Websea's Third Anniversary: Adjustments and Choices of a Mid-Sized Exchange Amid Industry Restructuring

Author: Mona, Chain Catcher

The exchange industry in 2026 presents a seemingly contradictory picture.

On one hand, TradFi, RWA, stablecoins, and on-chain derivatives are continuously expanding, broadening the asset boundaries accessible to trading platforms; on the other hand, established exchanges like BitMart and BitMEX are exiting the market.

This points to a real issue: for small and medium-sized exchanges, market conditions and asset expansion can generate new trading demand, but this does not guarantee that the platform will naturally achieve long-term growth. Any failure in liquidity, compliance, security, risk management product iteration, customer acquisition costs, or user retention can impact the platform's short-term and even medium-term operational performance.

Against this backdrop, Websea, which was established three years ago, has recently made intensive adjustments to its product and business layout.

In the past month, Websea has focused on launching or upgrading contract insurance, copy trading, VIP services, gold and silver CFDs, and proof of reserves, and co-hosted the global RWA summit in Almaty. According to Websea's third-anniversary announcement, the platform disclosed that it has over 1.5 million registered users globally, and recent data from CMC shows its daily trading volume has reached $5 billion.

From these actions, it appears that Websea's recent product adjustments are primarily focused on risk management, multi-asset trading, and asset transparency.

Starting from the Aftermath of the Bear Market, Entering a New Competitive Phase After Three Years

Websea was founded in 2023, during a time when the industry was still reeling from the previous round of deleveraging. Subsequently, the Bitcoin spot ETF, halving cycles, and institutional funding drove market recovery, allowing exchanges to reap the benefits of increased trading volumes. As we enter 2026, competition has begun to differentiate: leading platforms are vying for global liquidity and compliance entry points, on-chain trading is eating into some long-tail asset demand, and mid-sized platforms must find their position among product features, regional markets, and user operations.

This context is essential for understanding Websea's third-anniversary data. The user scale and trading volume disclosed by Websea reflect the platform's current business scale, but the quality of its operations requires longer-term data observation. More specifically, for exchanges, registered users, trading volume, and short-term activities can only explain part of the growth; whether users continue to trade, whether assets are retained long-term, and whether the platform can maintain product operations after market cooling will ultimately determine the quality of its scale.

Websea has also experienced market pressures and business adjustments over the past three years. In April 2026, the platform announced a phased adjustment to its withdrawal services and subsequently stated that it would conduct asset verification and recovery arrangements. For platforms that have gone through this phase, how to continuously enhance asset transparency, risk management, and user trust has become a significant test for their subsequent business development.

Recent actions indicate that Websea is making product adjustments around several directions: contract insurance and copy trading products primarily address risk management needs in derivative trading; TradFi and CFDs expand the range of trading targets; PoR provides users with a way to verify the platform's reserve status; and RWA points more towards regional industrial resources and potential asset collaborations.

These directions correspond to different issues currently faced by exchanges, but whether they can ultimately form stable commercial value still requires subsequent trading data, user feedback, and business implementation to validate.

Risk Management Products: Can They Form Long-Term Competitiveness?

Spot, contracts, copy trading, and wealth management have become common configurations for centralized exchanges. As products become increasingly similar, the cost of user migration is very low, and new users brought in by fee subsidies and promotional rewards are also difficult to retain naturally.

Websea has adjusted key products like "contract insurance" and "copy trading"; from a product design perspective, these features primarily revolve around trading risk management and user participation experience, with some mechanisms attempting to lower the understanding and usage barriers for users participating in related products for the first time.

In the upgrade on July 20, Websea injected trading fees from insurance orders into the corresponding insurance pool and adjusted the distribution rounds and VIP benefits. On the copy trading side, new users can receive corresponding incentives. On August 18, the maximum subscription limit for ordinary subscriptions was raised, and the subscription periods for some traders were changed to 7, 14, and 21 days, with subscription fees adjusted from a fixed amount to a percentage of the copy trading amount.

From a product mechanism perspective, Websea is attempting to combine new user incentives, copy trading, risk management, and VIP benefits. Users first familiarize themselves with the product mechanisms through experience quotas offered to new users before participating in actual trading, and then operate using features like profit-taking, stop-loss, position management, and contract insurance. Compared to one-off user acquisition activities, this mechanism focuses more on connecting user incentives with subsequent trading experiences.

However, risk management products also have clear boundaries. They do not mean that users can achieve guaranteed profits, and contract insurance does not imply that all losses from leveraged trading can be covered. Whether the protection conditions are easy to understand, whether the insurance pool funds are sustainable, and whether the compensation and withdrawal rules are stable will all affect users' real evaluations of the products.

Therefore, for Websea, whether contract insurance and copy trading can form long-term competitiveness ultimately depends on whether the product rules are clear, whether execution is stable, and whether relevant data can be continuously disclosed.

TradFi Heating Up: Exchanges Competing for Users' Asset Time

The expansion of TradFi by crypto exchanges has a straightforward commercial rationale: when the crypto market lacks a main line, trading opportunities still exist in gold, US stocks, indices, foreign exchange, and commodities. By providing more asset categories, platforms can increase user retention time and smooth out the impact of single market fluctuations on trading volume.

++CoinGecko++ data indicates that in the first half of 2026, the perpetual trading volume handled by crypto exchanges in TradFi has exceeded $14.5 trillion, with perpetual contracts accounting for 98.5%. The data shows that the path users are currently more familiar with is still trading the price exposure of traditional assets, while holding real assets on-chain involves more complex processes such as issuance, custody, valuation, and redemption.

The CoinGecko "2026 RWA Report" also states that the market capitalization of tokenized RWA has increased from $5.42 billion at the beginning of 2025 to $19.32 billion at the end of Q1 2026, with government bonds and commodities constituting the main parts, and stocks and ETFs also beginning to scale. The trading of derivatives and the tokenization of assets are heating up simultaneously, providing exchanges with two types of opportunities: undertaking price trading and connecting liquidity demands after assets are on-chain.

Figure: Market capitalization changes of various asset categories of tokenized RWA; Source: CoinGecko "2026 RWA Report", data as of March 31, 2026.

With TradFi continuing to heat up, Websea launched gold and silver CFDs on August 11, having previously covered US stocks, global indices, ETFs, foreign exchange, and commodities, allowing users to trade different markets within their USDT accounts.

It is important to distinguish product attributes here. CFDs provide price exposure to relevant targets, and users do not directly hold stocks, gold, or other underlying assets. As a result, exchanges gain new trading scenarios but must also manage price sources, liquidity, funding costs, market closure periods, and extreme market risk control. Whether TradFi can become Websea's second growth curve still requires time to verify.

PoR and RWA: Two Different Competitive Strategies

On August 18, Websea launched its first proof of reserves. The platform disclosed that the reserve ratios for USDT, BTC, ETH, and WBS are 111%, 100%, 102%, and 174%, respectively. Users can verify whether their personal assets are included in the statistics through a Merkle tree, and can also download wallet addresses, user asset files, and open-source tools for verification.

Figure: Websea's proof of reserves officially launched; Source: Websea official poster

PoR can provide a public verification entry for the asset transparency of centralized platforms, but a single disclosure can only provide a snapshot in time. Its reference value also needs to be considered in conjunction with update frequency, address coverage, liability criteria, and the continuity of historical reports. Websea's CMO Herbert R. Sim has stated: "The platform will regularly publish data and historical reports for each period."

On the same day, the global RWA summit held in Almaty may reveal another expansion strategy. The summit involved industries such as mining, agriculture, real estate, and green energy, connecting industry and investment participants from China, Kazakhstan, and other markets. Central Asia has energy, mineral, agricultural, and cross-border trade scenarios, providing a real asset basis for RWA, as well as specific issues related to asset confirmation, compliance, custody, valuation, and cross-border settlement.

Figure: Scene of the RWA summit in Almaty; Source: Websea official poster

From a business logic perspective, regional activities like the summit can become a channel for Websea to connect with local asset sides and cooperation networks. However, there are still many steps to go before RWA products can be traded, verified, and sustainably operated.

Of course, whether this route is ultimately effective will depend on the project's implementation, the structure of partners, asset cash flows, and legal arrangements. Overall, regional activities provide an entry point, and business results determine how far it can go.

What Does Websea Need to Prove After Three Years?

Over the past three years, the competitive logic of crypto exchanges has continuously changed.

In the early days, the focus was on the speed of listing and the number of trading pairs; during the bull market phase, the focus shifted to traffic and contract depth; as the industry matures, transparency, risk management, global assets, and regional services have been pushed to more important positions.

Websea's recent layout has largely followed this change. Contract insurance and copy trading address user risk perception, TradFi expands the range of tradable assets, PoR establishes a public verification entry, and Central Asia RWA collaboration extends the regional resource network.

These actions cover several important competitive dimensions for exchanges currently, but for Websea, what is truly worth observing moving forward may not be how many more products can be added, but whether these layouts can translate into sustained data performance that withstands user scrutiny.

The competition in the exchange industry continues. The changes at BitMart and BitMEX remind the industry that past scale and notoriety cannot be permanently exchanged for a seat at the table.

For Websea, the third-anniversary milestone has concentrated on showcasing the platform's recent business adjustments: continuing to expand asset trading scenarios while strengthening risk management and asset transparency, and attempting to find regional RWA opportunities.

As for whether these strategies can ultimately translate into stable liquidity, sustained user retention, and verifiable business growth, longer-term data will need to provide answers.

This article is based on publicly available information and disclosures from the platform for industry analysis. Websea's user scale, trading volume, reserve ratios, and product parameters are all derived from platform disclosures, and relevant information is subject to published announcements and product pages. The media has not independently audited or guaranteed the related data. The analysis of the platform's business development in this article only represents industry observations and does not constitute a recommendation or investment advice for any trading platform, financial products, or digital assets.

This content is provided for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. Any events, rewards, online promotions, or related information mentioned herein should not be considered a recommendation, solicitation, or invitation to purchase, sell, trade, or otherwise deal in any crypto assets. Crypto assets are highly volatile and may result in loss. The availability of WEEX services, products, and related events may vary by region. You are responsible for ensuring that your participation is in accordance with applicable local laws and regulations.