When brokers set their sights on Crypto Assets trading

We are already in the midst of this reshuffle between traditional brokers and encryption natives.

Written by: Sleepy, Kaori, Peggy

"I have been having conference calls every day until 2 AM recently."

The person saying this is an old finance professional who has been in the traditional brokerage industry for more than a decade. When he said this, he was placing his phone upside down on the coffee table. The corners of his eyes were slightly red, but his tone remained very casual.

His office in Beijing is located in a siheyuan in Xicheng District, with two slightly chipped doors. The afternoon light slants into the courtyard, and some dust floats in the beams of light. He sits at an old wooden table, dealing with issues related to regulation, business cooperation, and project scheduling.

Starting from the financial industry for over a decade, he has experienced the last financial crisis, rolled around in the global market, managed funds, developed products, and led teams, almost running across all continents. It wasn't until these past few years that he began to shift towards a direction that the entire traditional financial industry initially thought was "unpredictable"—virtual assets.

The traditional finance industry's attention to Web3 did not start in 2025. If we trace back to the starting point, many people would mention Robinhood.

This platform, known for "zero-commission stock trading," launched its Bitcoin and Ethereum trading features as early as 2018. Initially, it was just a supplement to the product line, allowing users to buy coins like they would buy Tesla stocks, without needing a wallet or understanding encryption. This feature was not heavily promoted that year, yet it became a breakout point a few years later.

In the fourth quarter of last year, cryptocurrency contributed over 35% of Robinhood's total net revenue, with trading volume surging by 455%, driving trading revenue to grow by 733% year-on-year, reaching $358 million, making cryptocurrency the largest source of revenue for Robinhood in that quarter. In the first quarter of 2025, cryptocurrency contributed over 27% of total revenue, with trading revenue doubling year-on-year, reaching $252 million.

Robinhood quarterly encryption asset trends, source: IO.FUND

What drives this change is not technology, but the clicks of thousands of users. Robinhood did not tell the Web3 narrative; it simply adapted to the trading habits of its users, and as a result, found that cryptocurrency trading is no longer a fringe business, but has instead become the core engine of the company's growth.

Since then, Robinhood has gradually transitioned from a centralized brokerage to a digital asset trading platform.

With the Robinhood sample, traditional finance will finally stop just watching the encryption industry in 2025 and will decide to collectively enter the market. They are not here to experience Web3, nor are they here to invest in projects; "traditional finance will take over the encryption industry within 10 years."

We are already in the midst of this reshuffling between traditional brokers and encryption natives.

In March 2025, one of the world's largest retail brokerage firms, Charles Schwab Group, with an asset management scale exceeding 10 trillion dollars, announced that it will open spot Bitcoin trading services within a year.

In May 2025, Morgan Stanley, one of the most influential investment banks on Wall Street, announced plans to officially integrate BTC and ETH into its trading platform E*Trade, providing retail users with a direct trading channel.

In May 2025, JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States by asset size and known for its long-standing criticism of encryption, announced that it would allow customers to purchase Bitcoin.

In July 2025, Standard Chartered, a long-established British bank deeply rooted in the Asian, Middle Eastern, and African markets, announced the opening of spot trading services for Bitcoin and Ethereum to institutional clients.

They are the behemoths that dominate the operation of the global financial system. These traditional financial institutions control the channels for the inflow and outflow of funds, the clearing networks, and the fiat payment systems on a global scale, holding assets worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. In comparison, the current total market capitalization of the encryption market is only 4 trillion.

Mainstream Asset Market Capitalization Ranking, Source: Steemit Community

They are gradually completing their layout in the encryption field based on traditional financial compliance frameworks. When an institution has both compliance trust and user traffic, as well as clearing and settlement capabilities, it possesses all the elements necessary to build an encryption trading network.

In the traditional financial system, whoever controls the account opening permissions can control the flow of funds, customer relationships, and even the final pricing power. For a long time, encryption trading platforms defined their narrative through token listings and controlled liquidity through deposits, but now, the "asset entry" role that has been taken away by CEX for nearly a decade is gradually being reclaimed by traditional finance.

"Those encryption trading platforms should start to feel anxious now."

His tone remained restrained, without a trace of schadenfreude. The root of the anxiety may not be solely due to the entry of a certain institution or the introduction of a certain policy, but rather a sense of industry awareness that encryption trading platforms may no longer be the only ones at this financial table able to deal the cards.

Ways to Stay at the Table

An insider from a cryptocurrency trading platform told us that he has been replying to messages frequently at five in the morning. He discusses partnerships during the day, monitors progress at night, and checks user community feedback late at night, hardly getting any sleep.

We can only survive in anxiety.

The anxiety he speaks of is the competition between platforms, the survival state of having to compete for users, products, and traffic every day upon waking up.

The root cause of the stock competition is that there is very little growth space left in the industry, as well as the significant pressure and impact from external sources.

Traditional finance is gradually encroaching on the core capabilities that cryptocurrency trading platforms rely on for survival—ranging from fiat currency deposits to asset custody, from user account opening to spot trading matching. They come with regulatory approvals and millions of users, and it seems they do not intend to coexist with native cryptocurrency platforms.

Almost all encryption trading platforms have immediately launched stock products. Buy Apple with USDT, leverage Nvidia, trade Tesla through on-chain contracts. This type of traditional asset on-chain solution has been successively launched on multiple platforms, becoming a collective industry action.

Bybit is the first to take the plunge. They completed the research and development and launch of the US stock token product in just two months, moving quickly from internal project initiation to engaging with the XStocks team and finally launching the product.

According to Bybit, the core advantages of centralized trading platforms still exist. The real users, strong liquidity, and trading depth accumulated over the years are resources that external brokers cannot easily replicate.

The launch of U.S. stock tokens is due to their recognition of a clear demand gap, such as trading needs during market closing hours or users being unable to access traditional stock markets due to geographical and compliance restrictions. The 7×24 nature of Crypto opens up new liquidity space for traditional assets.

Of course, this does not mean that this is a guaranteed victory. Emily, the head of spot trading at Bybit, admitted that US stock tokens are still in the early stages, and the number of participants and enthusiasm is far less than that for the launch of high-traffic new coins.

But she remains optimistic about this direction, as it represents that Crypto is expanding its gameplay into the world of TradFi. DeFi, synthetic assets, on-chain staking, these new derivative scenarios of traditional assets on the chain may be where the true value of this path lies.

However, these features seem to be actively exploring new markets, but to many, they appear more like a form of passive defense.

When trading platforms no longer have control over the "asset entry", they start trying to make themselves appear connected to the whole world. Thus, tokenized stocks became the most common defensive move at this stage.

The concept of coin stocks is actually not new.

Back in 2020, FTX proposed the stock-coin model. At that time, they launched trading pairs like TSLA/BTC and AAPL/USDT, which were seen as an attempt to challenge traditional financial pricing logic.

That was a time when the cryptocurrency world still had an aggressive nature. What FTX wanted to do was to rewrite the trading methods of traditional finance with encryption finance, and to price Nasdaq with encryption finance.

Perhaps he had already seen that the biggest competitor to cryptocurrency trading platforms in the future would be brokerages, and thus took the initiative. Looking back now, this model has been picked up by the industry again, but it has already changed its flavor. After FTX collapsed, coin stocks became a bandage to stop the bleeding, no longer a battering ram.

The data also corroborates this.

After the launch of the coin-stock model, it initially gained a wave of community attention, but the activity quickly declined, and attempts on various platforms failed to generate much excitement.

On the other hand, in contrast, the memecoin market on Solana during the same period has exhibited a completely different trend. When Musk tweets, the market value of related meme coins can rapidly exceed hundreds of millions, with daily trading volumes reaching tens of millions of dollars, which is much higher than the trading volume of many cryptocurrency stocks over the course of a week.

Above: XStocks trading volume, source: Dune; Below: meme coin Ani trading volume, source: gmgn

New features, no new users.

At this stage, it no longer matters what features CEX is launching. What matters is why they are launching these features and whether these features can reclaim the role they are losing.

This round of cryptocurrency and stock frenzy is not because the industry has progressed, but because no one dares to do nothing.

Kant said: "Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want, but the ability to refrain from doing what you do not want to do."

Compliance is just an illusion.

In the past period, almost all encryption trading platforms have been discussing compliance. Each company is striving to apply for licenses, adjust their business structures, and bring in executives with traditional financial backgrounds, attempting to prove that they have emerged from the wild era and become more like a financial institution that can be accepted by regulators.

This is a kind of industry consensus, and also a kind of collective anxiety.

However, in the eyes of traditional finance professionals, this understanding of compliance is still too shallow.

"Many trading platforms go to small countries to obtain licenses for self-compliance, but those licenses are hardly considered licenses; they can't even be taken seriously." He said, his tone not sharp, but more like stating an industry common knowledge.

What he means by "going to the table" is not whether you have a business license, but whether you can connect to the real financial system—whether you can open an account with a mainstream bank, whether you can use the clearing and settlement network, and whether you can be trusted by regulatory agencies to truly cooperate with them in business.

This implies a reality that, under the scrutiny of traditional finance, the encryption world has never been treated truly equally.

The traditional financial system is built on a chain of responsibility and a closed loop of trust, emphasizing a transparent customer structure, risk control, audit capabilities, and the interpretability of capital paths. In contrast, encryption platforms often grow in institutional gaps, relying on gray areas to maintain high profits and high growth, but rarely have the ability to establish these compliance foundations.

In fact, people in the circle understand these issues. But in the past, no one paid attention because no one came to compete for this territory. Now that traditional financial institutions have entered the scene, they operate according to their own rules, and the "industry practices" of the encryption sector have suddenly become serious flaws.

Some platforms are indeed making adjustments by introducing compliance audits, establishing overseas trust structures, and splitting their businesses to appear more legitimate.

But many countries' regulatory agencies simply don't buy it. On the surface, they will cooperate with you to discuss processes, but deep down, they never intend to consider you as part of the formal financial system. No matter how much you resemble it, it's just "appearance," and it doesn't mean they will actually keep you.

However, not all trading platforms are just putting on a show. Bybit is one of the few platforms that has truly broken through the regulatory shell. This year, they became one of the first centralized trading platforms to obtain the European MiCA license and established their European headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

Bybit does not deny that this process is difficult, nor does it shy away from the regulatory doubts about the industry. But as Emily said, regulation is no longer the regulatory environment that did not understand encryption five years ago. Now, regulatory agencies are beginning to truly understand the business logic and technical structure of this industry. From technology and models to market promotion, their understanding is deepening, and the foundation for cooperation is becoming more solid.

In addition, Xie Jiayin, the Chinese head of Bitget, told us that Bitget has obtained virtual asset licenses in multiple countries and has established local compliance structures according to the regulatory requirements of each region. He revealed that the team is also actively promoting the application for the MiCA license, hoping to establish a more stable business channel in the European market and lay the foundation for multinational operations under a future unified regulatory framework.

However, even so, such cases are still in the minority. For most platforms, they neither have the licenses, networks, and trust endorsements within the traditional financial system, nor are they benefiting from the high growth dividends brought about by the original institutional vacuum. They want to transform through compliance but find the threshold too high; they want to revert to being encryption native, but discover another group of rivals is eyeing them.

So everyone can only continue to align with regulations, continue to talk about compliance, apply for licenses, and go through procedures. Many times, behind these actions, it is not a strategic choice, but a sense of anxiety being pushed forward.

The Midgame Moment of the Game

At five o'clock in the morning in the community, Xie Jiayin was still replying to users' questions one by one. Some asked how to play with coin stocks, some asked about the platform's recent compliance progress, and some asked what the situation with the PUMP subscription was and how it was going to be handled. He said that he and his colleagues often stayed up late, and an all-nighter was nothing.

On a hot afternoon in Beijing, in a siheyuan, an executive from a Hong Kong brokerage is having tea and discussing cooperation with several senior executives from listed companies. The meeting room is separated by a carved wooden door, outside is a courtyard paved with blue bricks, and the sound of insects can be heard in the shade of the trees.

Looking further afield, Vienna, Austria, Bybit's new headquarters in Europe has just completed its ribbon-cutting ceremony and has officially started operations. This is their European outpost established after obtaining the MiCA license. They are among the first centralized trading platforms to have made the leap, while it is clear that the vast majority of their peers are still feeling their way across the river.

They are in different places, different emotions, different rhythms, but the words they say resonate subtly: they all mention "changes happening too fast", they all talk about "taking it slow", and they are all contemplating how the industry should continue moving forward.

The premise for moving forward is no longer the same as it was a few years ago.

Encryption trading platforms may no longer be the most central role in this world, nor the starting point of all traffic and narratives. They are standing on the edge of a new order, slowly being pushed out of the core by an invisible layer of rules.

More complex systems and larger capital have gradually replaced the original narratives and structures.

The encryption trading platform is still there, new product features are being launched as usual, and announcements are being released one after another. Their expression methods are changing, the rhythm of their voices is changing, the context they want to integrate into is also changing, everything is changing.

Some changes are actively chosen, some are passively accepted, but more often, they are just trying to maintain a sense of presence without being eliminated by the times.

However, not everyone is pessimistic. Xie Jiayin and Emily both believe that the impact of Crypto on traditional finance is greater than the latter's squeeze on CEX. They are optimistic about the trend of traditional financial institutions entering the market, as each round of evolution in the industry requires new players and new participants. Centralized trading platforms have developed to this point and are continuously expanding their institutional client base, beginning to engage in wealth management, asset allocation, and more. The businesses of both sides are intersecting and merging, "the two financial worlds resonate with each other, creating a romantic moment."

But at the same time, everyone is also aware that this advantage itself cannot exempt one from anxiety.

Many questions will not have clear answers. For example, will regulators really allow these encryption trading platforms? Will traditional finance truly be willing to build together rather than replace?

For example, before the next round of the industry's main theme arrives, do they still have a chance to define themselves?

No one dares to speak too confidently about these issues. Everyone is dealing with their own part of the work, holding meetings, modifying products, running for licenses, waiting for feedback, maintaining the status quo while waiting for opportunities to regain initiative.

Waiting for the wave of reshuffling in the industry.