Bitget presses ahead with US licensing bid regardless of CLARITY Act’s fate
Bitget seeks money-transmitter, derivatives and broker-dealer approvals for a US entity as tokenised stocks reshape its business, CEO says.
Bitget intends to press ahead with a licensed entry into the United States whether or not Congress passes the CLARITY Act, according to chief executive Gracy Chen, in a sign that exchanges are no longer willing to wait for Washington’s stalled market-structure debate before committing capital to the world’s largest financial jurisdiction.
Chen said the exchange plans to seek money-transmitter, derivatives and broker-dealer approvals before offering any services to American customers, and will operate through a standalone US-based entity kept separate from its offshore platform. “With or without the Clarity Act, Bitget has already made a decision to enter the US market,” she said.
A shelved plan revived after the FTX fallout
Bitget first weighed a US launch in 2022 but abandoned the idea as enforcement actions multiplied across the industry following the collapse of FTX. Chen said she is now leading a renewed push to secure the necessary approvals ahead of any launch, rather than entering the market and adapting to rules after the fact.
The strategy mirrors moves elsewhere. Bitget’s European arm submitted a MiCAR licence application to Austria’s Financial Market Authority in June, and the exchange has separately expanded through local registrations in markets including Argentina, while explicitly excluding restricted jurisdictions from its growth plans. The pattern points to a firm choosing jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction compliance over the offshore-first model that defined much of the industry’s earlier expansion.
Tokenised equities move to the centre of the pitch
The US ambitions are not confined to conventional crypto trading. Chen said Bitget has held talks with the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq about distributing tokenised versions of traditional assets, describing the exchanges as collaborators rather than rivals as parts of the wider financial sector move equities onto blockchain-based rails.
Those conversations coincide with a rapid shift inside Bitget’s own business. Chen said tokenised traditional assets accounted for between 20% and 30% of the exchange’s spot trading volume in the previous quarter, that 52% of its users now hold both crypto and tokenised stocks, and that its tokenised-stock products have accumulated more than $100 million in assets. Bitget recently folded more than 100 tokenised US stocks into a unified margin system alongside over 370 eligible assets, with its Reality platform offering 1:1-backed tokenised equities and ETFs that can also be used as trading collateral.
What US market structure still leaves open
A domestic launch would need to reconcile with securities law, broker-dealer obligations and derivatives oversight that could dictate which products Bitget can offer Americans and in what form. Those questions remain unresolved regardless of the CLARITY Act’s progress through Congress, and Chen said the company wants its approvals settled before any customer-facing launch rather than seeking forgiveness afterwards.
For UK and European observers, the episode illustrates how exchanges are treating tokenised securities as a growth engine even as legislators debate the underlying rulebook, a dynamic regulators on this side of the Atlantic will be watching closely as they weigh their own approach to tokenisation under frameworks such as MiCA.
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