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Cecilia Hsueh, Chief Strategy Officer of MEXC, thinks an altcoin season within the next 18 months is plausible, “but it will likely unfold in phases rather than a sudden, uniform rally.”
In an exclusive chat with 99Bitcoins.com, Hsueh said, “With altcoins remaining tethered to Bitcoin’s broader cycle, Bitcoin needs to consolidate at higher levels before capital meaningfully rotates into other assets. If the current ETF-driven inflows sustain and stablecoin liquidity keeps expanding, we could see conditions align for altcoin outperformance as early as late 2025.”
That said, it won’t be a blanket rally. Ecosystems with proven traction, such as Solana, which continues to attract developers and DeFi projects, and BNB, with its sticky exchange-driven economy, are better positioned to capture inflows than weaker tokens.
“A true alt season would hinge on three drivers including retail returning with risk appetite, a pick-up in on-chain economic activity across DeFi and L2 networks, and continued capital inflows from ETFs and stablecoins. If Bitcoin dominance begins to roll over after a strong run, that’s the inflection point where altcoins can begin to surge, with leading platforms potentially outperforming the broader market.”
With jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Singapore pushing regulatory clarity, how is the institutional investor profile in Asia evolving compared to North America? Specifically, what are the key differences in products or services MEXC is seeing demand for from Asian institutions versus Western funds?
We’re seeing Asian institutions evolve along a different vector than North American allocators. In the US, much of the institutional demand has been funneled into ETFs and regulated fund wrappers, characterized by custody, compliance, and large block trades, while in Asia, the demand is more pragmatic.
In Asia, regional institutions are asking for custody plus liquidity rails that let them deploy capital across borders quickly. Local investors are opting for USDT-settled derivatives, tokenized credit, and structured synthetics that reflect regional needs.
In Hong Kong and Singapore, regulatory licensing clarity is accelerating institutional readiness and helping to build composable, crypto-native rails for a highly dynamic market.
Emerging Tokenization Trends — beyond real estate or treasuries, which asset classes or commodities is MEXC most optimistic about in Asia, and why?
We’re especially optimistic about trade finance and receivables tokenization. Asia has an enormous base of SMEs that rely on invoice financing, and tokenizing those flows creates short-duration, verifiable yield products that institutions and retail alike can access.
MEXC is also bullish on micro-commodity tokenization — assets like palm oil, rubber, or LNG cargoes — which are deeply rooted in regional markets where faster settlement and fractional ownership can have tangible impact. Beyond that, tokenized digital revenue streams such as telco bandwidth or cloud compute credits represent an emerging category gaining close attention.
Can you walk us through the BTC-Backed Oil thesis? How does pairing the volatility of oil futures with Bitcoin as collateral achieve a censorship-resistant synthetic commodity, and what hurdles do you anticipate?
BTC-Backed Oil thesis combines two fundamental commodities, one is Bitcoin as digital gold and second is oil as the foundation of the physical economy, to create a censorship-resistant synthetic asset. By tokenizing oil futures and using Bitcoin as collateral, we can make borderless, transparent, and programmable trading without reliance on traditional banking rails a tangible reality. Over-collateralization and smart contracts manage volatility between the two assets, and this ensures solvency and stability.
The potential of this scenario is enormous. It democratizes access to energy markets, and at the same time unlocking new DeFi collateral types and offering an alternative financial route for non-Western economies. The main challenge remains the regulatory, as Western jurisdictions are unlikely to host such markets. Innovation will likely come from emerging or sanctioned regions, ones where demand for alternative settlement rails is highest.
The RWA market is at $28B today. How does this BTC-Backed Oil concept fit into MEXC’s broader strategy to bridge TradFi and DeFi, particularly for non-Western capital flows?
The BTC-backed oil concept positions MEXC at the strategic intersection of the $28B+ RWA market and underserved non-Western capital flows, offering a pathway to accelerate tokenization beyond current growth trajectories. By enabling censorship-resistant oil futures trading with Bitcoin collateral, MEXC can serve nations excluded from SWIFT and traditional banking systems, markets that U.S.-based platforms failed to facilitate due to sanctions compliance.
This approach leverages oil’s position as the world’s most globally critical commodity while utilizing Bitcoin’s apolitical, permissionless nature to facilitate capital flows from Russia, Iran, Latin America, and other marginalized regions. Such a solution would do more to drive RWA adoption and capital inflows than any other asset class, positioning MEXC as a truly global exchange that bridges TradFi and DeFi where Western infrastructure either can’t or won’t reach, while pioneering the synthetic commodities infrastructure that could form the foundation of a new, borderless financial system.
Beyond TVL, what single metric do you track most closely at MEXC to measure liquidity depth? How have Bitcoin ETFs and stablecoin inflows changed the exchange landscape?
The most telling metric is order-book depth within tight spreads — specifically, cumulative volume within 0.5% of mid-price, normalized against volatility. That shows whether the market can absorb real flows without slippage, which matters far more than headline TVL.
ETFs have changed who holds the inventory, while also legitimizing Bitcoin as an institutional asset. Meanwhile, stablecoin inflows are arguably more impactful for us: the $45 billion in Q3 inflows deepened dollar rails on-chain, expanded liquidity provision, and lowered friction for cross-border settlement. That’s dry powder converted into executable liquidity.
From both the exchange and VC lens, what is the most significant shift in Asian retail investor behaviour over the last 12 months?
The biggest shift is from single-asset speculation to multi-vector utility. Retail traders still chase memecoins, but we’re seeing far more discipline, such as the use of stop-losses, derivatives, and proper sizing.
Layer 2 adoption is also key. For many users, L2s are no longer experiments, but the main venues for NFTs, gaming, and payments. And finally, we’re seeing longer hold times for tokens with real utility, whether that’s staking, revenue share, or governance. Retail is learning to distinguish hype from fundamentals.
Your background includes co-founding Morph. How does MEXC’s strategy adapt to the proliferation of Layer 2s, and do you hold any contrarian views about Ethereum’s L2 future?
On the exchange side, we support USDT and USDC across multiple networks, and we list leading Layer-2 tokens (for example, Arbitrum, Optimism and Base) as market demand and network readiness warrant. On the venture side, MEXC Ventures focuses on L1/L2 ecosystem growth and has made strategic commitments to projects in the infrastructure and synthetic-asset space, reflecting our belief that interoperability, security, and resilient oracle systems are core to long-term value creation.
My contrarian view is that we’ll see consolidation rather than endless fragmentation. Network effects surrounding liquidity and composability mean that only a handful of L2s will likely dominate. Others will either specialize or merge. Infinite proliferation isn’t sustainable once capital efficiency and UX pressures take hold.
More About MEXC
MEXC is a centralized, global cryptocurrency exchange platform. It is one of the larger exchanges in the digital asset space, known for its extensive selection of tokens, low trading fees, and a variety of financial services beyond basic spot trading.
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