MEXC’s new CEO wants to tame a memecoin machine without killing what made it work
A Bitget veteran, Vugar Usi inherits a top-three exchange built on zero fees, 3,000 tokens and a compliance record he himself calls a “missing point” in its growth.
What to know:
- Vugar Usi, the new CEO of MEXC, argues that memecoins have not lost relevance but that broader financial markets now move on the same kind of viral sentiment, prompting his push to turn MEXC into a “trade everything” platform for retail speculators.
- Unlike rivals such as Binance, OKX and Bybit that are courting institutional money and ETF-driven flows, MEXC is doubling down on its overwhelmingly retail user base with a zero-fee model and plans to add tokenized stocks, commodities and prediction markets in a Robinhood-style, offshore “superapp.”
- MEXC is trying to repair its reputation and improve compliance after the high-profile “White Whale” fund-freezing incident and a CoinDesk report that graded it as lower tier on risk and compliance, even as the exchange has rebounded to become the second-largest by volume with a growing core of loyal traders.
“Everything has kind of become a meme at this point,” Usi said in an interview with CoinDesk.
“Meme coins were driven by social sentiment, virality, speculation,” he continued, adding that today one of “President Trump’s tweets does all these three.”
That thesis underpins his plan to reposition MEXC, long synonymous with memecoin speculation, into a broader “trade everything” platform spanning tokenized equities, commodities and prediction markets, built around a retail base that accounts for roughly 98% of activity by his estimate.
“It’s very funny to see that memecoins today are fighting for the same attention that gold and silver does,” Usi said.
The bet is that retail doesn’t need replacing with institutional flow, it needs more things to speculate on.
Usi points to prediction markets, where traders bet on the outcome of events rather than the price of assets, and to political announcements that move commodities and equities before most of the market has time to react — what he describes as trading by people “who have their close proximity to the news.”
