1. Intensified Exchange Competition: Entering Deep Waters

Since its inception, the cryptocurrency market has been known for rapid growth, constant innovation, and high volatility. After several cycles of bull and bear markets, the industry ecosystem has matured significantly, yet competition has also become increasingly fierce. Today, we stand at the beginning of a new market cycle characterized by accelerated institutional participation, the rise of high-net-worth users, and a global wave of regulatory compliance. These profound structural changes are reshaping the operating models and competitive strategies of crypto exchanges at unprecedented speed, making the old growth models of “barbaric expansion” or relying solely on traffic-driven strategies unsustainable.

1.1 Market Characteristics and Challenges in the Post-Bull Era

After the fervent bull market of 2021, the crypto market has shifted into a calmer and more rational phase. Despite occasional rebounds, overall sentiment has moved from FOMO (fear of missing out) to a focus on long-term value and sustainable growth. Against this backdrop, exchanges face a series of tougher challenges:

• Normalization of trading volume: As market volatility decreases and speculative enthusiasm fades, total trading volumes have declined, putting pressure on exchanges’ traditional fee-based revenues. According to CoinGecko’s 2025 industry report, the top 10 centralized exchanges (CEX) saw spot trading volumes drop from $6.4 trillion in Q4 2024 to $5.4 trillion in Q1 2025, a decrease of 16.3%. Nine out of the top ten exchanges experienced volume declines, with eight seeing double-digit drops. Notably, in April 2025, Gate recorded $113.7 billion in spot trading volume, ranking second among centralized exchanges with a market share of 9.0%—a 14.4% increase from March’s $99.4 billion, and the only top-10 exchange to achieve double-digit growth.

• Slower user growth: The early user acquisition dividend has faded, and the cost of attracting new users is rising. It has become critical to retain and engage broader and more professional user segments.
• Severe product homogenization: Most leading exchanges offer similar core trading products (spot, derivatives, leveraged trading, and savings products), leading to intense price competition and difficulty in establishing differentiated advantages.
• Security and trust crises: In recent years, incidents such as security breaches, opaque operations, and even bankruptcies have severely damaged the industry’s reputation, prompting users to demand higher levels of platform safety and transparency.

These challenges have pushed exchanges to shift from simply pursuing user quantity and transaction scale to focusing more on user quality, depth of service, and ecosystem development to build stronger competitive moats.

1.2 The Impact of Traditional Financial Institutions Entering the Crypto Space

The period from 2024 to 2025 marks a critical stage in the institutionalization of the crypto market. Major economies, led by the United States, have successively approved spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, signaling the formal integration of crypto assets into traditional financial investment portfolios and paving the way for large-scale institutional inflows. The participation of large asset managers such as BlackRock and Fidelity has not only brought substantial capital but also introduced stricter compliance standards, professional risk management systems, and mature trading strategies to the crypto market. According to data from The Block, by the end of June, the cumulative trading volume of spot Bitcoin ETFs had exceeded $1.04 trillion.

The entry of traditional financial institutions has had a multi-dimensional impact on crypto exchanges:

• Raising compliance standards: Institutions’ high compliance requirements have compelled exchanges to meet stricter standards in anti-money laundering (AML), know-your-customer (KYC) protocols, and regulatory licensing, thereby accelerating industry standardization.
• Increasingly complex and specialized demands: Institutional clients now seek more than basic trading functions—they require high-performance APIs, customized liquidity solutions, professional over-the-counter (OTC) services, robust custody solutions, and tailored risk management tools.
• Elevated competitive dimensions: Competition among exchanges is no longer limited to fee structures; it now extends to the stability of technological infrastructure, professionalism of customer service, capacity for product innovation, and the breadth of global compliance operations.
• Market reshaping: The influx of institutional capital is accelerating market share consolidation among leading exchanges that are compliant, secure, and equipped with comprehensive services, creating a “winner-takes-most” environment.

1.3 Shifts in User Structure and Demand: From Retail Dominance to the Rise of Institutional and High-Net-Worth Users

In the early stages of the crypto market, the user base was dominated by individual retail investors who mainly valued trading convenience, a wide variety of tokens, and low transaction costs. However, as the market has matured and institutional capital has entered more deeply, the user structure is undergoing a significant transformation. According to the State of Crypto 2025 report published by Coinbase and The Block Research, institutional interest in digital assets continues to grow: 86% of surveyed institutions said they currently invest in or plan to invest in digital assets, and 83% said they intend to further increase their allocations in 2025.

• Growth of High-Net-Worth Individuals (HNWIs): An increasing number of high-net-worth individual investors are allocating assets to crypto. They have higher expectations for asset security, privacy, personalized services, and exclusive investment research.
• The rise of professional institutional investors: This includes hedge funds, family offices, corporate treasury teams, and others who see crypto assets as part of a diversified investment portfolio. These institutions demand deeper liquidity, faster execution, stable APIs, and comprehensive financial services. According to the Q1 2025 Report from Finery Markets, institutional crypto spot trading volume maintained its growth momentum from late 2024, mainly driven by shifting U.S. regulatory sentiment and rising confidence in stablecoins. Based on an analysis of two million institutional spot trades from January to March 2025, trading volumes of crypto-to-stablecoin pairs increased fivefold compared to Q1 2024, while crypto-to-crypto trading volumes rose 189% year over year.

• The growing importance of market makers and quant teams: These professional players are critical for providing market liquidity and driving active trading. They require lower trading costs, robust API support, and a fairer trading environment.

This shift in user structure means exchanges must move away from broad, one-size-fits-all marketing strategies to more refined operations and differentiated services tailored to each user segment. By designing competitive product portfolios and service systems based on user needs, exchanges can better win the long-term favor of institutional clients, high-net-worth users, and professional market makers.

1.4 The Importance of Refined Operations and User Lifetime Value (LTV) Management

Given these challenges and trends, the competitive logic of crypto exchanges has evolved from a simple “traffic race” to a “user value race.” This means:

• Refined operations: Providing customized products, services, and marketing strategies for different user segments — such as beginners, active traders, high-net-worth users, and institutions — to enhance user experience and satisfaction.
• User lifetime value (LTV) management: Focusing on long-term user value by continuously delivering value and maintaining strong relationships to extend the user lifecycle and achieve sustainable revenue growth.
• Building user loyalty: Going beyond low fees to cultivate user loyalty and a sense of belonging through excellent service, community building, and brand trust—ultimately reducing churn.

Against this backdrop, an exchange’s VIP program is no longer just about fee discounts; it has become a core strategic tool for refined operations, enhancing user lifetime value, and building competitive moats. It directly determines whether an exchange can effectively attract and retain high-value users and stand out in an increasingly competitive market.

In this industry context, Gate’s newly launched VIP revamp program is particularly noteworthy. It represents not only a significant strategic upgrade for Gate but also reflects its deep understanding of current market trends and its proactive response to them.

2. Gate VIP Revamp: Comprehensive Breakdown of Products and Mechanisms

As user acquisition costs for crypto exchanges continue to rise and competition for institutional and high-net-worth clients intensifies, fee discounts alone are no longer sufficient to build a sustainable moat. With this in mind, Gate has launched a comprehensive five-dimensional upgrade spanning trading, asset management, fiat services, and brand experience. The core idea is to embed VIP benefits into every key stage of the user lifecycle: attracting trading activity with zero-fee offers at the front end, increasing asset retention through yield products during holding periods, ensuring liquidity through efficient deposit and withdrawal channels, and ultimately deepening loyalty through brand-focused engagement—creating a closed-loop operational model.

Gate’s VIP revamp represents a systematic upgrade of both product architecture and service mechanisms. Centered on five core pillars—trading, asset management, fiat services, brand privileges, and customer service—it creates a premium benefits system balancing operational efficiency with tangible value. On the trading side, VIP users can enjoy up to 100% discount on spot trading fees and up to 90% discount on futures trading fees, daily withdrawal limits of up to 20 million USDT, and up to 400 sub-accounts—significantly boosting flexibility in strategy deployment and capital allocation. For asset management, the program focuses on enhancing capital efficiency and returns, offering exclusive high-yield products, increased Launchpool staking limits, higher borrowing caps for collateralized loans, and Gate Card cashback rewards, thereby deepening users’ asset management capacity and platform engagement.

In the current market, most leading platforms still focus mainly on fee discounts and custodial insurance. Gate, by contrast, has extended its offering to include Launchpool protection quotas, fiat withdrawal limits of up to USD 500,000, and priority handling for P2P transactions—building an integrated benefits network that spans on-chain, fiat, and consumer use cases. This greatly increases service depth and user touchpoints, creating a differentiated competitive advantage. Notably, financial lifestyle perks such as Gate Card cashback and tickets to major sporting events not only offer real-world utility but also build emotional connections with high-net-worth users, creating user stickiness that simple low-fee models cannot easily replicate.

On the fiat service side, VIP users can withdraw up to USD 500,000 per month, benefit from priority dispute resolution in P2P trading, and enjoy higher concurrent order quotas—improving cross-border fund flow efficiency and supporting multi-currency and compliant trading needs. For brand and customer service, VIP users receive dedicated account manager support, personalized holiday gifts, exclusive event tickets, and periodic delivery of in-depth industry research reports, strengthening their sense of identity and platform loyalty. Overall, Gate is using a structured, system-level VIP strategy to build a seamless service chain covering trading, asset management, and lifestyle experiences—establishing a solid competitive moat in the high-net-worth user segment.

Below is a detailed breakdown of the newly upgraded VIP benefits:

Overall, Gate’s latest VIP upgrade goes beyond a simple adjustment of fee structures. Instead, it systematically expands benefit coverage horizontally and deepens service vertically, building a comprehensive service system that spans asset management, strategy trading, and brand experience. According to platform data, in Q2 2025, the number of VIP users increased by over 10% year-on-year, while trading volume contributed by these users rose by more than 40%, clearly demonstrating the effectiveness of the upgrade in boosting user engagement and platform stickiness.

The core value of this upgrade is not merely about lowering fees, but about designing a user value chain that runs through trading behavior, asset retention, capital flows, and brand identity: attracting traffic at the front end, retaining assets in the middle, and locking in loyalty at the end. Quantifiable data confirms the effectiveness of this holistic strategy. Compared with competitors, Gate’s multi-scenario, multi-role differentiated benefits model is likely to become its key competitive moat in the race for high-net-worth and institutional users.

3. User Perspective Analysis: The Significance of Gate VIP Benefits to Different User Groups

As the system design and product upgrades roll out, Gate’s approach to VIP user management has also become increasingly refined. Instead of relying on a single metric of asset size, Gate is shifting toward a layered service system built around trading roles and usage scenarios. The following sections analyze the real and long-term value of Gate VIP benefits from the perspective of different core user groups.

3.1 User Segmentation Strategy: Building a Diversified VIP Client Model

Gate’s VIP upgrade is not only aimed at traditional “high-net-worth individuals.” Instead, it tailors layered incentives and differentiated support based on user type and trading behavior. This results in three core user groups:

• High-net-worth individual investors: primarily concerned with trading costs, capital allocation flexibility, and platform identity.
• Professional institutional users (e.g., quant teams, market makers): focused on strategic flexibility, fee structure, and multi-account management.
• Cross-border arbitrage and compliance users: prioritizing deposit/withdrawal efficiency, multi-currency support, and compliance services.

This layered design, based on “trading roles + usage scenarios,” moves beyond the traditional single-asset-volume standard for VIP qualification, greatly enhancing Gate’s adaptability and service coverage to build a more diverse user ecosystem.

3.2 Benefit Allocation: Multi-dimensional Empowerment to Strengthen Platform Stickiness

To meet the core needs of different user groups, Gate systematically empowers users across three dimensions: fee optimization, liquidity support, and brand services.

• Fee benefits: individual investors enjoy up to 75% spot trading discounts and 70% borrowing rate discounts, reducing rebalancing and leverage costs. Institutional users can receive up to 100% fee waivers and configure up to 400 sub-accounts for strategy separation and risk hedging—greatly improving flexibility and capital efficiency.
• Liquidity support: high-net-worth and arbitrage users benefit from up to 20 million USDT in withdrawal and borrowing limits and USD 500,000 in fiat withdrawal quotas to manage funds during volatile markets. Priority P2P dispute handling and extensive OTC channels further enhance cross-border transaction efficiency.
• Brand and service: Gate offers VIP users personalized gifts, wealth advisor services, and dedicated account managers, deepening trust and sense of belonging in long-term asset management and interaction. Brand recognition and service experience are becoming the key pillars of building user loyalty.

3.3 Platform Strategy: Building a Layered, High-Stickiness User Structure for Long-term Retention and Asset Accumulation

Gate does not see this VIP upgrade as a one-off incentive, but rather as part of a systematic design to transform its user strategy from “traffic-driven” to “relationship-driven.”

• For high-net-worth users, the benefits extend from product and service to wealth management, increasing brand loyalty and willingness to retain assets.
• For professional institutions, the platform exchanges highly attractive fee structures and technical support for stable trading volume and deeper engagement.
• For cross-border users, Gate offers a complete solution including compliant deposit/withdrawal, fiat bridging, and liquidity support—enhancing global adaptability.

Ultimately, Gate aims to build a “low entry threshold + high value + finely layered” full-cycle VIP user system, ensuring stable trading activity, retention, and asset accumulation even amid market fluctuations—creating a resilient, high-quality user structure.

In short, Gate’s VIP benefits upgrade goes beyond the traditional high-net-worth service model by applying a “trading role + usage scenario” segmentation strategy. This brings high-net-worth individuals, professional institutions, and cross-border arbitrage/compliance users into a unified service framework. By precisely empowering them across three key areas—fee benefits, liquidity support, and brand experience—Gate significantly improves cost efficiency, user stickiness, and asset retention. This move strengthens its control over core assets and trading depth, shifting from pure traffic competition to relationship management, and lays a solid foundation for long-term asset accumulation and counter-cyclical growth.

4. Comparative Analysis: Gate’s Advantages in the Refined VIP Market

As the industry evolves, crypto trading platforms are increasingly shifting toward professional operations and high-net-worth user services. The VIP system has become a key tool for attracting and retaining high-value users. While most leading exchanges offer tiered VIP systems, Gate’s new upgrade stands out in both benefit coverage and service depth.

For example, some platforms’ VIP benefits are mainly limited to fee discounts and airdrop rewards focused on trading functions. By contrast, Gate’s new VIP program goes further, expanding into wealth management services and brand experience to create a comprehensive service system. The following table (excluding institutional VIP tiers) compares the core benefits at the highest VIP level among major crypto exchanges to highlight Gate’s differentiated strengths in the market.

Gate demonstrates significant competitiveness in trading fee discounts. For spot trading, Gate offers a 100% discount—matching KuCoin for the highest discount among peers, and far exceeding Binance (81%), Bybit (80%), and Bitget (70%). This means Gate users can enjoy the lowest trading costs in spot markets, improving trading efficiency and profitability. For derivatives trading, Gate provides a 90% discount, also above the industry average. This shows Gate’s fee advantages extend to futures trading, appealing to high-frequency traders and institutional investors. For cost-sensitive traders, Gate is undoubtedly a highly attractive choice.

In terms of sub-account support, Gate VIP users can create up to 400 sub-accounts—far surpassing other exchanges. In comparison, Binance VIP users can create up to 250, Bitget and Bybit only allow 20, and KuCoin allows 50. This advantage offers significant flexibility for institutions and advanced traders, enabling more efficient management of multiple trading strategies or portfolios. For users needing complex account management, this is a strong competitive highlight of Gate VIP.

Gate’s VIP system offers 16 tiers, reflecting a more granular and refined structure than most competitors. This high-density design shows Gate’s in-depth understanding of user needs and its precise operational capabilities, aiming to deliver differentiated services and tailored experiences for various user groups—thereby enhancing its core competitiveness.

Moreover, Gate’s approach to VIP tier requirements shows a more inclusive and strategic differentiation. Other leading platforms like Binance, OKX, and Bybit often set very high thresholds for higher VIP levels (e.g., VIP 7 requires $500 million–$1 billion monthly trading volume plus significant asset requirements). For example, Binance’s VIP 7 needs $800 million in 30-day trading volume and at least 3,000 BNB holdings. Gate’s thresholds are significantly more accessible: for VIP 10, only $100 million in monthly trading volume, 100,000 GT, or $2 million in assets is required to enjoy zero trading fees. Even users with tens of millions in monthly volume can reach VIP 8 or above—much lower than competitors.

This “low threshold + high reward” mechanism lowers the barrier for mid-sized users to reach higher VIP tiers and encourages active traders and potential institutional clients to become core users, strengthening user stickiness. By designing more inclusive and incentivized tiers, Gate successfully implements a refined customer management strategy built around “deepening service + layered operations,” breaking through in the competition for high-net-worth clients.

Gate’s VIP system upgrade is not just about optimizing trading fee discounts.Instead, it creates a comprehensive service ecosystem spanning over 20 exclusive benefits across five areas: trading, wealth management, fiat services, customer support, and brand experience. This refined service strategy is at the heart of Gate’s long-term strategic plan, designed to enhance its appeal to high-net-worth and institutional clients through multi-dimensional improvements in user experience. For example, VIP users enjoy up to 100% spot trading discounts, 90% derivatives discounts, exclusive wealth management products, monthly fiat withdrawal limits of $500,000, and dedicated account manager services. This holistic design goes beyond the traditional fee-focused model, reflecting Gate’s deep insight into user needs and its commitment to long-term service. Data shows that in Q2 2025, Gate’s number of VIP users increased by over 10% year-on-year, and VIP trading volume rose by more than 40%, confirming that refined services significantly boost user stickiness and platform activity.

5. Risks and Challenges

As the crypto market moves from its early explosive growth into a phase of compliance and institutionalization, exchanges can attract and retain high-net-worth and institutional clients through VIP strategies—but they also face multiple risks and challenges:

First, regulatory uncertainty remains the most significant long-term external risk.Major economies worldwide are moving from ambiguous stances toward clearer regulations, but this also means stricter compliance requirements and rising costs. For example, the approval of US spot ETFs has fueled institutional interest but raised the bar on AML, KYC, and tax compliance. Exchanges must proactively obtain global licenses and invest in compliance systems, teams, and training to maintain business continuity and risk resilience amid tightening policies or market volatility.

Second, changes in market volatility are a key challenge.In 2025, as the market matures and speculation cools, overall spot trading volume has declined. To reduce dependence on fee income alone, exchanges must expand into diversified businesses such as derivatives, wealth management, staking, and custody—and stabilize large client bases through VIP strategies to build counter-cyclical resilience. They must also continuously iterate VIP benefits, offering exclusive and scarce resources like early-stage project allocations, custom investment products, or Web3 ecosystem privileges to build hard-to-replicate competitive moats. The essence of VIP service lies in being “exclusive” and “high-quality.” As the number of VIP users grows, ensuring each one continues to enjoy consistently premium, personalized service becomes a major challenge.

Technical challenges cannot be overlooked either.The core competitiveness of exchanges is shifting from simply listing coins quickly to trading depth, matching efficiency, system stability, and security. As the industry’s technical standards rise, product homogeneity is increasing, and users’ demands for stability and differentiated experiences continue to grow. Any outages, vulnerabilities, or liquidity issues can quickly go viral on social media and damage brand reputation. Exchanges must therefore keep investing in R&D, strengthen infrastructure and risk control, and improve resilience against extreme market events and black swans.

In addition, changes in global macroeconomic conditions and capital costs are worth watching.If global interest rates remain high, high-net-worth and institutional clients’ allocation willingness might decrease, while higher financing costs could constrain expansion and capital efficiency. To mitigate this, exchanges can invest in stablecoin-related services, real-world assets (RWA), and cross-border settlement to attract longer-term funds and reduce sensitivity to short-term market fluctuations.

In summary, the success of a VIP strategy depends not only on fee discounts and exclusive services but also on the exchange’s ability to systematically identify external risks, optimize internal management, and build sustainable competitive advantages in compliance, technology, and product. Only then can it achieve sustainable growth and stand out amid intensifying industry competition.

6. Conclusion: VIP Refined Service Is Gate’s Long-term Strategy

As the global crypto market enters a new phase of stock competition, compliance upgrades, and user structure reshaping, the VIP strategy is no longer just a new user acquisition tool—it has become a core strategic pillar for connecting high-net-worth users and institutional clients and building long-term moats.

As the industry moves from “traffic dividends” to “stock deepening,” competition has evolved from simple fee wars to competing on product diversity, technological strength, and integrated service capability. Future leading platforms will resemble comprehensive fintech companies, offering VIP users end-to-end solutions in trading, risk management, market strategy, and custody/settlement. Exclusive research reports, customized risk controls, dedicated VIP APIs, and multi-market trading tools will become key differentiation points.

Meanwhile, institutionalization is accelerating: high-net-worth individuals, family offices, hedge funds, and market makers are becoming market mainstays. Through refined VIP services, exchanges can not only stabilize volume and liquidity but also form long-term ties with core users to co-build ecosystems and enhance resilience. Global compliance presence is also a key pillar for VIP strategy success.

Looking further ahead, the VIP strategy will help exchanges evolve from pure matching engines to “platform ecosystems.” By opening APIs to aggregate third-party services and supporting derivatives, RWA, market making, custody, and other businesses, exchanges can meet users’ complex cross-asset, cross-chain, and cross-market needs—further strengthening stickiness and competitive barriers.

For Gate, the refined VIP strategy is not only a key pillar to consolidate its market position but also an essential path toward its vision of becoming the “next-generation crypto asset exchange.” Gate will continue to enhance security, efficiency, user experience, and brand recognition—e.g., strengthening fund security, speeding up fiat and on-chain transactions, and enriching exclusive privileges—to build a globally competitive high-end service system.

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