Dissecting the underlying architecture of the BIT US Stock Platform, Why is Real US Stock Important?

In 2026, the cryptocurrency platform collectively began to turn its attention to the US stock market.

Last Friday evening, SpaceX completed its listing on the US stock market, almost pushing this sentiment to a new high. As one of the most watched global tech companies, SpaceX’s IPO was not only a capital market event but also a global retail-oriented “US stock access” stress test.

On one side was the extremely high market enthusiasm. SpaceX’s first day of trading was strong, with the stock price significantly rising above the offering price, and discussions surrounding it quickly spreading from traditional brokerages and financial media to the crypto community. On the other side, many investors experienced a more direct gap: some platforms had vigorously promoted participating in the SpaceX IPO, but in the end, did not actually allocate shares to users, leading to only refunds.

In fact, this case can illustrate some things very well: cryptocurrency platforms’ US stock businesses are essentially a mirror image of US stocks rather than real US stocks. It is in this context that dissecting and analyzing how BIT operates as a professional US stock platform has very strong practical significance.

BIT is not a newly emerged US stock trading platform. Its predecessor was Matrixport, co-founded by former “mining tycoon” Wu Jihan. In February 2026, BIT launched its US stock trading service; by mid-May, about 100 days after BIT’s US stock business went live, user AUM had already exceeded $200 million.

The biggest feature of BIT’s US stock product is that users trade real US stocks.

This means that in the fund transfer process, BIT is closer to the actual needs of both crypto and US stock users. Users can quickly deposit using USDT or USDC stablecoins, achieving 24/7, second-level deposits; they can also choose stablecoin standard deposits, settling through the regular wire transfer process; if they have an overseas bank account, they can also directly recharge in dollars via bank wire transfer.

What’s more special is that BIT also supports stock transfers. This means that users who already hold US stocks with other brokerages do not necessarily need to sell their stocks first, transfer the funds out, and then buy them back but can directly transfer their existing US stock holdings to BIT.

How much dividend have you missed out on by buying mirror-image US stocks?

Although now, most cryptocurrency trading platforms that have launched US stocks can basically solve the problem of “historically, crypto users entering the US stock market was not smooth,” the new problem is that, in fact, many users do not know that on various major crypto platforms, what they are buying is more of mirror-image US stocks rather than real US stocks.

The distinction between synthetic and actual US stocks may not be obvious, and it may not be easy to distinguish them on a trading interface. You may see symbols like NVDA, AAPL, MSFT, all showing a candlestick chart, a buy button, and the P&L in your account.

During short-term trading, this difference may not be glaring. As long as the price is accurate, there is sufficient liquidity, and the orders are executed smoothly, many people may not inquire about the underlying asset. However, once a user’s goal is not just to ‘make a quick trade’ but to ‘allocate a type of asset,’ this difference becomes significant.

Because holding real stocks means that users are entering not just a price system but are entitled to more rights. This includes dividends, voting rights, corporate actions, securities custody, settlement, and even investor protection in extreme cases. A price contract can replicate price movements, but it is challenging to fully replicate the chain of rights behind a stock as a security asset.

So, what you buy on most crypto trading platforms as NVIDIA, in fact, cannot be considered as ‘holding NVIDIA stock’. This is precisely the most significant point of discussion when crypto platforms enter the US stock market in 2026.

The most straightforward example is dividends. The US stock market is not just about price movements. For many companies and ETFs, dividends are an essential part of long-term returns. According to Fidelity’s data, dividends contribute to approximately 40% of the total return of the S&P 500 over the long term.

Let’s take a more concrete example with $1 million to illustrate. For instance, some high-dividend US stocks. Altria has an annualized dividend per share of about $4.24. Based on a rough calculation of the June 2026 stock price, holding $1 million for a year would result in a pre-tax cash dividend of approximately $58,700, corresponding to an annual dividend yield of about 5.87%. Verizon’s latest quarterly dividend is approximately $2.83 per share on an annualized basis. Holding $1 million for a year would result in a pre-tax cash dividend of around $62,400, corresponding to an annual dividend yield of about 6.24%. Realty Income, a company that pays dividends monthly, has an annualized dividend per share of about $3.246. Holding $1 million for a year would result in a pre-tax cash dividend of approximately $53,000, corresponding to an annual dividend yield of about 5.3%, and it is distributed monthly.

These are just the results based on dividends. If these dividends are not withdrawn but reinvested in the same stock, the compounded returns would be higher. Calculating based on pre-tax, stable stock price, unchanged dividends, and immediate reinvestment of dividends, investing $1 million in Altria and letting the dividends compound for a year would yield approximately $60,000 solely from dividends and reinvestment, with a corresponding return rate of about 6%; reinvesting quarterly dividends from Verizon would result in an approximately $63,900 return after a year, with a return rate of about 6.39%; due to the monthly dividend schedule, Realty Income would generate approximately $54,300 in returns after a year, with a return rate of about 5.43%.

Even if we switch to more familiar tech stocks, the dividend yield is not as exaggerated as high dividend stocks, but the difference still exists. NVIDIA is now more like a growth stock, with a low dividend yield. Holding $1 million for a year, the pre-tax dividend is about $4,900, corresponding to an annual dividend yield of about 0.49%; Microsoft is a bit more mature. Holding $1 million for a year, the pre-tax dividend is about $8,700, corresponding to an annual dividend yield of about 0.87%. These numbers may not look as eye-catching as high dividend stocks, but they are still a part of real holding returns.

(It is worth noting that different platforms may use different methodologies to display dividend yield. Some platforms use Dividend Yield, which is the dividend annualized based on the current or latest dividend divided by the stock price; some platforms use Dividend Yield TTM, which is the actual dividends over the past 12 months divided by the current stock price. Therefore, for the same stock, the dividend yield seen on different platforms may vary. The above calculations are mainly to illustrate the magnitude of cash flow and adopt a rough calculation method based on the current dividend level annualized.)

For many funds with a biased asset allocation, the attraction of these stocks lies not only in the stock price, especially when the fund size reaches $1 million, $10 million, or even higher, dividends are no longer just “small change” but a very generous continuous cash flow. This is also the most easily overlooked difference between price mapping and the real asset path.

If a user holds actual stocks in a securities account, dividends can enter the asset portfolio through corporate actions and the brokerage account; if a user buys tokenized stocks, CFDs, or some kind of price mapping product, how dividends are reflected depends entirely on the product rules. Some products may reflect the economic effects of dividends through net asset value adjustments, price corrections, or other mechanisms, but this is not the same as receiving cash dividends in a shareholder account.

In addition to dividends, another easily overlooked difference is transferability. Many U.S. stock products on CEXs are essentially a kind of price exposure provided within the platform. Users can buy and sell, and can see profit and loss changes similar to U.S. stock prices, but these products usually do not support transferring positions to other brokerages or custody accounts. In other words, if a user wants to leave this platform, most of the time they can only sell first, withdraw the funds, and then buy again on another platform.

This is different from holdings in a real U.S. stock account. The reason real stocks can be transferred is because they have a clear securities account, custody relationship, and clearing and settlement chain. The assets are not just a string of accounting numbers existing within the platform but can migrate within compliant securities systems.

BIT supports off-chain transfers, and the core reason lies here: its US stock product is not simply price-pegged, but based on real US stock assets and the corresponding securities custody architecture. Therefore, users hold not just a price contract that can only be traded within the platform, but a US stock position with more complete asset attributes.

This difference may not be obvious during intraday trading, but it is crucial for long-term allocators. The larger the fund size and the longer the holding period, the more users need to care about one thing: whether this asset can leave the platform, enter another custody system, and be migrated and managed like a real securities asset. Naturally, the more comprehensive the rights, the higher the demands on the platform.

Behind the Scenes: BIT’s Specific Mechanism

According to BIT’s public information, its US stock business does not turn stocks into internal price contracts; instead, it enables users to access the US stock securities trading and clearing system through Matrix Gelephu and US licensed broker-dealers and clearing partners. BIT’s disclosed information mentions US broker-dealer/clearing partners like RQD Clearing, Atomic Vaults Securities, and also reveals the DTC off-chain transfer path.

When breaking down US stock trading into its specific operational mode, the most essential infrastructure is called DTCC. DTCC is not a name that ordinary users encounter daily, but almost every post-trade process of a US securities transaction cannot escape its subsidiary system. DTC is responsible for securities central custody. Simply put, US stocks do not physically move between buyers and sellers like paper certificates; instead, they are electronically transferred within the DTC system. According to DTCC’s June 2025 disclosure, DTC’s custodied assets have exceeded $100 trillion.

NSCC handles clearing. It processes a large number of broker-to-broker trades for stocks, ETFs, corporate bonds, municipal bonds, ADRs, and more. DTCC’s 2024 annual report shows that NSCC processes an average daily transaction value of $22.19 trillion. More importantly, NSCC uses multilateral netting to compress a large number of buy and sell orders in the market into fewer cash and securities settlement obligations. DTCC itself discloses that NSCC can reduce approximately 98% of the payment amounts that need to be exchanged daily.

At the core of this mechanism is CCP novation. Originally, a trade involved the buyer and seller bearing each other’s counterparty risk: the buyer worried that the seller wouldn’t deliver the stock, and the seller worried that the buyer wouldn’t pay. When entering the NSCC’s central clearing system, the NSCC becomes the central counterparty, and the legal relationship shifts from “buyer to seller” to “buyer to NSCC, NSCC to seller”. In other words, the NSCC stands in the middle, transforming countless bilateral credit risks in the market into more standardized, manageable clearing risks.

This is why the U.S. stock market can accommodate such a huge trading volume.

The OCC is mainly responsible for clearing options and other derivative products, while the FICC is responsible for clearing fixed-income products such as U.S. Treasuries, corporate bonds, and MBS. For regular stock trading, users may not directly perceive the OCC and FICC, but together they form the backend infrastructure of the U.S. capital market. The frontend is a buy button, but behind the scenes is actually a well-defined set of financial machinery.

For crypto platforms, entering this system is like learning a new language. What crypto platforms are familiar with are wallets, order matching, on-chain addresses, perpetual contracts, funding rates, and on-platform accounting; whereas what the U.S. stock market is familiar with are broker-dealers, clearing brokers, DTC, NSCC, SIPC, account structures, corporate actions, and settlement.

Both systems deal with assets and transactions, but their underlying logics are different. The former is more like a real-time ledger, while the latter is more like a property rights system built on law, accounts, and intermediary institutions.

Therefore, the real challenge of accessing the true U.S. stock market is not “whether there is market data” or “whether a buy button can be created”, but how platforms integrate with the broker and clearing systems.

In the traditional securities market, there are several models through which brokerage firms can access clearing. The first is self-clearing, where the broker becomes a clearing member and handles the post-trade process themselves, requiring significant capital, system, compliance, and risk management capabilities. The second is fully disclosed introducing broker, where the introducing broker handles the client and frontend, while the clearing broker opens a disclosed account for each client, handling custody and clearing. The third is omnibus introducing broker, where the platform or introducing broker uses an omnibus account structure at the clearing broker, with the underlying customer records maintained by the introducing party. The fourth is DVP/RVP, which stands for delivery versus payment / receive versus payment, more commonly used for securities settlement arrangements between institutional clients and custodian banks.

For a crypto-native platform, direct self-clearing is usually not the most realistic first step. A more feasible path is to leverage the mature brokerages and clearing infrastructure of the U.S. securities market to connect user onboarding, securities accounts, trade execution, and custody of settlements. In other words, it’s not about creating a new U.S. stock market from scratch; it’s about integrating crypto users into the existing financial rails of the U.S. stock market.

That’s why, in the current phase where trading platforms collectively handle “U.S. stock flow,” compliance and clearing have actually become the most critical parts.

For the average user, the specific mechanisms behind these “stages” may not necessarily be perceived. What users first see is still whether they can buy, how fast the transactions settle, how much the fees are, and how user-friendly the app is. However, as U.S. stocks transition from short-term trading targets to long-term asset allocation, the legitimacy of the mechanisms becomes important.

Because when holding a stock for the long term, users care not only about how much it has gained today but also about whether it is genuinely their asset, how dividends and corporate actions are handled, where the securities account is located, who handles custody and settlement, and what mechanisms can be relied upon in extreme cases to protect the assets.

This is also the core consideration of BIT in its U.S. stock products: it genuinely wants U.S. stocks to be part of a crypto user’s asset allocation, rather than another price game for leveraging gains and losses.

From Matrixport to BIT: The “Genetic Continuity”

“When we were still preparing the product at the end of last year, we made a very firm decision. This decision actually stems from the company’s 7-year-old DNA of serving institutions and high-net-worth clients, originating from a values-driven long-termism.”

As Elio Cui, Head of BIT Brokerage Business, mentioned at a recent roundtable meeting, BIT’s choice of this product line is intimately linked to its past company DNA. If you only look at this year’s launch of the U.S. stock business, BIT could easily be misunderstood as a new platform that suddenly entered the consumer market. But if you extend the timeline a bit, the logic becomes much clearer. BIT is the new brand after the Matrixport rebrand, and Matrixport has been serving institutions and high-net-worth clients since 2019, covering businesses in custody, trading, asset and wealth management, liquidity and financing, RWA, and other areas.

Currently, BIT manages over $6 billion in assets, with a monthly trading volume exceeding $7 billion, a cumulative interest paid to customers of over $2 billion, a valuation exceeding $10 billion, and has been selected for the “2024 Hurun Global Unicorn List” and “2025 Singapore Fintech Unicorn List.”

What is more well-known is that BIT’s co-founder and chairman is Wu Jihan, who is also the CEO and chairman of Bitdeer.

BIT is not a typical high-traffic trading platform. In the past, its clients were more institutions, professional investors, and high-net-worth individuals. This type of client often has different product requirements from retail traders. They are certainly concerned about returns, but more concerned about where the assets are, who is custodying them, how risks are mitigated, who the counterparty is, whether the account structure is clear, and if compliance boundaries can be clearly articulated.

Larger clients are not easily swayed by the phrase “high returns.” What they care more about is whether they can trace back in case of issues, confirm asset ownership, and have the underlying processes explained. For them, being slower is not a disadvantage. Many times, being slow is part of risk control itself. This is the product philosophy behind BIT’s U.S. stock business.

If a company’s DNA is in matching, leverage, traffic, and trading activity, when entering the U.S. stock market, it will naturally choose a lighter path: turning U.S. stocks into a price product that can be quickly traded. This makes it more like a trading platform and also easier to generate short-term trading volume.

But if a company’s strength comes more from institutional financial services, when entering the U.S. stock market, it will consider not only “how to get users to trade” but also “in what way this asset should be held.”

There is no absolute right or wrong between these two ways of thinking; they just cater to different service demands. Trading-oriented users want speed, volatility, and liquidity. Allocation-oriented users want clarity, stability, and certainty in the asset chain.

U.S. stocks are particularly suitable for understanding from this perspective. The equity of U.S. listed companies is an asset composed of company profits, cash flow, governance structure, and shareholder equity. For long-term allocators, buying a stock is not just about today and tomorrow’s price movements but about buying a part of the value this company will create in the future.

In the crypto market, platforms are adept at trading all assets. BTC can be traded, ETH can be traded, gold, U.S. stocks, indices, and macro events can also be traded. This ability is strong, as it allows global funds to quickly access various asset prices. But it also has a side effect: prices are amplified, and rights are weakened. What BIT wants to do is bring back this notion of rights.

This also explains why their U.S. stock business focuses on “real holdings,” “shareholder equity,” and “direct connection to brokers.” It is not about creating another high-volatility trading venue but about allowing stablecoin users to smoothly enter the traditional market with the most sophisticated and mainstream type of asset.

Slow is fast.

In the crypto industry, fast is usually considered a virtue. A new narrative emerges, and the platform needs to be fast; a new asset is trending, and the listing needs to be fast; users want quick access and exit, while the market rewards speed, volatility, and responsiveness. Hundredfold, thousandfold, ten-thousandfold, being fast, accurate, and fierce is the most familiar language in this industry.

Therefore, when a crypto platform claims to provide real U.S. stocks, real securities accounts, and a real clearing system, it doesn’t sound as exciting.

For a crypto platform, the fastest approach is, of course, to establish a price gateway. By integrating U.S. stock prices, creating trading pairs, tokens, or contracts, the product can be quickly launched. Users are already accustomed to spot trading, perpetual futures, leverage, funding rates, and 24/7 trading on exchanges; this path is naturally convenient and is also the easiest way to generate volume quickly.

However, financial products ultimately need to focus on user experience, especially during critical moments. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the night of SpaceX’s IPO is a good example. When a popular IPO is imminent, many platforms have lively pre-launch promotions, and users invest their time, attention, and even funds while awaiting the results. But if they ultimately don’t receive any shares and only get a refund, users not only lose the opportunity to subscribe but also incur a time cost and opportunity cost for the period they waited. The market does not pause because users are waiting; the real trading window is often only open for a few hours.

That is why stability, reliability, and executability are more important than merely appearing fast. Compared to the grand hype of promoting IPO participation but ultimately disappointing investors, BIT’s approach is more like steadily giving users a reliable opportunity. On the night of SpaceX’s IPO, the BIT system ran smoothly, allowing users to participate in pre-market and regular trading through a real U.S. stock trading gateway; many investors who bought in pre-market were able to seize the opportunity brought by the first-day price discovery.

In an industry that advocates speed, slowing down to develop account systems, clearing processes, custody solutions, compliance, and a path for real assets may not seem as glamorous. However, many truly important aspects of finance are not achieved through posters and promotional slogans but are demonstrated in the details of whether orders can be executed, assets can be confirmed, systems can withstand pressure, and users can genuinely participate in the market during the window period.

The larger the capital, the more it cares about more than just speed; the longer the investment horizon, the more it cares about more than just ROI screenshots. Institutions and high-net-worth clients are genuinely concerned about where the assets are held, how rights are confirmed, how risks are isolated, and whether issues can be traced back.

This may be the true path that the BIT US Stock Business wants to convey: not to create a US stock price gateway in the fastest way possible, but to bring stablecoin users into the real US stock asset system in a more solid way. Slow is fast.

Disclaimer: This material is for general information and market education purposes only, does not constitute investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any security, product, platform, or service. Investing in US stocks involves risks such as market, liquidity, custody, clearing, and settlement risks. Investors should assess their own situation carefully and seek professional advice when necessary.

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