Original Author: Bruce, Founder of MaiTong MSX

To every user, partner, and fellow traveler:

Hello everyone!

Today marks the one-year anniversary of MSX going live.

On April 15, 2025, MSX reached its initial product launch milestone. Although the time is not long, we have experienced and grown together in this year.

It’s important to know that a year ago, "on-chain US stocks" was just a distant concept for most people, or a narrative on social platforms. At that time, NASDAQ had not submitted an application for tokenized trading, the NYSE had not announced an on-chain settlement plan, and the DTCC's pilot program was still in the internal discussion stage.

With the community's support, we chose to step in first and create it.

For this reason, today, one year later, I want to use this letter to have an honest exchange with all the friends who have followed and supported MSX, to review the road we have traveled together, discuss the pitfalls we have encountered, validate our judgments, and share where we are preparing to take the next step.

I. What We Have Done in These 365 Days

All of MaiTong MSX's stories begin with the community.

In early 2025, we, along with community partners, embarked on a journey from a not-so-mainstream yet sufficiently determined judgment, traversing from the concept of "on-chain US stocks" to its implementation, from the product prototype to the first stage of validation.

To be frank, when the platform first launched, the product was quite rough. Whether it was the trading interface, asset types, or interaction details, each aspect had significant room for improvement. Yet, despite this, users chose to trust us, willing to give it a try and provide us with their genuine feedback. I deeply understand the weight of this trust, and the team is motivated by it as well.

Looking back now, we should be thankful for the initial decision: we did not stay in theory but instead let it run first, and then polished it through rounds of real user feedback.

This year, from the initial product concept to platform implementation, from the refinement of the earliest versions to continuous iterations and optimizations, from explaining to the market "what tokenized US stocks are" to starting to answer "why now and why it is worth participating seriously," there have been some significant moments on our journey:

• On April 15, 2025, the Beta version went live, marking the starting point from 0 to 1, with the first batch of users mostly coming from word-of-mouth in the community;
• On May 10, 2025, the on-chain US stock token market went live, allowing users to complete trading of US stock tokens with stablecoins on-chain;
• On July 16, 2025, the globally solicited Chinese name "MaiTong" was released, which was also a choice made after co-creation with the community;
• On August 11, 2025, the public testing of the perpetual contract for US stock tokens was launched, expanding the trading scenarios from spot to derivatives;
• On September 23, 2025, the platform completed a brand upgrade and switched to the top-level domain msx.com;
• On November 5, 2025, the M Bean incentive mechanism and S1积分赛季 went live, starting to build a user incentive and long-term value retention mechanism unique to the platform;
• On December 3, 2025, the platform's 24-hour trading volume surpassed $2 billion, setting a historical high;

Entering 2026, our pace has not slowed down:

• On February 11, 2026: the new official website msx.com went live, completing a systematic upgrade of product experience and visual language;
• On March 2, 2026, the Pre-IPO section went live, extending from secondary market US stock tokens to primary market share tokenization;
• On April 15, 2026, today, the platform's total trading volume officially surpassed $30 billion;

As I write this letter, there are already over 180,000 users trading on the platform. This number may not be large in the entire market, but for a platform that has just turned one year old, it represents 180,000 real choices, trust, and participation.

Every early user voted for us with their own judgment and actions when this track was not widely recognized. We are grateful for every user’s choice and are doing our utmost to create more opportunities for users and capture greater value amid the diminishing wealth effect on-chain. In Q1 of this year, MaiTong just delivered a stock selection report with 39 new stocks, 38 of which were profitable, with an average increase of 39%.

Of course, the past year has also been an extremely tumultuous year for the industry. We have encountered pitfalls, wrestled under multiple pressures and difficulties from the market, and have also wrestled with ourselves. Although it was not easy, the community's reactions surprised and touched us. Users repeatedly chose to stand up, using their genuine experiences to speak for us, continuing to move forward side by side with us.

Our shared experiences will become the moat of MSX today and ultimately become the most valuable asset of MSX.

If I were to summarize the most important gains of MSX over the past year, I think it is not merely a milestone, an exposure event, a version update, or even just the trading volume and user numbers themselves; rather, it is that our understanding of "on-chain US stocks" has become more specific.

We are increasingly convinced that the path of on-chain US stocks cannot be realized merely by hype. Users will not remain long-term just because of grand narratives; they will build trust in the platform gradually through smoother trading experiences, more attractive asset choices, lower friction in participation, and stable, clear, and predictable user experiences again and again.

And this answer sheet has never been written by us alone. It has been co-written by the platform, the team, the market, and the community.

II. A Bigger Picture: Where Are We with Tokenization of US Stocks?

Before discussing MSX's next steps, I want to take a step back and briefly share our observations on the entire track.

I believe many friends have a very intuitive feeling: a year ago, "tokenized US stocks" was still a concept that needed repeated explanation; today, the picture is completely different.

After all, in the past year, some of the most prominent names in the traditional financial world began to embrace this direction at an unprecedented speed:

• In June 2025, NASDAQ integrated blockchain technology into the Calypso system;
• In September 2025, NASDAQ submitted an application to the SEC for "tokenized" trading of stocks;
• In November 2025, NASDAQ clearly made tokenized US stocks a primary strategy, indicating it would "promote as quickly as possible";
• In December 2025, the SEC approved the DTCC to launch a pilot for stock tokenization;
• In December 2025, NASDAQ applied to extend trading hours to 5 days × 23 hours;
• In January 2026, the NYSE announced that it was developing a tokenized securities trading and on-chain settlement platform, intending to support 24/7 trading of US stocks and ETFs;
• In March 2026, NASDAQ partnered with Kraken to promote the tokenization process, planning to launch a stock token framework in 2027;
• In March 2026, the SEC officially approved NASDAQ to conduct a pilot for securities tokenization trading;

The historical trend is unstoppable.

A year ago, when we started doing this, many people asked, "Is it necessary to bring US stocks on-chain?"; now, when NASDAQ, NYSE, and DTCC are personally getting involved, this question no longer needs to be answered by us; the market is providing its judgment through action.

Fortunately, MSX was at the forefront of this epic transformation earlier. In the past year, we didn’t just stand by; we became core participants, personally experiencing the entire process of this direction moving from the fringe to the mainstream.

This understanding of the product, perception of user needs, exploration of compliance pathways, and building on-chain trading infrastructure have formed our most crucial accumulation in facing the next stage of competition, and the reason we can seize opportunities.

Of course, we do not naively believe that being a "first mover" itself is a moat. The real first-mover advantage does not lie in "being one year ahead in going live," but in the product understanding, user relationships, and operational capabilities accumulated during this period. The upcoming market will be more crowded and more mature, which is a great benefit for the industry and a higher-level validation for MSX.

In my view, if a track only has one player, it may indicate that the direction itself is still questionable; whereas when the most important trading infrastructures globally begin to move in this direction, it shows that the long-term value of this matter is being confirmed.

Our judgment has always remained unchanged. The tokenization of US stocks is not a short-term hotspot, but a structural migration of financial infrastructure. This process will not be completed overnight, but the direction is becoming increasingly clear.

MSX chooses to continue to dig deep in this track because we believe it represents a more efficient, more open, and more inclusive form of financial infrastructure.

III. From "US Stock Token Trading Platform" to "Blockchain Brokerage"

So, if in the past year, MSX primarily answered the question, "Can US stocks be tokenized," the next question we want to address is "How should it be done, and how deep should we go?"

Here, I want to share a positioning judgment that our team has been thinking about for a long time and has become increasingly clear: MSX's next step is not just to become a "US stock token trading platform," but to strive to become a genuinely meaningful "blockchain brokerage."

What's the difference?

The core action of a "US stock token trading platform" is to "wrap" US stocks into tokenized forms for on-chain trading. This is certainly valuable, but if it stops at this level, it feels more like just changing the front-end interface of existing financial products. Standing at today’s market phase, we believe this is not the most core or urgent proposition.

The logic of a "blockchain brokerage" is entirely different. It aims to solve not just "in what form to trade," but rather whether blockchain technology can reconstruct the underlying processes behind brokerage services, including deposit/withdrawal, clearing and settlement, asset custody, global account systems, and cross-border fund flows, among others.

To put it more bluntly, many pain points of traditional brokerages, such as high account opening thresholds, slow cross-border remittances, and overly long settlement chains and cycles, are not merely due to "stocks not being tokens," but because the underlying infrastructure is too outdated—T+1 or even T+2 settlement cycles, layers of nested intermediaries, and fragmented account systems across countries are the real structural barriers constraining global investors' participation in US stocks.

What blockchain can do is to rebuild these processes with a more efficient underlying infrastructure.

Just like the rise of internet brokerages, which did not change stocks themselves, but completely transformed how people access stocks: moving from offline service centers to online apps, lowering thresholds, improving efficiency, and expanding coverage radius.

The logic of a "blockchain brokerage" is similar; by leveraging tokenization and blockchain infrastructure, it allows the globally premier asset pool of US stocks to reach global users with lower friction—users can complete instant deposits and withdrawals with stablecoins, replace multi-layer intermediaries with on-chain clearing and settlement, enhance transparency in custody and settlement using smart contracts, and use a globally unified on-chain account system instead of fragmented brokerage accounts across countries.

Thus, this is not a simple story of "turning stocks into tokens," but a story of "reconstructing global brokerages with a new generation of infrastructure."

MSX’s next step is to work deeply along this direction.

Specifically, there are several key areas we will focus on.

First, products will continue to be the most core investment direction. As the team’s "product manager," I and my colleagues at MSX will continue to focus on optimizing trading experience, page efficiency, functional completeness, usability thresholds, and overall fluency, refining more details that impact user experience and making the product more user-friendly.

Second, asset supply will continue to be an important lever. We will expand the range of assets; whether it's popular individual stocks, thematic assets, or Pre-IPO shares, we are pushing some significant preparatory actions, and users will soon see that on-chain US stocks are not a single-point product but a whole set of asset participation methods taking shape.

Third, liquidity and trading depth will remain key areas of ongoing advancement. Whether on-chain US stocks can truly reach a broader market acceptance depends on more mature trading capacity. We will continue to invest resources in optimizing order flow and integrating liquidity to make the trading experience increasingly comparable to, and in some dimensions even superior to, traditional brokerages.

Fourth, content, research, and user communications will not decrease; instead, they will become more systematic. An emerging new track not only requires trading entrances, but also cognitive entrances. Over the past year, the content produced by the MSX Research Institute has been continuous, and the stock selection team has delivered impressive results to some extent. Community content like "US Stock Study" has built a good reputation among new users.

These efforts are not meant to create noise, but to help more users understand earlier: why on-chain US stocks are worth关注, what they are changing, and how they differ from the previous single trading logic. In the future, this part of work will be more systematic because we believe that truly vital platforms should not only provide trading scenarios but also help users establish judgment frameworks.

The market often likes to evaluate new things using very short time scales, but the truly important changes often do not happen at the busiest times; rather, they slowly materialize after the heat has passed, when people are still willing to keep polishing products, building infrastructure, and refining user experience.

MSX hopes to become such a platform.

In Conclusion

One year may not be long in any industry, but in the time scale of Crypto, it is sufficient for a lot to happen.

In the past 365 days, MSX has derived a product from a judgment, transitioned from a concept to an entry that creates value for users every day. We have validated the true demand for US stock tokens, established a basic compliance framework, and assembled a team that has experienced the entire process from 0 to 1.

This is our stage answer sheet—perhaps it cannot be perfect, but it is very real.

Finally, I want to sincerely thank the MaiTong community and every friend who has accompanied MSX through its first year. In this year, almost every day, users have brainstormed with us in the community, from function suggestions to UI critiques, from stock selection discussions to strategy sharing; every bit of growth for MaiTong is inseparable from your contributions.

MaiTong starts with the community; this is not just a pretty phrase, but a code ingrained in MSX's DNA.

Thank you to all users who have used, experienced, and provided feedback on the platform. Each click, each suggestion, each opinion from you is the basis for our continuous correction and progress.

Thank you to all partners, ecological peers, and industry friends. Many things have been able to continue to advance in the early stages due to mutual trust, support, and consensus.

Also, thanks to every colleague in the team. In the past year, we have worked together to find certainty amid uncertainty, invested hard work in new things, and truly translated many "directions" seen by others into product and execution step by step.

In the new year, we move forward together.

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