MEXC pitches zero-fee trading as a race for AI tools and

MEXC is framing the next phase of centralized exchange competition as a post-fee fight, where pricing hits zero and differentiation shifts to tooling, execution workflow, and custody comfort. CEO Vugar Usi is pairing the message with an AI-assisted analytics push and a bundle of trust signals, from monthly Proof of Reserves to a planned Guardian Fund expansion.

Key Takeaways

MEXC says it now runs zero maker and taker fees across spot markets and applies zero fees to selected futures products, with eligibility changing by product and campaign.
The exchange stated its zero-fee initiatives saved 3.44 million users about 1.1 billion USDT during 2025.
An August 2026 Proof of Reserves disclosure audited by Hacken reported reserve ratios of 115% for USDT and 114% for USDC, with other major assets listed above 100%.
MEXC has said it plans to grow its Guardian Fund from $100 million toward $500 million over two years and acquired 1,000 BTC as part of its reserve arrangements.

When Trading Fees Hit Zero, the Fight Moves to Tools, Speed, and Trust

MEXC CEO Vugar Usi is treating fee compression as the new baseline for venue selection. His framing is blunt: once an exchange can no longer win by undercutting on price, it has to win on the rest of the stack, from execution experience to perceived safety.

“When price is zero, it means the user is not choosing you because of just price,” Usi said. “That is where the competition actually starts.” In practice, that pushes the battleground toward product quality, speed, available markets, and the tools traders use to interpret flow once they are already on-venue.

The company used an August 2026 live trading competition in Bali, Alpha Arena S03, as a narrative anchor for that shift. Twenty traders competed in a simulated trading environment for a share of $100,000 during CoinFest Asia. Japan’s Arumando won, followed by Murasaki Trades from the Philippines and Coin6097 from South Korea.

Usi argued the format exposes the part of trading that gets edited out on social feeds: the decision-making under pressure. “You see what kind of decisions they make. Are they panicking? Are they panic buying or panic selling? Are they good at following their instinct, or are they more practical?” he said. The point for exchanges is that “access” is no longer the product. The workflow around that access is.

The Concrete Offer: Zero-Fee Scope and a Push Beyond Crypto Markets

MEXC’s pitch starts with pricing. The exchange says it currently offers zero maker and taker fees across spot markets, and it applies zero fees to selected futures products, with eligibility and fee arrangements varying by product and campaign.

Maker and taker fees are the per-trade charges exchanges typically apply to liquidity providers (makers) and liquidity takers (takers). Taking both to zero removes a familiar knob for traders optimizing costs, but it also removes a familiar revenue lever for the venue. MEXC is leaning into that tradeoff as a positioning choice, and it is attaching a headline number to it: the exchange stated its zero-fee initiatives saved 3.44 million users approximately 1.1 billion USDT during 2025.

The second leg of the offer is market breadth that looks less like “altcoin venue” and more like a multi-asset gateway. MEXC said it offers equity exposure through more than 300 stock and index futures, over 200 tokenized stocks, and more than 7,000 global stocks and ETFs through RealStocks.

Tokenized stocks, in this context, are blockchain-based representations of stock exposure offered by a platform, typically designed to track the price of underlying equities. The mechanism matters because it changes what traders are actually holding and what risks sit between them and the reference price. MEXC’s messaging does not dwell on that plumbing. It uses the product count as proof that the exchange wants to compete on “what you can trade” as much as “what it costs.”

That ambition ties into Usi’s longer-range framing that exchanges are converging toward a “financial super app,” a single platform bundling trading, investing, payments, and other financial services into one interface. “In the next five years … we will be seeing these financial super apps, super platforms, gateways where we can meet all our financial needs in a single place,” he said.

AI as the New Retail Edge: Order-Book Analytics and User Demand Signals

MEXC is also trying to make AI the retail-facing differentiator that replaces fee discounts. Usi’s version of the AI story is not “hands-off trading.” It is analytics access, where tools that used to be gated behind expensive institutional software get packaged into a consumer workflow.

“The opportunity with AI is not just to automate things,” he said, describing its potential to bring institutional-grade trading tools to retail users. His concrete example was order-book analysis at scale. An order book is the live list of buy and sell orders at different prices, and it is one of the clearest windows into where liquidity is sitting and where support or resistance can form. Usi said he uses an AI assistant to study order books and identify where capital is concentrated across large market datasets, a task that is hard to do continuously by hand.

MEXC is pointing to demand signals to justify prioritizing those features. Usi said a recent campaign soliciting customer feedback generated more than 2,500 pages of responses, with AI the most common subject. The exchange also cited MEXC Research data stating that 67% of Gen Z traders used AI tools in 2025. The material adds that the number is “likely to be higher in 2026,” but it does not provide a 2026 measurement.

The open question is where MEXC draws the line between “assist” and “decide.” The same source material frames the near-term value as summarization, monitoring, and surfacing relevant information, while keeping judgment with the trader. That is consistent with the Alpha Arena point: even with similar information, traders interpret the same market differently.

What Traders Should Track Next: Missing Terms, Product Rollouts, and the ‘Super App’ Direction

The pitch is broad, but the tradable details are still uneven. MEXC says selected futures products qualify for zero fees, yet it has not enumerated which contracts are included or how often the eligibility rules change by campaign. For active derivatives traders, that missing list is not cosmetic. It determines whether “zero fees” is a stable venue characteristic or a rotating acquisition program.

The trust bundle has similar gaps. Proof of Reserves (PoR) is a transparency report intended to show an exchange holds enough on-chain assets to cover customer balances for listed assets. MEXC says it publishes monthly PoR reports audited by Hacken. Its August 2026 disclosure reported reserve ratios of 115% for USDT and 114% for USDC, with other reported major assets above 100%. The same disclosure put MEXC’s futures insurance fund at approximately 751 million USDT. A futures insurance fund is a pool used by derivatives exchanges to help cover losses from bankrupt accounts and reduce the chance of socialized losses.

MEXC has also said it plans to expand its Guardian Fund from $100 million toward $500 million over two years, and that it acquired 1,000 BTC as part of its reserve arrangements. The next practical checkpoints are whether the monthly PoR ratios stay above 100% for USDT and USDC, whether additional assets get disclosed with similar coverage, and whether the Guardian Fund expansion comes with a clear funding path rather than a headline target.

The “super app” direction adds another set of terms traders will want in writing. Usi posted on September 4, 2026 about “Zero fees on spending” and “up to 10% cashback on everything,” referencing a planned card offering. The material does not provide a launch date, jurisdictions, or the cashback terms, and those details will decide whether it is a meaningful bundle or a marketing layer.

My Read: Zero Fees Are a Headline—But the Real Differentiator Becomes Risk Controls and Workflow

The threshold that matters is whether “zero fees” stays true when the trader’s actual mix of products and campaigns is applied. If the program is narrow or frequently rotating, it functions as acquisition spend. If it is durable across the contracts that carry real volume, it forces the competitive axis to move, exactly as Usi describes.

If that axis moves, the winners are not the venues with the loudest AI claims. They are the venues that can prove custody comfort and keep traders in a tight loop: clear PoR coverage audited monthly, insurance and guardian funds with disclosed mechanics, and AI features that compress time-to-decision without pretending to remove judgment. Zero fees only matter in practical terms if the exchange can keep funds on-venue and keep execution predictable when the market is stressed.

MEXC pitches zero-fee trading as a race for AI tools and trust signals