A Letter to the Community: The First Leg of MSX's Journey, and the Longer Road Ahead

Original Author: Bruce, Founder of Maitong MSX

To every user, partner, and fellow traveler:

Hello everyone!

Today marks exactly one year since MSX's launch.

On April 15, 2025, MSX reached its earliest product launch milestone. While this period may not seem long, we have experienced and grown together throughout this year.

It's important to remember that a year ago, "on-chain U.S. stocks" was still a distant concept for most people, or merely a narrative on social media platforms. Back then, Nasdaq had not yet submitted its tokenized trading application, the New York Stock Exchange had not announced its on-chain settlement plans, and DTCC's pilot program was still in the internal discussion phase.

Yet, with the support of our community, we chose to step in first and build it.

Precisely because of this, one year later, I want to use this letter to have a candid conversation with all friends who have followed and supported MSX. Let's look back on the path we've traveled, discuss the challenges we've faced, the judgments we've validated, and where we plan to take the next leg of this journey.

1. What Have We Done in These 365 Days?

All of Maitong MSX's story began with the community.

In early 2025, starting from a judgment that was not mainstream but sufficiently firm, we and our community partners embarked on the first leg of the journey for "on-chain U.S. stocks" — from conception to implementation, from product prototype to phased validation.

But frankly, when the platform first launched, the product was rough. Whether it was the trading interface, asset variety, or interaction details, every aspect had significant room for improvement. Yet, despite this, users chose to trust us, willing to try it out, use it, and then provide us with their most genuine feedback. I am deeply aware of the weight of this trust, and the team draws mutual encouragement from it.

Looking back now, we should be grateful for the initial decision: not to remain stuck in theoretical debates on paper, but to get it running first, and then refine it round by round based on feedback from real users.

This year, from the initial product conception to platform launch, from polishing the earliest versions to continuous iterative optimization, from explaining to the market "what are U.S. stock tokens" to beginning to answer "why now, and why is it worth serious participation," Maitong's journey forward has also seen some moments of great significance for us:

• April 15, 2025: Beta version launch. This was the starting point from 0 to 1, with the first batch of users mostly coming from community word-of-mouth.
• May 10, 2025: On-chain U.S. stock token market launch. Users could use stablecoins to complete the buying and selling of U.S. stock tokens on-chain.
• July 16, 2025: The globally solicited Chinese name "麦通 (Maitong)" was released, also a choice born from community co-creation.
• August 11, 2025: Public beta launch for U.S. stock token perpetual contracts, expanding trading scenarios from spot to derivatives.
• September 23, 2025: Platform completed a brand upgrade, adopting the global top-level domain msx.com.
• November 5, 2025: M Bean incentive mechanism and S1 points season launched, beginning to build the platform's own user incentive and long-term value capture mechanisms.
• December 3, 2025: Platform's 24-hour trading volume broke through $20 billion, reaching a historic high.

Entering 2026, our pace has not slowed down:

• February 11, 2026: The new official website msx.com launched, completing a systematic upgrade in product experience and visual language.
• March 2, 2026: Pre-IPO section launched, extending from secondary market U.S. stock tokens to primary market share tokenization.
• April 15, 2026: That is today, the platform's total trading volume officially surpassed $300 billion.

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

Every early user cast their vote for us with their own judgment and actions at a time when this track was not widely recognized. We are grateful for the choice of every user and are doing our utmost to help users create more opportunities and capture greater value against the backdrop of a weakening on-chain wealth effect. In Q1 this year, Maitong also just delivered a stock selection report card of 39 new listings, 38 with positive returns, and an average gain of 39%.

Of course, the past year has also been an extremely noisy one for the industry. We've faced challenges, persevered through multiple pressures and difficulties from the market, and pushed ourselves hard. While this hasn't been easy, the community's response has been somewhat surprising and touching. Users have repeatedly chosen to stand up, speak for us with their real experiences, and continue to walk alongside us.

Our shared experiences will become MSX's moat today and will ultimately become MSX's most valuable asset.

If I were to summarize the most important gain for MSX over the past year, I don't think it's just a particular milestone, a media exposure, a version update, or even just the trading volume and user numbers themselves. It's that our understanding of "on-chain U.S. stocks" has become more concrete.

We are increasingly convinced that the path of on-chain U.S. stocks cannot be paved by hype alone. Users won't stay long-term because of a grand narrative; they will gradually build trust in a platform because of smoother trading experiences, more attractive asset choices, lower-friction participation methods, and stable, clear, predictable usage experiences time and time again.

And this report card was never written by us alone. It was written together by the platform, the team, the market, and the community.

2. A Broader Picture: Where is U.S. Stock Tokenization Now?

Before discussing MSX's next steps, I'd like 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 U.S. stocks" was a concept that needed repeated explanation. One year later, the picture is completely different.

After all, over the past year, the most influential names in the traditional financial world have begun embracing this direction at an unprecedented pace:

• June 2025: Nasdaq's Calypso system integrated blockchain technology.
• September 2025: Nasdaq submitted a "tokenization" trading application for stocks to the SEC.
• November 2025: Nasdaq explicitly listed tokenized U.S. stocks as a top strategic priority, stating it would "advance at the fastest possible speed."
• December 2025: SEC approved DTCC to launch a stock tokenization pilot.
• December 2025: Nasdaq applied to extend trading hours to 5 days × 23 hours.
• January 2026: New York Stock Exchange announced it is developing a tokenized securities trading and on-chain settlement platform, planning to support 7×24 trading for U.S. stocks and ETFs.
• March 2026: Nasdaq partnered with Kraken to advance tokenization, planning to launch a stock token framework by 2027.
• March 2026: SEC formally approved Nasdaq to conduct a pilot for tokenized securities trading.

The tide of history is vast and mighty.

A year ago, when we started this endeavor, many people asked, "Is it necessary to put U.S. stocks on-chain?" One year later, when Nasdaq, NYSE, and DTCC are all personally entering the arena, this question no longer needs to be answered by us. The market is giving its own judgment through action.

Fortunately, MSX stood at the forefront of this epic transformation earlier. Over the past year, we were not bystanders but 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 paths, and building of on-chain trading infrastructure constitute our most important accumulation for facing the next stage of competition and the reason we can seize opportunities.

Of course, we are not naive enough to think that "first-mover" status itself is a moat. The real first-mover advantage lies not in "launching a year earlier than others," but in the product understanding, user relationships, and operational capabilities accumulated during this time. The market will become more crowded and more mature going forward. This is a great boon for the industry and also a higher-level validation for MSX.

In my view, if you are the only one working on a track, it might indicate the direction itself is still questionable. But when the world's most important trading infrastructures start moving in this direction, it precisely confirms the long-term value of this endeavor.

Our judgment has never changed. U.S. stock tokenization is not a short-term trend but a structural migration of financial infrastructure. This process won't happen overnight, but the direction is becoming increasingly clear.

MSX chooses to continue deepening its efforts on this track because we believe it represents a more efficient, open, and inclusive form of financial infrastructure.

3. From "U.S. Stock Token Trading Platform" to "Blockchain Brokerage"

So, if over the past year, MSX primarily answered the question "Can U.S. stocks be put on-chain?", then the question we want to answer next is "How should it be done, and how deeply?"

Here, I want to share a positioning judgment that our team has pondered for a long time and that is becoming increasingly clear: MSX's next leg is not just about being a "U.S. stock token trading platform," but striving to become a true "blockchain brokerage."

What's the difference?

The core action of a "U.S. stock token trading platform" is to "package" U.S. stocks into token form for on-chain trading. This certainly has value. But if we stop at this layer, it's more like putting a new front-end interface on existing financial products. At today's market stage, we believe this is not the most core nor the most urgent proposition.

The logic of a "blockchain brokerage" is completely different. What it aims to solve is not just "in what form to trade," but whether blockchain technology can be used to reconstruct the underlying processes behind brokerage business, including deposits/withdrawals, clearing/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 barriers, slow cross-border remittances, and overly long settlement chains and cycles, are not just because "stocks are not yet tokens." It's because the underlying infrastructure is too old. T+1 or even T+2 settlement cycles, multiple layers of nested intermediaries, and fragmented national account systems—these are the real structural barriers preventing global investors from participating in U.S. stocks.

And what blockchain can do is precisely to redo these processes with a more efficient infrastructure.

Just like the rise of internet brokerages back in the day didn't change the stocks themselves but completely changed how people accessed stocks: moving from offline branches to online apps, lowering barriers, improving efficiency, and expanding coverage.

The logic of a "blockchain brokerage" is the same. Leveraging tokenized forms and blockchain infrastructure, it allows the U.S. stock market—the world's highest-quality asset pool—to reach global users with lower friction. Users can use stablecoins for instant deposits/withdrawals, replace multi-layered intermediaries with on-chain clearing/settlement, enhance custody and settlement transparency with smart contracts, and replace fragmented national brokerage accounts with a unified global on-chain account system.

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

MSX's next leg is to deepen its efforts along this direction.

Specifically, there are several things we will focus on advancing.

First, product will remain the core area of investment. As the team's "product manager," I and the MSX team will continue to optimize trading experience, page efficiency, feature completeness, usage barriers, and overall smoothness at a deeper level, refining more details that affect user experience to make the product better.

Second, asset supply will continue to be an important lever. We will continue to expand the asset range. Whether it's popular individual stocks, thematic assets, or Pre-IPO shares, we are advancing some major preparatory actions. Soon, users will clearly see that on-chain U.S. stocks are not a single-point product but a whole set of asset participation methods taking shape.

Third, liquidity and trading depth remain key areas for continuous advancement. Whether on-chain U.S. stocks can truly move towards broader market acceptance depends on more mature trading capacity. We will continue to invest resources in optimizing order flow, integrating liquidity, etc., to make the trading experience increasingly close to, or even superior to traditional brokerages in certain dimensions.

Fourth, content, research, and user communication will not decrease; instead, they will become more systematic. A new track still in its early stages needs not just a trading gateway but also a cognitive gateway. Over the past year, MSX Research Institute has consistently produced content, and the stock selection team has delivered a quite impressive report card to some extent. Community content like "美股大学习 (U.S. Stocks Big Learning)" has built a good reputation among new users.

This work is not about creating noise but about helping more users understand earlier: why on-chain U.S. stocks are worth attention, what they are changing, and how they differ from past single-dimensional trading logic. In the future, this part of the work will become more systematic because we believe a truly viable platform should not only provide trading scenarios but also help users build a judgment framework.

The market often likes to examine new things on a very short time scale. But truly important changes often don't happen during the peak of hype. They slowly happen after the hype subsides, when people are still willing to refine the product, continue building the infrastructure, and pay attention to user experience details.

MSX hopes to be such a platform.

In Closing

One year is not long in any industry, but on the Crypto time scale, it's enough for many things to happen.

Over the past 365 days, MSX evolved from a judgment into a product, from a concept into an entry point that creates value for users every day. We validated the real demand for U.S. stock tokens, established a basic compliance framework, and built a team that has experienced the entire process from 0 to 1.

This is our phase report card—perhaps not perfect, but very real.

Finally, I want to sincerely thank the Maitong community and every friend who has accompanied MSX through its first year. Throughout this year, almost every day, users have engaged in "brainstorming" with us in community groups—from feature suggestions to UI critiques, from stock selection discussions to strategy sharing. Every bit of Maitong's growth is inseparable from your contributions.

Maitong originated from the community. This is not just a nice slogan; it's a code engraved in MSX's DNA.

Thank you to all users who have used, experienced, and provided feedback on the platform. Every click, every suggestion, every piece of feedback is the basis for our continuous correction and progress.

Thank you to all partners, ecosystem peers, and industry friends. The reason many things could keep moving forward in the early stages is inseparable from mutual trust, support, and consensus.

And thank you to every member of the team. Over the past year, we have searched for certainty amidst uncertainty, put in the hard work on new things, and truly implemented many of the "directions" others saw into products and execution, bit by bit.

Let's continue in the new year.