations with regulators in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, with the aim of building a “more transparent and compliant” platform.
Regarding potential entry into the United States, even if the CLARITY Act were passed, he was evasive, calling the market “expensive and complex.”
This hesitation reflects a deeper constraint: The speed, extreme scale of listing, and minimal friction that have fueled MEXC’s rise are the same characteristics that are attracting the attention of regulators, leaving it to pursue a global “anything-app” strategy without the licensing, banking rails, or institutional clients that its competitors are building around.
Can MEXC add guardrails without losing its advantage?
There is a certain type of crypto trader who loves everything about MEXC 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 Mexico’s increasingly loyal merchants may not care.
