Gate’s new money app empowers users to hold, trade, and spend any assets on one platform.
At TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Gate unveiled Gate Money, one of its largest brand upgrades in its 13 years. Under a single line, One Gate, Everything Money, the platform now brings cash, crypto, gold, stocks, and more into one place. Users can hold, trade, and spend them there.
The company’s founder did not set out to build a money app. In 2013, Lin Han was a researcher in optical physics in Canada when he lost 100 bitcoin to a scam on an online forum. “My first instinct as an engineer was that this was a solvable problem,” he says. “If there was a place where two parties could settle a trade securely, that would not happen.”
He wrote the first version of Gate himself, and for its first year or two handled virtually all of the development alone. Thirteen years on, Gate serves more than 61 million users in more than 130 countries and regions, and holds licenses including Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) authorization in the European Union and a Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) license in Dubai.
Han is now steering the company toward a larger ambition: A single money app where people can hold, trade, spend, and earn on everything they own. He spoke with Fortune about the thinking behind the shift.
Beyond the exchange
Gate began as a place to trade bitcoin. It became very good at it. CoinGecko’s Q2 2026 market report placed Gate among the top three spot exchanges globally, with perpetual futures trading volume in the global top five.
But an exchange, however large, serves the people who already trade. Han’s view is that some people never will. “Our users number in the tens of millions. The number of people who manage money every day is in the billions,” he says. “The exchange was the first product. It was never the whole idea.”
The shift, he argues, is not away from the exchange but on top of it. Every conversion inside Gate Money runs through the same liquidity that handles the platform’s trading. “A platform that cannot perform in the market it knows best has no credibility pursuing a second act,” he says. “We earned the right to do this.”
“A platform that cannot perform in the market it knows best has no credibility pursuing a second act,” he says.
One Gate, Everything Money
Gate Money reorganizes the platform around one idea: A person’s money should live in one place, whatever form it takes. “People think of their money as one thing,” says Han. “They should not have to split it across five apps because it takes five forms.”
Traditional finance keeps brokerage, banking, and payments on separate rails. A crypto-native account, built on unified balances and 24/7 settlement, can bring them together. Gate Money opens with a single view of a user’s fiat and crypto balances, with deposits, transfers, payments, and recent activity in one place.
What sets Gate Money apart is how quickly that idea becomes a real account. Users in eligible regions can open a global bank account in their own name with one click, entirely online. Gate plans to expand the service to more markets, including Europe, Australia, and Dubai, with support for receiving payments in more than 60 local currencies. Because the account is in the user’s own name, money comes in and goes out under their name, without routing through a shared account or a reference code.
Alongside cash, the platform holds more than 5,300 digital assets, gold, and more than 12,800 stock assets, and Gate Convert lets users move between them at any time. For Han, that range matters most when markets turn. “Once tokenized gold and stocks came onto the platform, users gained far more choices in how to allocate,” he says. “That is what a money app should do. Give you options, not opinions.”
Gate Money also changes how users’ spending behaviors via Gate card. Most crypto cards let you pay with crypto. Gate Money lets you pay with whatever you hold: crypto, fiat, tokenized gold, or stocks. Buy a coffee with your shares. Cover dinner with gold. Anywhere Visa is accepted, your whole portfolio is spendable. That shifts how people think about saving. Users no longer need to park large amounts of cash for a rainy day, because every asset they own can be spent the moment they need it. More of their money can stay invested in assets built to grow. Gate Money also supports scan-to-pay through local payment QR codes in selected countries and regions.
“Nobody should sell their stocks to buy a coffee, and nobody should hold extra cash just in case. If every asset can be spent, your money can keep working and grow at the same time,” Han says.
Through Gate Earn, idle balances can be put to work without leaving the platform. Holding, converting, earning, and spending all run through the same account.
Trust and the next five years
Holding people’s money raises the bar on trust. Beyond MiCA and VARA, Gate holds a payment institution license in Malta under the EU’s PSD2 rules and state-level licenses covering 47 U.S. jurisdictions (37 US state money transmitter licenses and 10 no-action letters), and in 2020 became one of the first exchanges to publish proof of reserves. “Trust is not a feature you launch,” Dr. Han says. “It is thirteen years of not losing people’s money.”
Over the next five years, Han expects tokenization to keep bringing traditional assets on-chain. “If anything can be tokenized, we can let people trade on our platform,” he says. He also expects AI agents to change how people use their money; his goal is for a user to state an intention in a single sentence and have it executed in under a second.
“We built a gate for traders. Now we are opening it for everyone,” he says.
Note: This content was created by Gate.