Bitget, one of the largest crypto exchanges by derivatives volume, is in talks with Wall Street giants including BlackRock to fuel its Asian distribution push. Chief executive Gracy Chen highlighted the world’s largest asset manager as one example of a firm seeking to expand distribution of tokenized ETFs in the region, according to CoinDesk reporting this week.
The talks point to where exchange growth is heading. Trading fees from spot and derivatives have compressed across the industry, and every major platform is looking for the next product line. Tokenized ETFs, blockchain versions of funds like BlackRock’s IBIT bitcoin trust or traditional equity ETFs, let exchanges offer familiar Wall Street products to retail users who already live on crypto rails.
Why Asia is the target
The United States has an efficient fund distribution system already, but large parts of Asia do not. Retail investors in markets such as Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines often face high fees, minimum investment thresholds and slow settlement for US-listed funds. A tokenized ETF on an exchange app collapses that friction: fractional units, instant settlement, and an interface users already open daily.
Exchanges hold another advantage in the region: licences. Bitget and rivals like Bybit and OKX have spent two years securing registrations across offshore-friendly jurisdictions such as Dubai and various Asian regulatory sandboxes. That regulatory groundwork is what makes a distribution partnership with a US asset manager plausible rather than theoretical.
The user base is the other half of the pitch. Bitget reports more than 100 million registered users, with a heavy concentration in Asian timezones. Converting even a small share of those accounts into fund buyers would make the exchange one of the largest fund distributors in the region almost overnight, something no traditional bank-led distributor has managed against incumbent brokers.
BlackRock’s own crypto track record
BlackRock is not a passive party in this story. Its iShares Bitcoin Trust became the largest spot bitcoin ETF in the United States within months of launch, and the firm has filed for ether products and tokenized money market funds on Ethereum. Larry Fink, the firm’s chief executive, has repeatedly said the future of fund settlement is tokenization, calling it the next generation of markets infrastructure.
For BlackRock, an Asian distribution deal with an exchange solves its own problem: US ETF assets are concentrated among a few brokers, and growth requires new channels. Exchanges in Asia bring tens of millions of pre-cleared, app-onboarded retail accounts that no traditional fund distributor can match.
The firm has already crossed that bridge once with a crypto-native partner. Its BUIDL tokenized treasury fund, launched on Ethereum in 2024, grew into a multibillion-dollar product used by trading firms and protocols as cash management. The lesson BlackRock took from it appears to be that crypto distribution channels can move serious money without damaging the brand.
The competitive picture
Bitget is not alone in courting asset managers. Binance has listed tokenized versions of traditional assets and launched its own tokenized stock products in past cycles. Coinbase filed registration documents with the SEC this week to offer equity perpetual futures in the United States, and Standard Chartered launched institutional spot bitcoin and ether trading in Dubai. The infrastructure race between crypto platforms and banks is now running on both sides of the Pacific.
The timing also matters for flows. US spot bitcoin ETFs have pulled in $3.8 billion over the past three weeks, their strongest run of 2026, even with bitcoin trading below $80,000. Institutional appetite for regulated wrappers is intact. Extending those wrappers into Asian retail distribution is the logical next leg.
Fee economics support the shift too. Fund distribution pays recurring management and distribution fees for as long as the client holds the product, unlike spot trading fees which fall with volume compression. An exchange that seeds tens of millions of accounts with tokenized funds builds a recurring revenue base that smooths out the volatility of trading income. Copy-trading, earn products and staking already follow the same logic: keep the user on-platform with products that pay periodically, not just when they trade.
What could slow it down
Nothing is signed. Talks with asset managers of BlackRock’s size routinely stretch for quarters, and any product would need approval from securities regulators in each market where it lists. Several Asian jurisdictions restrict what a crypto exchange can offer alongside securities products, which could force Bitget to build a separate regulated entity for the fund business.
There is also a history to overcome. Tokenized stock products on exchanges ran into securities-law trouble in past cycles when they were launched without regulatory cover. A partnership with BlackRock is precisely the kind of arrangement that avoids that outcome, since the underlying fund would be a registered product and the exchange would sit in a distribution role rather than an issuer role.
Custody and cross-border settlement remain engineering problems as well. A US-listed fund tokenized for Asian retail buyers needs a creation and redemption chain that crosses jurisdictions, and the market infrastructure for that is still being built. Early products will likely lean on simplified wrappers rather than full on-chain transferability.
Chen did not give a timeline for a launch or name the other firms involved. If a deal lands, the first tokenized ETFs on the platform would likely be US-listed crypto products, given BlackRock’s existing suite, with equity ETFs following depending on each market’s rules. Either way, the message from the talks is clear: the next phase of exchange competition is not which platform lists which token, but which one becomes the retail fund supermarket for a region that traditional distributors have underserved for decades.
discussion