Market Backdrop
The first half of 2026 was one of the most demanding cycles the industry has faced since the launch of the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs. Bitcoin declined roughly 33% over the period from its January opening above $87,000, Ether fell 50%, and spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $5.4 billion in net outflows — the first net-negative half since ETF launch. Aggregate spot volumes cooled across the top-ten centralized exchanges, on-chain perpetual venues absorbed a rising share of derivatives flow, and CertiK's H1 2026 CEX review captured the mood in one line: "volume cools, balance sheets decide."
Against this backdrop, BitMart's operating priorities in H1 2026 were deliberately not about chasing headline volume. They were about strengthening the underlying platform — asset supply, product breadth, security posture, and regulatory footprint — so that BitMart is positioned to lead when the cycle turns. This report summarizes that work and, in the spirit of transparency our users expect, discusses the market environment plainly rather than around it.
2026 also marks BitMart's eighth anniversary. Eight years is long enough to have operated through multiple cycles; the discipline built in cycles like this one is what separates durable platforms from temporary ones.
"H1 2026 was a market that punished platforms optimizing for the last cycle and rewarded platforms building for the next one. Our numbers reflect that choice. Asset-management AUM grew approximately 256% while Bitcoin fell roughly 33% — that gap is not a market gift, it is a product outcome. Among Prediction Market users, 44% were new to BitMart, making it one of the clearest new-user acquisition signals from a category we did not offer six months ago. Our App Store rating moved from 4.33 to 4.90 because we invested in the parts of the platform that compound quietly. BitMart is eight years old this year. We intend to be here for the next eight, and we are building accordingly."
— Nathan Chow, Chief Executive Officer, BitMart
H1 2026 at a Glance
- Spot listings: 495 new assets, bringing supported spot assets above 1,900; 46 primary listings (~9% of the period's listings).
- Futures listings: 492 new perpetual futures pairs added, up 203.7% period-over-period.
- TradFi expansion: 197 TradFi-linked assets listed — nearly 40% of new listings for the period — spanning stocks, indices, ETFs, precious metals, forex, and commodities.
- Asset Management AUM: grew approximately 256% period-over-period despite Bitcoin's ~33% drawdown — a measure of platform stickiness independent of market direction.
- Payments & fiat: card issuance and transaction volume up 150% and 300% respectively; on/off-ramp coverage across 120+ countries; global transfer service now supports 20 fiat currencies.
- Prediction Market: launched in H1 2026; excluding continuous crypto price prediction, the product covered 2,000+ events, with 1,500+ traded; ~44% of Prediction Market users were new trading users on BitMart.
- App Store rating: 4.33 → 4.90; Google Play positive review rate 88% → 95.8%.
- Compliance milestones: Australian licensed entity established; European market expansion partnership with Zero Hash.
Trading: Broadening the Asset Universe
Trading remains the platform's core, but in H1 2026 the more important story was the composition of tradable assets rather than raw pair count. BitMart's H1 listings moved decisively in two directions: (1) toward tokenized traditional finance, and (2) toward high-conviction, primary-market opportunities that are hard to find elsewhere. Together these positioned BitMart to serve users whose needs no longer stop at spot crypto.
Spot: Curated Listings in a Selective Market
BitMart listed 495 new assets in H1 2026, bringing supported spot assets above 1,900. Coverage spans MEME, AI, RWA, DePIN, GameFi, and TradFi. Forty-six were primary listings, representing approximately 9% of listings in the period.
In a half where risk appetite was compressed and asset performance was highly dispersed, selection mattered more than count. Of the newly listed assets, 348 recorded gains of more than 100% and 28 rose more than 500% during the period — evidence that BitMart's listing process was identifying momentum where it existed rather than diluting the book with low-quality supply. That selectivity, not the headline listing number, is the durable competitive edge.
TradFi Zone: A Bridge Into Tokenized Traditional Markets
BitMart officially launched the TradFi Zone and TradFi aggregation page in H1 2026, unifying stocks, indices, ETFs, precious metals, forex, and commodities in a single interface. 197 TradFi-linked assets — nearly 40% of all new listings during the period — were added. This ratio is a strategic signal: BitMart is deliberately shifting the mix of what it lists to reflect where user demand is heading.
The move sits inside a broader industry trend. Tokenized-equity infrastructure took a meaningful step forward in H1 2026 with DTCC's production testing of tokenized Russell 1000 equities and Treasuries alongside BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Circle, Ondo, and Ripple. Peer venues have moved in parallel — Bitget's Onchain product surpassed $17 billion cumulative in tokenized stock-futures volume as of year-end 2025, and Ondo Global Markets launched 100+ tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs. BitMart's TradFi Zone is our positioning in that same competitive lane, purpose-built for a user base that increasingly wants global equity, commodity, and FX exposure inside the same account they use for crypto.
IPOPrime: Access to Scarce Primary-Market Opportunities
IPOPrime is designed to connect digital-asset users with high-quality pre-IPO opportunities sourced through Wall Street investment-bank and primary-market channels. It addresses a real market gap: retail participation in late-stage private rounds has historically been closed to almost everyone.
The first IPOPrime project, SpaceX, drew 38,013 subscribers and total subscription volume exceeding 10.57 million USDT. Beyond the specific numbers, the launch demonstrated three capabilities that are difficult to replicate: primary-market sourcing, structured product issuance, and global user reach converging on a single deal.
Futures: Depth, Not Just Breadth
BitMart added 492 new perpetual futures pairs in H1 2026, up 203.7% period-over-period — a listing pace consistent with the top tier of derivatives venues, though pair count alone is not the point. Two experience upgrades were the more meaningful shifts:
- Take-Profit / Stop-Loss 2.0 — Order entry, position management, and risk controls were rebuilt to bring TP/SL flexibility and clarity in line with the leading global venues, giving users better tools to navigate the kind of volatility this half delivered.
- Cross-currency margin — Multiple assets can now be aggregated as margin, reducing conversion friction and lowering forced-liquidation risk for users holding diversified portfolios. This is the feature set professional traders expect and is a prerequisite for capturing more institutional and prosumer flow.
The derivative landscape itself is shifting. On-chain perpetuals — led by Hyperliquid, whose share of on-chain perp volume climbed above 44% and whose 30-day volume topped $180-250 billion in H1 2026 — have taken meaningful shares from the smaller and mid-tier CEX venues. BitMart's response is not to compete on leverage or listings alone, but to compound experience, risk tooling, and asset breadth so that users who want everything in one account continue to find that account here.
Building a One-Stop Digital Asset Platform
Beyond spot and futures, H1 2026 was a build-out half across asset management, payments, prediction markets, and the Web3 ecosystem. These lines are what convert a trading venue into an integrated digital-asset platform — and, importantly, they generate engagement and revenue that are structurally less correlated to BTC's daily price.
Asset Management: AUM Growth Decoupled from Price
Bitcoin fell approximately 33% in H1 2026. BitMart's asset-management AUM grew approximately 256% over the same period. That divergence is the most important data point in this report: it is direct evidence that users are choosing to keep and deploy assets on BitMart on the merits of the products, not because the market environment is doing the work.
The half saw an integrated upgrade of BitMart's smart asset-management stack: a refreshed wealth product suite, the launch of lending, the rollout of BMRUSD as a yield-bearing RWA stablecoin, and a redesigned Wealth Management page. Fixed-term wealth products doubled in scale, stablecoin AUM grew nearly 90%, and the average lock-up period extended nearly 5x — a significant increase in duration commitment that speaks to product-market fit more clearly than AUM growth alone.
BMRUSD is BitMart's entry into the yield-bearing stablecoin / tokenized-cash category — the segment that connects stablecoin infrastructure to RWA yield. That category is the connective tissue of two of the largest 2026 narratives; it is worth building out prominently. Total RWA on-chain value (excluding stablecoins) sits in the roughly $25-37 billion range at mid-2026 per industry trackers, with BlackRock BUIDL, Ondo OUSG/USDY, and similar products defining the leadership tier. BMRUSD is BitMart's contribution to that market for a retail and prosumer audience that has previously been priced out.
Payments and Fiat Network: Higher-Frequency Utility
Payments and fiat continued to expand from trading and holding into everyday use.
- BitMart Card: physical issuance up 150% and transaction volume up 300% period-over-period, with total issuance at a record high.
- Fiat on/off-ramp: coverage extended past 120 countries and regions, transaction volume up 60%, and completed orders above 15,000.
- P2P: cumulative trading volume of 39.2 million USDT, up 16.8% period-over-period.
- BitMart Mall and BitMart Pay scan-to-pay: officially launched, laying the foundation for offline merchant and regional payment expansion.
- Global transfer: now supports 20 fiat currencies including EUR, GBP, USD, BRL, VND, THB, SGD, HKD, CAD, AUD, and AED — enabling instant crypto-to-fiat transfers between users, family, and friends.
These are not marketing lines. In the sector, stablecoin-plus-payments has become one of the clearest post-trading revenue vectors — stablecoin daily transaction volume ran near $3.5 trillion in H1 2026, comfortably above Visa's daily volume. BitMart's payment and fiat build-out is our route into that flow.
Prediction Market: The Fastest-Scaling New Category in Crypto
BitMart launched Prediction Market in H1 2026, expanding user participation from crypto price trading into event-driven markets across sports, crypto, financial events, and global trends.
The scale of the launch — and its role as a new-user acquisition channel — was one of the standout results of the half:
- Covered 2,000+ events, with 1,500+ traded, excluding continuous crypto price prediction markets.
- June trading volume grew 1,500%+ month-over-month on the back of FIFA-related event flow; trading users rose approximately 460% and order count approximately 890%.
- Approximately 44% of successful Prediction Market traders were new trading users on BitMart, making the product a clear acquisition channel in an environment where CAC across the industry has been climbing.
Context matters here. The FIFA World Cup 2026 has become a landmark liquidity event for the whole prediction-market category — combined Polymarket and Kalshi volume on the outright winner market alone exceeded $5 billion by early July 2026. Coinbase disclosed prediction markets crossing $100 million+ in annualized revenue in its "Everything Exchange" strategy. Prediction Market has moved from novelty to a real product line for the major CEXs, and BitMart has entered the category at exactly the right cycle point.
Forward direction: expand market categories and event coverage, lower participation thresholds, and build a more real-time and interactive event-driven layer that connects user insight, market sentiment, and real-world events into an on-platform trading surface.
Web3 Ecosystem: The Wallet as a Financial Master Account
BitMart Wallet continued to develop against the positioning of a "Web3 financial master account." Built on an EOA self-custody architecture, the wallet now supports on-chain asset management, DEX trading, smart-money tracking, trading signals, and other decision-support tooling — allowing discovery, execution, and portfolio management within one platform.
Wallet expanded into two adjacent surfaces in H1:
- A prepaid wallet card allowing direct stablecoin spending at global Visa and Mastercard merchants.
- Prediction Market integration, extending event-driven trading into on-chain contexts.
Forward roadmap: social-login wallets, RWA, Perps, and wealth management inside the wallet — completing the wallet → consumption → investment loop and giving on-chain users a single surface for discovery and execution.
BMX Ecosystem: From Utility Token to Ecosystem Value Carrier
In H1 2026, BMX progressed toward a fuller ecosystem role.
- The BMX AMM market-making bot launched, deepening liquidity and expanding application scenarios.
- BM Chain — BitMart's public chain — completed its whitepaper planning and moved to the testnet stage.
- BMX Whitepaper 3.0 is scheduled for release to formalize an enhanced value-capture mechanism spanning exchange, wallet, payments, and on-chain ecosystem — pushing BMX from platform utility toward an ecosystem-wide value carrier.
Platform, Security, and Global Operations
The unglamorous work — user experience, security, and localization — is where a bear market is either won or lost. In H1 2026, BitMart invested against all three.
Full-Platform Experience Refresh
A unified visual and interaction upgrade shipped across Web and App: registration and login, homepage, search, and market data. Following the App homepage redesign, key functions became easier to reach. Following the Web navigation and homepage optimization, first-time deposit conversion improved by 7.3%. Global search now spans ten scenarios — coins, campaigns, Earn products, and more — helping users reach target functions faster.
Account Security and Asset Protection
- Passkey passwordless authentication was extended to login and withdrawals — improving both security and convenience.
- Identity reset introduced facial verification and automated review, compressing what were once manual multi-day processes to minutes.
- Deposit and withdrawal flows added contract-address display and mandatory MEMO reminders, reducing loss risk from incorrect transfers or user error at the source.
In a period when the industry's largest security event of the prior year (Bybit's $1.4B Lazarus Group incident) reshaped user expectations around exchange trust, these upgrades are table-stakes investments — done proactively rather than reactively.
Market Data and Content: Turning Information Into Acquisition
BitMart launched Price pages and News products with sitewide content infrastructure improvements. After launch, Google-indexed pages increased more than 10x, and daily traffic to Price pages grew nearly 10x — creating a durable, low-CAC organic acquisition channel and improving the discovery-to-trade path inside the platform.
AI in Platform Services
- AI-powered multilingual translation for campaigns, emails, and Help Center content improved multilingual content production efficiency by more than 100%, expanding localized experience for global users.
- AI-assisted customer support — automated review and issue analysis — accelerated resolution of high-frequency requests.
Combined, these investments show up in user-side sentiment. App Store rating rose from 4.33 to 4.90; Google Play positive review rate rose from 88% to 95.8%, with weekly review volume up 319%. These are the compounding indicators that a platform-quality flywheel is operating.
Global Brand, Compliance, and Long-Term Trust
Licensing and compliance moved from a supporting narrative in prior cycles to a headline metric in 2025-2026 exchange reports. BitMart's H1 2026 progression:
- United States — BitMart.US live via Zero Hash: BitMart.US has been operating in the U.S. since November 2025 through a partnership with Zero Hash, a federally and state-regulated digital-asset infrastructure provider. The structure lets us serve U.S. users compliantly from day one: settlement, custody, and money-transmission handled through Zero Hash's licensed footprint.
- Australia — Licensed entity established: Formal regulated presence in Australia is now in place, providing a foundation for compliant digital-asset services in one of the region's most active markets.
- Compliance infrastructure: Upgrades to customer due diligence, on-chain address monitoring, sanctions risk controls, and AML frameworks — strengthening BitMart's ability to identify, assess, and respond to risk.
The licensing race across peers has accelerated — MiCA authorizations, ADGM, Hong Kong VATP and Stablecoin Ordinance, MAS tightening. Our H1 additions are steps within a multi-year strategy to be regulated everywhere our users are.
On the brand side, BitMart continued to strengthen its presence across key markets in H1 2026, reaching broader audiences while reinforcing trust with users and partners.
Its partnership with CryptoKnights, the world’s first reality-TV show focused on blockchain entrepreneurship, brought BitMart into a mainstream media format with distribution history across Prime Video, OSN, Roku, and Pluto TV. With CEO Nathan Chow joining the Season 2 judging panel, the partnership connects BitMart with founders, investors, and broader audiences, while giving the company a role in supporting early-stage Web3 projects.
Trust-building remained central to the brand strategy. BitMart’s partnership with Malwarebytes, a globally recognized cybersecurity company, adds an external cybersecurity partner to its user-protection efforts.
BitMart’s engagement with the next generation of Web3 talent continued through its official Internship Program, as well as visits and programs with Princeton University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and National Taiwan University. The company also remained active at major industry events, including Hong Kong Web3 Festival and Paris Blockchain Week 2026, where it connected with projects, partners, investors, and community users across the global Web3 ecosystem.
Themes We're Watching in H2 2026
The half ahead will be defined less by market direction than by structural shifts that are already underway. BitMart's product roadmap is organized around these:
- RWA and yield-bearing stablecoins — extending BMRUSD, deepening tokenized-cash integration, and expanding tokenized traditional-market coverage.
- Prediction markets as a durable category — moving from launch to leadership through event coverage, latency, and on-chain integration.
- On-chain / DEX convergence — the wallet-to-exchange loop, on-chain perps access, and unified account experience.
- Compliance and licensing depth — EU market activation, and progression in APAC regulated jurisdictions.
- Payments and stablecoin utility — expanding Card, Pay, and fiat-transfer scenarios into higher-frequency everyday use.
- AI-native platform experience — extending AI beyond translation and support into personalization, safety, and trading assistance.
Closing
H1 2026 was a demanding market. Bitcoin fell roughly 33%, ETF outflows set new records, and industry volumes cooled. In that environment, BitMart chose to build — to broaden asset supply, expand into TradFi and RWA, launch Prediction Market, deepen payments and fiat, and strengthen compliance infrastructure. The results — AUM up ~256%, average lock-up up nearly 5x, App Store rating at 4.90, 44% of Prediction Market users were new to BitMart, and a materially expanded regulatory footprint — are what long-term platform health looks like through a down cycle.
We are eight years into this business. The users, assets, and partners who chose BitMart in this half are the ones who define what the platform becomes in the next. We will continue to build with them at the center.
DISLAIMER:
The information provided is for informational purposes only and should not be considered a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any financial assets. All information is provided in good faith. However, we make no representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability or completeness of such information.
All crypto investments, including earnings, are highly speculative in nature and involve substantial risk of loss. Past, hypothetical, or simulated performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. The value of digital currencies can go up or down and there can be a substantial risk in buying, selling, holding, or trading digital currencies. You should carefully consider whether trading or holding digital currencies is suitable for you based on your personal investment objectives, financial circumstances, and risk tolerance. BitMart does not provide any investment, legal or tax advice.
