MEXC CEO Vugar Usi on Combo Trading, Prediction Markets, and the Future of Crypto Exchanges

1. What is MEXC’s approach to revolutionizing centralized prediction markets via MEXC Combo’s rollout?

Prediction markets have a structural problem, and most people in the industry know it. Everything trades as an isolated yes or no. If you think France is going to beat England, you buy one contract. You also expect Bitcoin to break $70,000 that same day, and that becomes a second position in a second market with separate capital behind it. 

Nobody thinks in single events, which is why the format never kept up with how traders read the world. 

Combo is our answer. You put up to 20 predictions into one order, sports and crypto together, and you see the full cost and the combined price before you commit. 

The timing of our launch was no accident either. The World Cup starts two days after it, and contracts on the tournament winner alone crossed two billion dollars before the opening match. 

The traders behind that volume have views on the final, on the group stage, and usually on what Bitcoin does while it all plays out. So I’d argue the demand existed years before the product did. People had these combined views the whole time; they just had nowhere to put them.

2. Which exclusive revenue flows can define the next chapter of centralized cryptocurrency exchanges beyond transfer fees?

Fees are a dying business, and we helped kill them. MEXC trades at true zero fees, which alone saved our users more than a billion dollars last year, and the rest of the market will end up at zero eventually. So if the trade itself earns nothing, the business has to come from everything built around it.

Prediction markets are the clearest example. Robinhood already calls them one of its fastest-growing revenue lines, and sportsbooks proved long ago that combination products carry the real economics (in New Jersey, parlays produce around 70 percent of gross revenue from roughly a third of the volume). 

The same pattern shows up with traditional assets. We listed more than a hundred tokenized stocks this year, and our futures on gold, oil, and other traditional markets grew over 240% in a single quarter.

And to me, the exclusive part is the combination itself. A person on MEXC can hold Bitcoin, buy tokenized equities, and take a position on the next Fed decision without ever leaving one account. 

No sportsbook, broker, or standalone prediction platform offers all three. That person never needs a second app, and that, right there, is the business model.

3. Why are prediction markets getting wider focus among crypto exchanges and what is their role in expanding consumer interaction beyond trading?

The growth numbers explain most of it. Monthly volume on the two biggest prediction platforms went from under five billion dollars last September to about 24 billion in April, more than the entire US sportsbook industry handles in an average month.

Categories don’t grow like that quietly. Coinbase partnered its way in this January, Robinhood has cleared billions of event contracts since last year, and we launched MEXC Prediction Markets in March with zero fees.

But the bigger story is what these markets do to behavior. An event price reads as a live probability, so people open the app to check the odds on a Fed cut or tonight’s match the way they check a headline (except this one has real money behind it).

Some visits turn into trades, plenty don’t, and both matter to us. Someone who shows up for one election market often ends up placing their first crypto trade a month later.

4. What led to MEXC Combo’s development and how does it underscore a landmark development in multi-factor prediction trading?

Our users led us there, plain and simple. We launched MEXC Prediction Markets in March, and within weeks, we watched people build combinations by hand, one position on a match, another on a token price, a third on a macro event, minutes apart.

So the demand was never in question; the whole industry can see the appetite for combined positions. The real question was whether anyone could run that logic natively inside a centralized crypto exchange, with proper pricing and proper guardrails.

Combo settled that in June, and it made us the first centralized crypto exchange to run multi-event combination trading natively.

5. How does MEXC organize risk, payout structures, and liquidity when clients merge up to twenty prediction outcomes within one Combo trade?

We organize all three around one principle: nothing about a combo should surprise you after you’ve placed it. The full cost and the combined price show up before you commit, and what you pay is the most you can ever lose.

The payout side has one rule. If every prediction lands, the order settles at full value, so the less likely your combination, the cheaper it was to build and the more it returns. If a single prediction misses, the order pays nothing.

Risk controls run before the order even exists. The system blocks logically impossible combinations, and if pricing moves while you decide, you get a fresh confirmation prompt before anything executes (a combo built on a stale price helps nobody, least of all us).

And the 20-prediction ceiling is itself a risk decision. Liquidity has to stand behind every quote, so we cap complexity at a level the market can support.

6. What is the importance of integrating non-financial prediction classes such as macroeconomic events, elections, and sports into exchanges?

Those events were always on the exchange; they just traded invisibly. Bitcoin moves when a central bank speaks, a government changes, a war starts, and until this year, all of that reached our platform only as an echo in the chart. Event markets make the cause itself tradable.

That changes hedging for a regular trader. Say you hold Bitcoin and the Fed meets this week. You can buy the contract that pays out if rates move against you, so when the bad scenario lands, the payout covers part of the loss. All of it happens in one account, and before this, the toolkit was a stop-loss and a prayer.

Elections and sports also solve a problem every exchange knows well. Activity follows the crypto cycle, and in a bear market, volumes die for months. The real world doesn’t pause for that. There’s always a next match, a next election, a next rate decision, so event markets keep people on the platform through the stretches when charts give them no reason to show up.

And the signal itself has value. A probability with real capital behind it beats any poll, and an exchange that hosts those numbers becomes part of how the world reads itself.

7. What are the advantages of MEXC and other centralized exchanges over decentralized prediction entities when it comes to scaling wider multi-event markets?

A combo is one atomic order with up to 20 live prices inside it, and that’s exactly where centralized infrastructure earns its keep. All 20 legs need to be priced, confirmed, and executed as one unit, in milliseconds, or the product doesn’t work.

Try that on-chain, and the physics fight you. Every leg wants its own transaction, prices change between blocks, and capital fragments wallet by wallet. 

Then there’s the user side. Someone who arrives for the World Cup shouldn’t need a wallet tutorial and a bridge transaction before their first order. On MEXC, they deposit, they trade, and if something looks wrong at settlement, a support team answers.

And decentralized platforms deserve their due: self-custody and open settlement matter to plenty of traders (crypto needs that wing of the market to exist). But to bring multi-event trading to forty million users, you need a matching engine, real-time risk checks, and a help desk, and only a centralized venue has all three.

8. Which additional asset categories or classes could enter prediction markets other than crypto and sports?

Anything with a clean, verifiable outcome can become a market, so the real filter is settlement. A contract needs a referee, a date, and a yes or no that nobody can argue with.

Private companies are the most interesting new ground. You can already trade on whether a startup reaches an IPO or raises money at a higher valuation, and that gives the market its first real read on companies that disclose nothing. Attention markets come right after – contracts on whether a person or a brand grows or fades in the public eye.

Closer to home, macro data releases, AI milestones, and entertainment all settle cleanly, and we keep expanding the categories Combo can hold. The plan was never sports and crypto forever.

9. How does MEXC Combo streamline portfolio expression in comparison with the management of multiple separated prediction positions?

Start with the capital, because that’s where the difference shows first. Take two predictions priced at 50 cents each. Bought separately, they cost a dollar; combined, they cost around 25 cents and pay out a full dollar if both land. Same view, a quarter of the capital (and the gap only widens as you add legs).

Then there’s the management side. Five separate positions mean five markets to watch, five expiry dates, and five exit decisions. A combo is one order with one settlement; there is nothing to manage in between.

10. Do you think the crypto exchange will work more like a worldwide decision market entity instead of only a trading venue in the future?

I do, and this year proved it. We added event markets, tokenized stocks, and commodities to a platform people still call a crypto exchange.

Just look at where the big money is going – the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange put two billion dollars into a prediction platform last year, and that only happens once traditional finance accepts event probabilities as a real asset class.

The word worldwide is the harder part. A decision market only matters at global scale, and global scale runs on licenses, oversight, and trust in settlement. That’s why we made a full European license our top strategic priority; other regions follow from there.

So my answer is yes. The product side already proves it, and the licensing work is how we take it worldwide.