The Bitget US stock options rollout switched on 2 July, adding long call and long put contracts to its Stock+ product line. Two days later, MEXC published a June trading update showing access to more than 7,000 US-listed stocks and ETFs, alongside $437 billion in monthly trading volume across the exchange.
Neither move is an isolated product launch. Both sit inside a wider crypto exchanges US stocks trading race that Binance joined on 1 June, adding the same roster of more than 7,000 US stocks and ETFs and pitching the expansion as a step towards what co-chief executive Richard Teng called a “multi-asset financial super app”. Coinbase, Kraken, OKX and Hyperliquid have each added stock, index or commodity exposure this year.
Two launches in one week
Bitget’s options product covers more than 540 contracts tied to S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 constituents and popular ETFs. Trading is limited to single-leg long calls and puts for now, cash settled, with the full premium paid upfront.
Bitget charges no trading commission but applies a $0.60 per-contract platform fee plus clearing charges. “We have consistently moved first to connect stock opportunities with our users,” said Gracy Chen, chief executive of Bitget. “From tokenised stocks to now options, we are executing on convergence.”
MEXC RealStocks gives users direct ownership of the underlying shares, including dividend eligibility, rather than a synthetic wrapper. Its Guardian Fund, an investor-protection reserve, held $101 million with a target of $500 million within two years.
The options record explains the timing
US options volume reached 15.2 billion contracts in 2025, 26% above 2024 and a sixth consecutive record year. Same-day contracts, the fastest-growing and most retail-heavy part of that market, made up 32.7% of all US options trading last year.
That is the fast-turnover trading style crypto exchanges already built their businesses around. Binance’s own weekly volumes hit $11.6 billion in the second week of June, coinciding with SpaceX’s Nasdaq debut, the largest IPO in Wall Street history at a $75 billion raise.
A defensive land grab
Crypto trading volumes fell 11% to $4.61 trillion in April, the lowest level since late 2024. That points to a defensive motive: keeping balances, collateral and trading fees on the exchange’s own platform instead of losing them to a conventional broker.
OKX, Kraken and other exchanges have added their own perpetuals and synthetic-stock products this year. KuCoin’s chief executive, BC Wong, has said “strict regulatory readiness” will separate the exchanges that survive this expansion from those that do not. Binance’s own record shows how uneven that readiness still is: the exchange missed the EU’s MiCA licensing deadline earlier this year and had to restrict services for EU customers, Fintechly reported at the time.
Products their own users cannot buy
Both Bitget and MEXC bar US residents from opening accounts at all. That leaves an odd structure: traders in Europe, Asia and the Gulf can buy options and shares tied to US-listed companies through platforms Americans cannot use.
Regulators have already drawn a line
Tokenised stocks regulation took clearer shape on 28 January, when staff at the SEC’s Divisions of Corporation Finance, Investment Management, and Trading and Markets issued a joint statement on tokenised securities, splitting the category into issuer-sponsored tokens and third-party tokens. It is staff guidance rather than a formal rule, but securities lawyers tracking the sector, including commentary from Cooley, Dechert and Morgan Lewis, have read it as the clearest signal yet of how the regulator intends to treat each structure.
The distinction maps onto two products already live. Kraken’s xStocks, an issuer-sponsored model, carry the same rights as the underlying share. Robinhood’s Stock Tokens took the other route: structured as debt securities rather than equity, giving holders exposure to the share price but no shareholder rights and no legal claim on the underlying stock.
None of Bitget’s options, MEXC’s RealStocks or Binance’s stock product are structured as issuer-sponsored tokens. Each instead routes trades through a licensed brokerage partner rather than the exchange itself; Binance, for example, uses Nest Trading as broker and Alpaca for custody and dividend handling. It fits a broader supervisory shift already under way, one compliance guide has called the end of crypto’s “regulatory exceptionalism.”
Bitget has said more contracts and multi-leg strategies are still to come. Supervisors will keep testing whether the brokerage partner behind each product is sufficient cover, according to Cooley’s reading of the SEC statement, or start holding the exchange taking the order, rather than the licensed broker behind it, to account.
