MEXC’s new CEO wants to tame a memecoin machine without killing what made it work

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 attraction, the remainder of the monetary system caught up to them.

Gold strikes on a Trump tweet. Oil spikes on a geopolitical rumor. Equities swing on a single Fed headline.

“Everything has kind of become a meme at this point,” Usi stated in an interview with CoinDesk.

“Meme coins were driven by social sentiment, virality, speculation,” he continued, including that at the moment certainly one of “President Trump’s tweets does all these three.”

That thesis underpins his plan to reposition MEXC, lengthy synonymous with memecoin hypothesis, into a broader “trade everything” 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 funny to see that memecoins today are fighting for the same attention that gold and silver does,” Usi stated.

The guess is that retail does not want changing with institutional circulation, it wants extra issues to speculate on.

Usi factors to prediction markets, the place merchants guess on the result of occasions quite than the worth of property, and to political bulletins that transfer commodities and equities earlier than a lot of the market has time to react — what he describes as buying and selling by individuals “who have their close proximity to the news.”

The entire thesis hinges on whether or not retail is fading or just migrating to no matter asset is most unstable at any given second.

Betting in opposition to the institutional pivot

That view places MEXC on a totally different trajectory from its largest opponents.

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 worth 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 other way. At Bitget, he stated, roughly 80% of buying and selling quantity got here from establishments. At MEXC, it is nearly fully retail, and he wants to preserve it that method.

“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 engine, in distinction to the Messi endorsements and Formula One sponsorships that outlined his earlier employer’s rise.

His plan is to lengthen that mannequin throughout asset lessons, 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 increase without tripping over the regulatory issues which have plagued it over the previous few years.

MEXC spent much of 2025 managing fallout from the so-called White Whale incident, by which a pseudonymous dealer alleged that $3 million of his funds had been frozen beneath opaque risk-control guidelines.

After months of public strain, MEXC’s chief technique officer Cecilia Hsueh issued a public apology in October, acknowledging that the corporate’s “risk, operations, and PR teams have not kept up” with its progress.

“We fucked up. We apologize to The White Whale, and his money is already been released. He can claim it at any time,” Hsueh wrote on X.

Data shows that withdrawals from MEXC surged within the aftermath and stay elevated all through 2025. But, in the previous couple of months, that pattern has reversed.

Data from CoinDesk Research exhibits 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 commands a high market share despite falling in the lower-tier category (grade C). This continues to underline the disconnect between volume capture and assessed risk/compliance among certain venues,” a CoinDesk information alternate benchmark report from November reads.

Compliance readiness was “one of the key missing points in MEXC’s growth,” Usi instructed CoinDesk.

He stated the alternate has “kick-started” conversations with regulators throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, with the objective of constructing a platform that’s “more transparent, more compliant.”

On a potential U.S. entry, even within the occasion the CLARITY Act passes, he was noncommittal, calling the market “expensive and complex.”

That hesitation displays a deeper constraint: the velocity, excessive itemizing breadth, and minimal friction that powered MEXC’s rise are the identical traits that draw regulatory scrutiny, leaving it to pursue a international “everything app” technique without the licenses, banking rails, or institutional shoppers its opponents are constructing round.

Can MEXC add guardrails without shedding its edge?

There’s a sure type of crypto dealer that loves every thing MEXC is and would hate to see it change.

The query is whether or not MEXC can clear up its mannequin without shedding the memecoin chaos that made it work.

Or, is that even crucial? Data exhibits that MEXC’s rising loyal merchants may not care.