📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update crypto: Gate CEO Dr. Han on Perpetual Trading, CeDeFi, and
In 2025, competition among centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs) began to change. Speed and liquidity still mattered, but they were no longer enough. Regulators drew firmer lines in major markets. Professional traders leaned further into derivatives. At the same time, decentralized platforms pulled attention, volume, and experimentation on-chain.
For Gate, one of the oldest exchanges still active, the year was filled with record-breaking headlines and structural execution. Over the course of 2025, the company completed a group-wide rebrand to Gate.com, secured the MiCA license through its Malta entity to operate across Europe, and obtained a full operational license from Dubai’s VARA. Alongside these regulatory milestones, Gate expanded infrastructure to support institutional trading workflows and on-chain participation in parallel.
In a conversation with BeInCrypto, Gate founder and CEO Dr. Han discussed how those decisions took shape over the past year, how market structure has shifted since the last bull cycle, and how the company is positioning itself for its next phase in 2026.
From Retail Frenzy to Institutional Rails
The crypto market has gone through multiple bull cycles, each driven by a different set of participants. In 2021, the rally was largely powered by retail speculation. Individual traders flooded exchanges, chasing newly listed tokens and NFT launches. Trading decisions were often driven as much by social media momentum as by price action.
Four years later, the conditions surrounding the current cycle look markedly different. Large asset managers have entered the market through crypto-linked ETFs, while major banks are exploring stablecoins and on-chain settlement. Capital is no longer moving primarily through consumer-facing apps, but through institutional channels that prioritize execution quality, capital efficiency, and system reliability.
Against this backdrop, Gate began expanding its infrastructure to support a broader range of trading behaviors. While the platform was originally built with retail accessibility in mind, 2025 saw a deeper investment in tools designed for professional and institutional workflows.
“The professional trader and institutional customers actually need to trade through a more professional interface, like API. So, we provide them API,” Dr. Han told BeInCrypto. “They also need more other options, like faster connection, low latency, very high speed of trading, we call it high frequency trading. We need to provide services for them like this.”
One concrete outcome of that effort was the launch of CrossEx in October 2025. Designed for professional investors, quantitative teams, and institutional clients, CrossEx functions as a cross-exchange trading and clearing platform that allows users to manage execution and capital across multiple venues through a single system.
According to Dr. Han, the product was developed in response to how professional traders actually operate. Many trade simultaneously across several exchanges, managing fragmented balances and collateral in parallel. CrossEx addresses this by offering a unified interface and unified API, allowing users to deploy their crypto assets more efficiently across platforms.
“At the same time, they can also transfer the asset from a different kind of platform instantly. They no longer have to withdraw, deposit on different platforms like before,” he said.
Where Retail Trading Went in 2025
While institutional capital became the primary driver of market liquidity in 2025, retail activity continued to influence where attention and narratives were heading. Dr. Han pointed to several patterns that stood out over the year. In addition to trading blue-chip assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, meme coins remained “very hot and active,” according to him.
Pointing to the surge in politically themed meme coins earlier this year, he cited the Trump meme token as one example.
“Remember the Trump meme coin? Because of that, many other meme coins came up. People trade them actively. They like to trade meme coins because meme coins have more new ideas, more opportunities,” he argued.
Another trend he highlighted was the growing popularity of perpetual trading, particularly among professional traders. Dr. Han attributed this trend to the broader range of tools now available to traders.
“When they trade perps, they can have more options. They can use larger leverage, making their assets more efficient when trading. Many years ago, most users stayed with spot trading because they didn’t have many options. But today, you have more options, more services,” he said.
Dr. Han also pointed to more users moving from centralized finance toward decentralized platforms. Over the year, a growing share of retail trading activity has concentrated on decentralized venues. These platforms offered faster access to new markets, earlier exposure to newly issued tokens, and direct execution through self-managed wallets.
Using meme coin trading as an example, he noted that most meme coin trading volume now occurs on DeFi. He added that perpetual trading itself has also been moving on-chain quickly this year.
Extending Infrastructure Beyond the Centralized Exchange
Rather than pulling users away entirely, the rise of decentralized platforms created an opportunity for centralized exchanges to extend their offerings and retain retail engagement across both environments. Gate was no exception. Over the year, the company expanded its foundation to support users who preferred direct interaction with on-chain markets without giving up the performance and reliability associated with centralized systems.
In October 2025, Gate launched Gate Layer, a Layer 2 network built on Optimism Stack and fully EVM-compatible. Gate positioned the network as the infrastructure layer for its broader on-chain strategy, supporting products such as Gate Perp DEX, an on-chain perpetuals platform, alongside other Web3 tools like Gate Fun, a zero-code token launchpad on Gate Layer, to capture new users. The aim was to offer decentralized access without forcing users to compromise on execution speed, cost efficiency, or market breadth.
Summing up the approach, Dr. Han said the goal was to support both centralized and decentralized users within the same ecosystem.
“For Gate, we need to build a very strong platform for both CEX and DEX users. Fo…
📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update crypto: Polymarket Hack: Third-Party Vulnerability Drains U
Polymarket has confirmed that a recent wave of wallet drains affecting user accounts was caused by a security vulnerability tied to a third-party authentication provider, following days of complaints from users who said their balances were emptied after unexplained login attempts.
The decentralized prediction market platform said the issue has now been fixed and that there is no ongoing risk, though it has not disclosed how many users were affected or the total value of funds lost.
Polymarket said that multiple user accounts recently suffered fund losses due to a security vulnerability in a third-party authentication service. The issue has been fixed and no ongoing risk remains. Some users reported on social media that their funds were drained after…
Login Emails, Empty Accounts: Polymarket Users Describe Sudden Fund Losses
Reports of suspicious activity began circulating earlier this week on X and Reddit, where several users described receiving multiple login notification emails despite not attempting to access their accounts.
In multiple cases, users said they logged in hours later to find their positions closed and balances nearly zero.
One Reddit user wrote that three login attempts were flagged while their email and other online accounts showed no signs of compromise, adding that their Polymarket funds were drained at the same time the login emails were sent.
Another user provided a detailed account suggesting the breach may have involved weaknesses in the platform’s one-time password system at the time of the incident.
A bunch of people reporting their polymarket accounts using magic link were drained. Possibly an ongoing security issue with magic link (though can never rule out user error / phishing). A few from discord posted below but I've seen more reports. pic.twitter.com/hQkyzJdE6V
According to the user, the login codes were only three digits long and may have been vulnerable to brute-force attempts. The user noted that shortly after the incident, Polymarket appeared to increase the OTP length to six digits, though the company has not publicly commented on that specific claim.
if you have ever used or downloaded this @Polymarket trading bot, move your funds to a new wallet immediately
this repo called simone46b/polymarket-trading-bot contains a malicious npm package called polystream/streaming, it pretends to be a sha256 validation utility, but it is…
User reports have pointed to a common thread among affected accounts. Several said they had signed up through Magic Labs, a popular onboarding service that allows users to log in with email addresses and automatically creates non-custodial Ethereum wallets.
Magic Labs is widely used by newer crypto users who do not already manage their own wallets.
While Polymarket did not name the authentication provider involved, it acknowledged in a message posted to its official Discord channel that the vulnerability originated from a third-party service.
The incident is not the first time Polymarket has faced security-related concerns tied to external services.
In September 2024, users who logged in through Google accounts reported wallet drains involving unauthorized proxy transactions that moved USDC funds to phishing addresses.
At the time, Polymarket investigated the events as potentially targeted exploits linked to third-party authentication tools.
More recently, a phishing campaign that abused the platform’s comment sections resulted in losses exceeding $500,000 after users were redirected to fake login pages.
The breach comes amid a broader rise in third-party security failures across the crypto and technology sectors. This week, crypto tax software firm Koinly warned users that email addresses may have been exposed following a breach at Mixpanel, an analytics provider it previously used.
