A cryptocurrency exchange can buy a place on a Formula One car. Buying a trader’s confidence is more complicated. Gate has pursued both: its name appeared in Oracle Red Bull Racing’s 2025 sponsorship lineup, while its proof-of-reserves software sits on GitHub, available for inspection. One attracts people who may never have opened a trading terminal. The other addresses the question that matters once they deposit money: is it actually there?
That tension explains Gate better than a league table. Founded in 2013 by Dr. Lin Han, usually called Dr. Han, the business built its appeal around access to a sprawling selection of digital assets. It now wants customers to do considerably more than buy a coin. The menu extends through derivatives, automated strategies, earning products, on-chain tokens and traditional financial assets. The exchange is becoming a financial supermarket, with all the convenience and complicated labels that implies.
In September 2026, Gate’s corporate blog reported that its user count had passed 60 million. Treat that as a measure of reported reach, not a census of people trading every month. Its May 2025 rebranding announcement had cited more than 23 million users and over 3,800 cryptocurrencies. Even allowing for the difference between registrations and active customers, the ambition is plain: more markets, more reasons to stay, more of each customer’s financial routine.
The customer who wants the other coin
Bitcoin is available in plenty of places. Gate’s more distinctive customer is looking for something further down the list: a new token, a particular derivatives contract, or a way to trade an on-chain asset without assembling a separate collection of tools. Breadth gives the exchange a reason to exist alongside Binance, OKX, Bybit and Coinbase. Those businesses overlap with Gate, though their geographical reach and available products differ.
The attraction is practical. A centralized exchange brings accounts, order matching and a trading interface together. Gate’s spot markets serve people buying and selling assets; margin and futures extend the menu to traders borrowing or taking leveraged exposure. For experienced participants, those instruments can support hedging as well as speculation. For a newcomer, the same abundance can make a trading screen look like a cockpit before the first lesson.
Gate Alpha pushes that convenience toward on-chain markets. Gate describes it as a way to buy early-stage tokens using USDT from an exchange account. The product reduces the number of steps between hearing about a token and trading it. That is a meaningful service, but the distinction matters: reducing the work of reaching an asset does not reduce the work of understanding it. A smaller token can still have a thin market or an uncertain future.
This is Gate’s competitive wager: customers will value the range, then discover adjacent products. It is also a demanding proposition to maintain. A long catalogue only earns its keep when users can find the right market, understand the instrument and execute at a tolerable price. Counting listings measures shelf space. It does not measure the quality of every item on the shelf.
A scam, a scientist and a market for trust
Han’s account of the origin is unusually direct. In a January 2026 Forbes interview, he said he lost about 100 Bitcoin in a trading scam in 2013. The experience helped motivate him to start the exchange. “The industry was still in the wilderness,” he recalled. That is a founder’s retrospective account, but it identifies a concrete failure: the informal way people found counterparties could leave them exposed before a proper trading relationship even existed.
Han has a doctorate in optics, a technical background that fits the company’s emphasis on systems and verification. The public leadership team also includes chief marketing officer Kyle Chiu, whose previous roles span Animoca Brands and asset-management marketing. The combination tells you something about the present business: Gate needs both financial distribution and engineering. A useful product that nobody recognizes has a problem; a recognizable name with weak infrastructure has a larger one.
Funding deserves a careful label. Contemporary reporting in April 2019 described Gate raising $64 million in crypto assets through a token-related offering. Participants purchased Gate Points, usable against trading fees, with GT tokens distributed alongside them. The first phase distributed 150 million GT. This was a specific mechanism linking customer participation, future platform use and a blockchain project. It should not be mistaken for a conventional venture-capital equity round.
Han later told Forbes, “We didn’t have an external balance sheet to lean on.” The useful distinction is between outside equity backing and the earlier customer-funded offering. The two facts can coexist. For another founder, the transferable lesson is to understand exactly what customers are paying for and what obligation that payment creates. Prepaid usage is future service owed, even when a token gives the transaction a more exciting costume.
The little fee that keeps coming back
Gate’s trading business earns money through charges attached to activity. Its published fee structure distinguishes products, VIP tiers and eligible GT discounts. A March 2026 announcement, scheduling changes for April 9, listed the basic VIP0 spot maker and taker rates at 0.1%, with a 0.09% rate for eligible GT deductions. The arithmetic is pleasantly simple. At 0.1%, a $1,000 executed trade generates a $1 commission.
Trade value × published VIP0 spot rate = commission for one execution.
A purchase followed by a sale at the same value would therefore generate $2 in commissions at that rate. That is an illustration, not the complete cost of a position. Spread and slippage affect execution; withdrawal charges affect moving funds away; borrowing and derivatives introduce their own costs. The number beside “fee” is only one line on the receipt. Frequent turnover makes even a small percentage consequential.
Copy trading adds another kind of convenience. A customer chooses a lead trader, assigns funds and configures parameters such as leverage and stop-loss settings. Gate’s own help text explains why the follower’s returns can differ: slippage, mismatched leverage, margin changes, manual closures and risk limits can all interfere. The button copies instructions under particular conditions. It cannot reproduce the exact market moment in which somebody else traded.
Earning and token-distribution products give customers additional reasons to keep assets within the platform. Simple Earn, staking, Launchpool and HODLer Airdrop have different mechanics; they should not be treated as interchangeable savings accounts. For Gate, the commercial logic is coherent. Someone who arrives to trade may return for a new-token allocation, then use another service. For the customer, each additional product deserves its own reading of the terms.
A reserve claim you can interrogate
The most useful part of Gate’s trust argument is its attempt to make a claim testable. The company introduced proof-of-reserves reporting in 2020 and made its implementation open source after FTX collapsed in 2022. A subsequent upgrade added zero-knowledge technology. The sequence matters: an industry-wide failure increased the value of evidence that customers and outside specialists could examine for themselves.
- 01Your balanceAn account balance enters the verification dataset.
- 02A cryptographic commitmentMerkle trees and zero-knowledge proofs allow checks without exposing every customer’s balance.
- 03A checkable resultPublished data and software let users verify inclusion and the stated reserve proof.
Scope and timing matter. A successful check does not guarantee future solvency or investment returns.
Gate’s process combines Merkle trees, which organize account data into a verifiable structure, with zero-knowledge proofs. Users can download verification software and data to check the published proof and their own inclusion. That is more substantive than asking them to accept a badge. It still requires attention to the dataset, the method and the moment being measured.
Hacken’s January 2024 review concerned the proof-of-reserves code. Its report lists three findings, all resolved. The scope is crucial: a review of this implementation is not an audit of every corporate obligation, every operational control or every product offered under the Gate name. In an August 24, 2026 update, Gate reported a 127% reserve ratio and more than $8.215 billion in reserves. Those are company-reported snapshots, not permanent properties of the exchange.
Counting listings measures shelf space. It does not measure the quality of every item on the shelf.
There is a useful management idea here: turn a vague promise into a check a customer can repeat. Publish the method, expose it to review and explain what it covers. That approach works beyond crypto. It loses its value when the test answers a narrower question than the marketing suggests. Verification earns trust by being specific about its boundaries.
The passport has fine print
Gate’s expansion has not been a straight line. In May 2024, its Hong Kong affiliate withdrew its licence application and moved to halt services while describing a platform overhaul. The episode shows why a global brand cannot treat every market as the same operating environment. A locally available website, a contact in Hong Kong and a regulated service are different things.
Dubai supplies a more concrete milestone. VARA’s public register records an active exchange-services licence for Gate Technology FZE, issued April 25, 2025. Gate’s own Dubai disclosure specifies spot trading and permission to serve retail, qualified and institutional investors. That authorization belongs to the named entity and its permitted business. It does not automatically cover every derivative or on-chain product displayed elsewhere in the group.
Meanwhile, the marketing became conspicuously public. Inter announced a sleeve partnership beginning with the 2024/25 season, covering its men’s, women’s and U20 teams. Red Bull Racing announced its multi-year deal in February 2025, with placements including the car, team clothing and Max Verstappen’s helmet. Gate adopted the Gate.com domain that May. Together, the moves put a less technical face on a technically complicated business.
More doors, more decisions
The latest expansion takes the supermarket idea further. Gate’s 2026 menu includes stock access, tokenized securities and derivatives linked to traditional assets. Its newsroom announced Japanese stock availability across web and app in August, followed by a unified USD order book in September. These are moves toward serving more of a customer’s portfolio from one interface. Ownership rights and product structures still differ behind the screen.
Gate is most legible when understood as a company selling access and convenience, then trying to supply enough verification to sustain them. Its breadth can help a knowledgeable trader find a market or automate an established process. It is less helpful when choice outruns understanding, a strategy meets insufficient liquidity, or a customer’s jurisdiction excludes the desired service. The next challenge is editorial as much as technical: making a vast financial menu clear enough that people know what they have ordered.