Crypto exchanges have long promised to become supermarkets for finance. Few have made convincing progress beyond the digital aisle.
Bitget’s launch of a private beta for “TradFi”, offering forex, commodities, indices and stock CFDs alongside crypto, all margined in USDT, is the latest attempt to blur the line between old markets and new. Investors should ask whether this is genuine convergence, or simply leverage with better branding.
The strategic logic is clear. Traditional markets are enormous. Global foreign exchange alone turns over close to $10tn a day, according to the BIS, while interest-rate and FX derivatives sit atop hundreds of trillions of dollars in notional exposure.
- Tokenised equities are changing the face of trading
- Cyprus forces CFD brokers to dial down on leverage
Retail access to this activity increasingly comes via contracts for difference (CFDs), a business expected to generate more than $5bn in annual revenues this year and grow steadily over the next decade. Crypto exchanges, facing fee compression and cyclical trading volumes, want a slice of that steadier pie.
Bitget’s proposition is straightforward: allow existing crypto users to trade mainstream macro instruments from the same interface they already use for spot and futures. No new accounts, no bank wires, no currency conversions. Everything is margined and settled in USDT. From a user-experience perspective, that is elegant. From a capital-efficiency perspective, it is powerful. Idle stablecoins can be redeployed instantly across asset classes, encouraging higher turnover and stickier balances.
The regulatory framing matters for Bitget
Bitget TradFi operates under a Mauritius Financial Services Commission licence, a jurisdiction commonly used by global CFD brokers. That places it squarely inside the established retail derivatives ecosystem, one characterised by high leverage, tight spreads and, historically, uneven outcomes for unsophisticated traders.
Anecdotal evidence gathered by The Armchair Trader from CFD brokers in 2025 indicates that many derivatives traders now access CFDs through offshore accounts to tap into higher levels of leverage. Levels of up to 500x will raise eyebrows, though Bitget is hardly an outlier in this market.
What differentiates Bitget is not the products themselves (forex, gold and index CFDs are commodities in every sense) but their integration with crypto-native infrastructure. USDT settlement removes friction and allows seamless movement between Bitcoin, tokenised equities and macro trades. That builds on Bitget’s earlier success with tokenised US stock futures, which have already generated more than $10bn in cumulative volume. The demand signal appears real.
Are there risks here for traders?
Still, there are risks to the “universal exchange” thesis. Combining crypto volatility with leveraged CFDs concentrates operational, market and regulatory risk in one place. Traditional brokers deliberately silo products, accounts and margin pools for a reason. A unified system may be efficient, but it also raises the stakes when things go wrong, whether through market dislocations, stablecoin stress or regulatory intervention.
There is also the question of margins. CFD brokerage is competitive and fee-sensitive. Bitget is advertising rates as low as $0.09 per lot for top-tier users. That suggests volume, not pricing power, is the goal. The bet is that crypto’s global user base and 24/7 culture can be cross-sold into forex and commodities at scale. Whether crypto traders genuinely want exposure to EUR/USD and the FTSE 100, or simply more ways to lever Bitcoin, remains to be seen.
Bitget’s TradFi push is a logical extension of a maturing crypto exchange model, not a revolution in finance. If it works, it could diversify revenues and smooth the brutal cyclicality of crypto trading. If it fails, it will underline an old lesson: putting everything under one roof is efficient, until the roof starts to leak.
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