15% of Your Users Are Trading Somewhere Else
Every decade, a new asset class moves from niche to mainstream. Platforms that adapt quickly expand market share. Those that protect legacy models lose relevance. We saw this with the onset of crypto trading across asset classes, geographies and time zones as part of the first wave of digital assets.
We’re now in the second major wave with the global stablecoin surge, which will be followed by growth in onchain tokenized assets. Tokenized treasury products and credit instruments are already live. Onchain perpetual futures process billions in daily volume. Prediction markets and culturally driven assets go from idea to liquid market in days, sometimes hours. All of it is accessible 24/7.
As trading moves onchain across asset types, platforms that don’t quickly expand their offering risk losing users, wallet share, and relevance to those that do.
What Happens When Platforms Don’t Evolve? A Short History Lesson
1994–2000: “Nobody Wants to Trade Online”
In the 1990s, trading required phone calls, high fees, and limited access. When online trading platforms collapsed distribution costs, incumbents resisted. By the time the market shifted, much of the damage was already done.
Lesson: When access costs drop, scale wins.
2013–2019: “Commission-Free Trading Isn’t Sustainable”
Commission-free trading was dismissed as a gimmick, until it became the standard. By the time incumbents responded, entire businesses had been acquired or absorbed.
Lesson: When revenue models shift, response time matters more than certainty.
2020–2024: “Retail Doesn’t Belong in These Markets”
Private markets, prediction markets, and alternative assets were once considered inaccessible to retail users. Platforms that built early infrastructure captured demand the moment regulatory clarity arrived. Others had no way to compete.
Lesson: Regulation is not a durable moat in emerging markets.
2025: Onchain Trading Becomes the Default
Infrastructure complexity is no longer a barrier. Secure, scalable wallet infrastructure no longer requires custodial risk. Policy-based controls make compliance programmable. Asset enablement no longer depends on exchange listings or long custody integrations.
So what does this mean for the industry more broadly? Perpetual futures, prediction markets, and tokenized securities are all unlocked for retail trading; cross-chain assets are made available instantly; and global, 24/7 trading is turned on without waiting months for approvals.
We are already seeing billions in daily onchain derivatives volume, with prediction markets reaching multi-billion-dollar annual volumes and major retail platforms expanding rapidly into onchain assets and new trading surfaces. This is the new reality.
The Opportunity for Regional Trading Apps
If you operate a retail trading app, exchange, or fintech with a fixed asset catalog, your users are likely already trading elsewhere. When a new market opens, whether a prediction market, a new perpetual contract, or a tokenized asset, users don’t wait. They open a second app.
This is largely due to the structural problems with traditional models, which require custody decisions per asset, lengthy legal and operational reviews, chain-specific integrations, and slow reaction times to market demand.
Meanwhile, onchain-native platforms can enable new assets in days (or less). The result? Wallet-share erosion.
If we crunch some numbers on potential lost revenue, we can conservatively estimate that if 15% of your users trade elsewhere each month, you charge roughly $50 in monthly fees per user and have approximately 2 million active users, that’s $180M in annual revenue happening outside your platform.
And once users build habits elsewhere, they rarely come back. There is a window of opportunity for regional trading apps to get ahead and address this issue with embedded wallets.
The Embedded Wallets Advantage
Whether you’re holding billions or serving millions, wallets are the foundation for your digital asset strategy and engine for your business. You could consider wallets as the new application layer; they determine what digital asset products you can offer, how quickly you can launch them, and whether you’ll own customer relationships or depend on intermediaries. The institutions that recognize wallets as strategic will define their markets over the next decade.
Fireblocks provides complete wallet infrastructure spanning corporate treasury to consumer experiences, allowing you to securely hold, manage and optimize your funds, or serve millions of customers at scale. Embedded wallets provide seamless wallet experiences for consumer-facing applications, enabling businesses of all sizes to build an end-to-end product offering that captures market share among senders, receivers and FX. A simplified UX and abstracted-away complexity means companies can launch thousands of wallets in sub-seconds, enabling mass crypto adoption and winning back lost revenue.
For years, user experience and trust slowed crypto adoption. That friction is now gone.
Users no longer need to understand blockchains to trade onchain. With gasless transactions, abstracted cross-chain execution, and familiar, app-native experiences, onchain is becoming the new normal.
One Infrastructure Layer to Support Everything
Winning platforms are no longer negotiating listings one asset at a time, but rather building infrastructure that scales alongside market innovation.
With modern digital asset infrastructure, platforms can:
- Provision secure wallets for every user without taking custody risk
- Enforce compliance and transaction policies at the infrastructure layer
- Support multiple chains and asset classes through a single integration
- Enable new markets without rebuilding backend systems
Instead of pushing users to external platforms, you keep trading activity inside your ecosystem while maintaining control over UX, security, compliance, and monetization.
The next generation of retail trading leaders will be defined by how quickly they can support whatever users want to trade next. Is your infrastructure ready?
Learn more about Fireblocks Embedded Wallets powered by Dynamic, and discover how companies like Kraken and Lighter are able to reach and retain customers with digital assets at scale.
