Gate.io — one of the oldest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. On 18 May 2013, it was founded by Chinese entrepreneur Li Han, and since then it has built a whole ecosystem for trading, creating new projects, and analysing the crypto market.
By the end of May Gate.io plans to update its design to align with the modern cryptocurrency world. In the meantime, we detail how the platform has evolved since 2020.
2020: 3 million users, the GT token, margin-trading certificates and a platform for startups
At the end of 2019 Gate.io launched its own Gate Token (GT). The exchange distributed a billion GT among Points—the points for paying trading fees with a discount.
In March 2020 Gate.io made GT the official ecosystem token, and over the year it bought back and burned 700 million coins. This decision led to the price rising from $1 to $13 in just a year.
Two months later the platform launched its own blockchain GateChain and made GT its native token. Besides paying transaction fees, GT is used to reduce trading fees on the platform.
The blockchain developers focused on speed and security:
- GateChain throughput — 2000 transactions per second;
- transaction finality speed — one block;
- fraud protection — a mechanism for reversal of transactions and clearing in the event of loss or theft of a private key.
In May Gate.io became the first of the crypto exchanges to provide users with verifiable proof that their deposits are indeed held in the platform’s wallets and are not used by third parties.
The solution is based on a Merkle tree: a user or auditor inputs the UID hash into Gate.io and obtains the balance of the corresponding Bitcoin address. With this development the auditing firm Armanino confirmed that Gate.io’s reserves fully cover user deposits.
In January the platform updated its launch platform Startup Premiere. Gate.io changed its project-selection strategy and allowed developers to apply for token sales. CryptoRank, a ranking site, provided interim results for IEO: average ROI stood at 160% over a year, and the highest result at 971% over a year.
2021: 4 million users, an incubator and NFT Magic Box
In February Gate.io launched the DeFi Ecosystem & Labs Incubator to attract developers to GateChain. The platform created a $50 million investment fund, and helped teams secure additional funding and publicity. In addition, the exchange listed tokens from promising projects and provided them liquidity to begin operations.
In May the exchange activated the EVM on the GateChain mainnet. A decentralized exchange HipoDeFi and the Gate Bridge appeared on the blockchain. Users gained access to Tether (USDT), Dogecoin (DOGE), Bitcoin (BTC) and other wrapped tokens of the GRC-20 standard.
A month later the exchange launched the NFT Magic Box marketplace. The platform offered users zero fees for creating NFTs, unique tokens of popular collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, and another token-sale format — Initial NFT Offering (INO) to support artists. At the time of publication, the marketplace’s trading volume stood at $5.4 million.
As with the DeFi Ecosystem & Labs Incubator, Gate.io provided financial and marketing support to digital artists.
In September Gate.io founded the Gate Ventures fund of $100 million. Its aim is to help developers of decentralised infrastructure, Web3 solutions and applications. The fund also offered grants to open-source DeFi project creators.
2022: 10 million users and a redesign
The exchange team focused on security. The platform introduced a range of measures to protect clients’ funds: from signing in only from specific IP addresses to a mechanism for returning funds in the event of a private-key theft in GateChain. The analytics service CoinGecko assigned Gate.io a cybersecurity rating of A and a Trust Score of 9 out of 10.
In addition, Gate.io regularly added new products. The exchange has rare tools such as delivery futures on cryptocurrency, trading bots with deep strategy customization, Big Data analytics of the crypto market, voting for token listings.
As of publication Gate.io serves 10 million users across 130 countries. Peak daily trading volume exceeds $10 billion.