Author: Jae, PANews

On June 12, the Nasdaq bell tugged at the nerves of global capital.

SpaceX, the commercial aerospace behemoth valued at $1.77 trillion, officially listed, setting a record for the largest IPO in global capital history. Wall Street institutions came out in full force, retail FOMO sentiment spilled over, yet the crypto industry trudged forward amid liquidity shortages and narrative exhaustion, with capital voting with its feet.

On one side, tech stocks surged ahead; on the other, a chill pervaded the crypto market. Crypto natives, unwilling to be trapped in zero-sum battles within a single asset class, began searching for a low-barrier gateway to mainstream assets. Gate's timely launch of the Gate TradFi product suite handed them exactly this key.

Notably, amid the unprecedentedly hot SpaceX IPO subscription wave, Gate TradFi successfully completed the placement of its subscription quota, becoming one of the few winners in this IPO frenzy to successfully deliver.

USDT Reconstructs the Settlement Layer, One Account Breaks TradFi Asset "Islands"

For a long time, global traditional financial markets have been like "islands" built from different fiat currency systems, time zone spans, clearing mechanisms, and regulatory frameworks.

For crypto users accustomed to "24/7, instant settlement, high capital efficiency," their first foray into traditional assets typically hits three high walls.

1. Account Fragmentation: Investors participating in different markets like US stocks, forex, precious metals, or commodities often need to switch between multiple brokers. Each trading platform requires re-KYC, re-depositing funds, and re-learning the interface, resulting in excessively high operational costs;
2. Idle Funds: There is a physical barrier between crypto accounts and securities accounts, preventing cross-market margin sharing. Idle crypto funds sit on one side while the securities account faces a margin gap, forcibly splitting capital utility;
3. Inefficient Settlement: Traditional brokerages generally use T+2 settlement, leading to delays in fund arrival and share confirmation, which cannot meet crypto users' demands for immediacy.

The proliferation of stablecoins provides a natural bridge to break this deadlock. The entry of cryptocurrency exchanges into traditional financial markets at this moment is essentially a revolution to reconstruct the settlement layer of traditional assets with stablecoins and seize the entry point for global user asset allocation.

To solve this chronic problem, Gate TradFi offers its solution: starting from a single account system, integrating compliant brokerage infrastructure downwards, and covering a full range of primary and secondary market assets and derivative tools upwards.

Users only need to complete one set of crypto KYC account verification to use USDT throughout as margin and settlement assets, significantly improving capital utilization and bringing the settlement cycle back to "crypto speed."

The SpaceX IPO Stress Test: Why Could Gate TradFi Successfully Deliver the Placement?

Beyond clearing account and settlement barriers, what draws even more market attention is whether ordinary investors have the opportunity to share in the growth dividends of high-quality primary market assets.

It's well known that Pre-IPO shares of top unicorns like SpaceX have always been an exclusive game for Wall Street giants, Silicon Valley old money, and high-net-worth individuals. Ordinary retail investors are not only locked out but often play the role of "premium bag holders" in the secondary market.

Taking SpaceX as an example, traditional brokerages like Fidelity require investors to have over $500,000 in account assets just to qualify for subscription, and they must manually confirm within an extremely short window before listing; missing it means forfeiture. Overseas retail investors find it even harder to reach the threshold.

Gate TradFi tore up the primary market ticket and distributed it to ordinary people: using a combination punch of "Pre-IPOs + Direct IPO Access" to democratize the investment dividends of the primary market for a broad user base.

Step 1: Pre-IPOs, locking in valuation dividends before asset listing.

On April 22, SpaceX was launched as the first target for Pre-IPO subscription, raising nearly $395 million. Users subscribed to "mirror notes," mapping the true fair value of SpaceX. At that time, the subscription price was $590 per share, equivalent to $118 per share after a 1:5 stock split, corresponding to a $1.43 trillion valuation. As SpaceX's valuation climbed above $1.75 trillion, early investors reaped substantial floating profits from the price difference.

It should be noted that Pre-IPO subscriptions are for asset mapping certificates. Users can freely trade them through pre-market trading or exchange them for real stocks or exit after a 6-month lock-up period post-IPO. For retail investors, this is already the most feasible way to get a unicorn ticket at the lowest cost and threshold.

Step 2: Direct IPO Access, making IPO subscriptions no longer a game for the rich.

On June 9, Gate TradFi launched SpaceX's "Direct IPO" service, directly lowering the subscription threshold to 100 USDT.

On June 12, SpaceX officially listed. Users who successfully subscribed automatically received real new shares, directly credited to their Gate stock accounts. That night, the Direct IPO smoothly settled the SpaceX IPO placement, with a single account receiving up to 154 shares, seizing a first-mover advantage in user mindshare.

From locking in valuation before listing to confirming rights and placement at listing, Gate TradFi compressed the entire investment participation process into a single click.

From Primary to Secondary Market, Gate TradFi Reshapes the Trading Market Landscape

If gaining access to primary market resources is just the beginning, then the trading experience in the secondary market—asset security, liquidity, and capital utilization efficiency—is the trump card for long-term user retention.

Gate TradFi launched its stock spot trading product, Gate Stocks, covering the US and Hong Kong stock markets. Currently, Gate Stocks not only supports over 10,000 US stocks/ETFs but also lists over 1,500 Hong Kong stock targets, covering high-quality listed companies with large market capitalization and good liquidity on the Main Board and GEM of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, making it the industry's first platform to launch Hong Kong stock spot trading.

In terms of asset breadth, Gate Stocks has far surpassed similar competitors, achieving high coverage of mainstream secondary markets and providing users with a wider range of global asset allocation options.

It is worth mentioning that the US stock market underlying Gate Stocks is connected to Alpaca, a US-licensed self-clearing broker, achieving a "physical-level access" to the real US stock market.

Alpaca is registered and regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and is also a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), serving millions of securities accounts globally. Through deep integration with Alpaca's API, Gate Stocks encapsulates the capabilities of a compliant brokerage into its crypto account system:

1. Fund Security: User-held securities are held in third-party segregated custody by regulated, compliant institutions;
2. Native Liquidity and National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO): User orders are routed directly to five major US exchanges—Nasdaq, NYSE, NYSE Arca, NYSE American, and BATS—accessing the national best bid and offer system, eradicating common ailments of tokenized stock trading such as "high slippage, insufficient depth, and delayed quotes";
3. End-to-End Automated Clearing: Alpaca handles the execution, clearing, settlement, and custody of all US stock/ETF orders in the background. Corporate actions like dividends and stock splits are also automatically processed and credited by Alpaca. For example, on June 16, Gate completed the dividend distribution for Google (Alphabet) GOOGL (Class A common stock) and GOOG (Class C capital stock). The dividend standard was $0.22 per share, automatically distributed to user accounts directly in the form of USDT.

For crypto users pursuing higher capital efficiency, spot trading is only the first step in asset allocation. A derivatives market with high liquidity and support for two-way operations is the main arena for unleashing capital efficiency. This is precisely the deep logic behind Gate TradFi building its CFD and perpetual contract matrix.

Now, Gate TradFi has deployed over 440 CFDs in its derivatives segment, encompassing asset classes such as forex, stocks, precious metals, stock indices, and commodities. This rich asset supply also brings a stronger "liquidity aggregation" effect. Gate TradFi's CFD single-day maximum trading volume has surpassed $30 billion, and the monthly trading volume of TradFi perpetual contracts once approached $290 billion, placing it in the industry's top tier.

The most noteworthy innovation is the "multi-level adjustable leverage mechanism." In the traditional CFD market, the leverage multiplier is forcibly fixed by the platform. Gate TradFi breaks this outdated dogma by introducing multiple leverage tiers on top of offering up to 500x leverage, supporting manual user customization and providing flexible parameter choices for trading strategies with different risk appetites.

Another attractive design is "zero margin for long-short hedging." When a user opens equal long and short positions on the same instrument, the system automatically hedges them, and the margin is directly cleared to zero. For market makers and arbitrage strategies, this is a tangible liberation of capital efficiency.

The ecological barrier between traditional assets and the crypto market is further dissolved in Gate TradFi: TradFi derivatives trading volume has been formally integrated into Gate's VIP tier system. When users engage in index arbitrage or gold hedging, they are simultaneously reducing their marginal transaction fees. In other words, the more you trade, the lower the cost.

In addition, Gate TradFi extends a uniquely Web3-featured value-added toolkit:

1. RWA Wealth Management: Idle stablecoins can be allocated to GUSD yield products with an annualized return of about 2.9%, ensuring capital doesn't sit idle;

2. Copy Trading: Replicating the mature social copy trading model from the crypto industry into traditional asset derivatives trading, allowing beginners to learn from expert trading strategies;

3. Quantitative Bots: Strategies like grid and martingale are directly applied to US stock CFDs and forex trading.

The common thread among these tools is migrating crypto user habits to traditional finance: lower usage barriers, a higher degree of automation, and a more open, socialized trading ecosystem.

Conclusion: The Global Asset Allocation Gateway is Being Reconstructed

If in the past, the core proposition of the crypto industry was how crypto assets could integrate into the mainstream financial system, then in the coming years, a more important trend might be how high-quality global assets can reach a broader user base through crypto infrastructure.

From SpaceX igniting an epic IPO on Nasdaq to tech upstarts like OpenAI and Anthropic secretly filing for listing behind the scenes, high-quality assets are no longer fragmented by geography, accounts, or currencies. Liquidity is continuously migrating from the traditional world due to unified accounts, stablecoin settlement, and on-chain financial infrastructure.

As global users' demand for cross-market asset allocation becomes increasingly urgent, the focus of future competition is no longer just the number of products, but who can build more robust underlying infrastructure, more stable resource acquisition capabilities, and a smoother trading experience.

The SpaceX IPO undoubtedly provided a real stress test for Gate TradFi, allowing the market to re-examine what role a crypto platform can truly play within the traditional financial ecosystem amid the mega-trend of reconstructing the global asset gateway.