The FX/CFD industry is not moving toward one universal model. Instead, brokers are splitting into different strategic camps. Some are trying to defend their core FX and CFD base by adding adjacent products. Others are moving into listed derivatives, cash equities or crypto to capture a wider share of client activity. A third group is less focused on the end-client interface and more focused on infrastructure, liquidity, APIs and white-label distribution.
That fragmentation matters because “multi-asset” is no longer a product label. It is a business model choice. A broker that adds futures is making a different operational bet from one that adds spot crypto, fractional equities, thematic CFDs or long-term investment products. Each path requires different permissions, technology, liquidity relationships, risk controls, client education and brand positioning.
The result is a market where the strongest firms are not necessarily those with the broadest catalogues. They are the firms with the clearest logic behind expansion.
In the first part of this feature, Finance Feeds spoke with senior executives, founders and market specialists across the FX, CFD, fintech and brokerage infrastructure sectors to examine why brokers are broadening their product coverage and where that expansion is creating pressure.
The feature included insights from Jonathan Squires, CEO of Tapaas and former CEO of Capital.com, Currency.com and Skilling; Arthur Azizov, CEO and Founder of B2BROKER Group and B2BINPAY; Prakash Bhudia, Chief Growth Officer at Deriv; Iván Marchena, Senior Economist at Just2Trade; Deepak Shukla, Founder and CEO of Pearl Invest; Hai Nakash, Founder of Nax Capital; Adam Woodhead, Co-Founder of The Investors Centre; Richard Demeny, Founder and CTO at Canary Wharfian; and Kevin A. Thomas, CFA and Founder of Omniga.ai.
In the second part, Finance Feeds also looks at the issue from the other side of the market: crypto platforms that are now adding traditional assets to their core offering. While FX and CFD brokers are moving toward crypto, digital asset exchanges have been moving in the opposite direction, expanding into stocks, commodities, indices and other familiar market products to keep users inside their ecosystem.
Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, offers that perspective, showing how crypto-native firms are no longer just venues for digital assets, but as broader trading platforms competing for the same multi-asset client relationship.
Why Cross-Asset Trading Needs Unified Execution
Gracy Chen, who stands as one of the few women leading a top-10 global crypto exchange, says product expansion is being driven by how traders now react to macro events across several asset classes at once.
“The expansion is fundamentally driven by a shift in global trading behavior,” Chen told Finance Feeds, with investors looking to “move capital quickly across asset classes based on emerging macro opportunities.” Events such as Fed rate cuts now affect several markets at the same time, pushing traders toward “cross-market exposure.”
For Chen, this explains the rise of unified trading environments. Traders want access to multiple asset classes in one place so they can respond to “interconnected global markets without operational friction.”
Gracy Chen, CEO of BitgetShe argues that brokers should not add every product simply because demand appears to be rising. Instead, they should focus on liquid, familiar assets. “Brokers could prioritize highly liquid, well-understood financial assets such as US equities, money market funds, and major commodities like gold and silver,” Chen says. Gold CFDs, in particular, have become a major cross-asset product during periods of macro uncertainty.
By contrast, Chen warns against illiquid or complex assets with unclear rules, weak liquidity, or limited use cases. These products can expose retail traders to “outsized price swings.”
Operationally, the main challenge is liquidity outside traditional market hours. Chen says brokers need specialist venues to support 24/5 or 24/7 access when primary markets are closed. Tokenized assets add another layer of complexity, especially around corporate actions. Since tokenized equities do not directly distribute dividends, adjustments are usually reflected in pricing, which can create short-term gaps against the underlying asset.
To keep the interface clear, Chen sees AI tools as part of the answer. Brokers can use “AI trading assistants” to help users execute cross-market strategies through natural-language commands instead of complex menus. She also points to CFD copy trading as a way for retail users to follow professional strategies across global markets without learning every asset class in detail.
Chen says expansion can weaken a broker’s identity if the platform drifts too far from its core audience. For Bitget, that means staying focused on digital-asset trading even while adding access to traditional financial assets. The brand remains tied to trading, not banking. She says the value proposition is protected by using blockchain-based settlement where appropriate, keeping transactions faster and cheaper.
Education and tools also become more important as product coverage expands. Retail traders often lack the time to track macro signals across several markets, so AI-driven tools can turn fragmented information into usable insights. Copy trading, Chen adds, lowers the barrier further by giving users access to strategies run by experienced traders.
Looking ahead, Chen expects stronger demand for tokenized real-world assets and cross-asset CFDs. “Demand is accelerating rapidly for tokenized Real-World Assets and cross-asset CFDs,” she says. In early 2026, Bitget’s daily CFD trading volume reached $8 billion, driven largely by gold demand through XAUUSD.
She also sees rising interest in 24/7 access to tokenized US equities, including derivative products such as perpetual futures for global users who face friction opening standard brokerage accounts.
From a technology and liquidity standpoint, Chen says successful expansion depends on unified execution rather than fragmented modules. The stronger model links centralized account balances with decentralized liquidity routing at the execution layer, so capital can move across crypto, on-chain tokens, and traditional CFDs under the same risk and margin controls.
She adds that proper expansion into tokenized assets also depends on structured RWA partnerships. Integrations with providers such as Ondo and xStocks help ensure tokenized instruments are properly backed and accurately track their underlying economic exposure.
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Multi-Asset Expansion Became a Unit Economics Decision
Stanislav Galandzovskyi, an acquisition and growth specialist who has worked with brokers and prop firms including NAGA Group, says product expansion is no longer primarily a trading decision — it is a customer economics decision.
“Product expansion is fundamentally a retention economics decision,” Galandzovskyi says. The acquisition cost of a single-product FX trader is effectively the same as that of a multi-asset trader, but the revenue profile is very different. “A single-product FX client costs exactly the same to acquire as a multi-asset client,” he notes, “but stays active in the system two to three times shorter.”
Stanislav GalandzovskyiDrawing on ESMA and FCA reporting alongside public data from brokers such as IG, CMC Markets, and Plus500, Galandzovskyi says retail FX client tenure often falls between four and seven months, while brokers with broader product coverage can extend that relationship to twelve to eighteen months. In EU markets where funded-account acquisition costs can range from €500 to €1,500, he says, “a 50% reduction in lifetime value mathematically destroys unit economics.”
Market cycles also reinforce the problem. “When the VIX drops below 14 and volatility on major FX pairs compresses, client activity typically falls 30–40%,” he explains. Brokers without exposure to equities, indices, crypto, or commodities have little to offset that slowdown, leading traders to migrate elsewhere. “Clients migrate to platforms where something is always moving.”
On deciding which products deserve expansion, Galandzovskyi argues that most firms move too quickly and rely too heavily on competitor behaviour. “The market needs to be validated before a development ticket is opened,” he says, describing a process that begins with a simple fake-door test: a landing page, a waitlist, and one to two weeks of paid traffic.
The metrics determine whether the idea survives. “A CTR below 0.8% on the ad and a CPL more than 2.5 times the core product benchmark indicates weak demand,” he says. The second stage measures search demand in the target market, while the third mines support tickets for direct client requests. “Fewer than fifty instances means the demand exists as a product team hypothesis, not as a client signal.”
For Galandzovskyi, competitors are not a reliable guide. “The fact that a competitor has added something is not a market signal for your business,” he says. “It is a market signal for theirs.”
He also warns that expansion can easily dilute a broker’s identity if product growth outpaces brand clarity. According to him, only two brand models consistently work at scale. One is a focused identity with a broad catalogue, which he says IG represents through its long-standing “professional-grade trading” positioning. The other is a broad catalogue anchored around a defining experience, which he associates with eToro’s copy-trading ecosystem.
“The path to commoditization is a broad catalog without a clear brand,” Galandzovskyi says. In marketing terms, this eventually appears through “higher CPL, weaker brand recall, and permanent spread-based price competition.”
He suggests a practical test for brand discipline: review the last twenty paid campaigns. “If a single dominant product does not appear in at least 60% of impressions,” he says, “the brand is already diluted.”
Education, in his view, is not a supporting function but part of the product itself. “Without an education layer, a new product in the platform is a CTA button that no one clicks,” Galandzovskyi says. His rule is strict: if educational infrastructure is not ready at least four weeks before launch, “the launch is delayed.”
The impact is measurable. Clients who complete at least three educational touchpoints — such as an article, webinar, and in-platform tutorial — “convert to their first trade on a new product two to three times more frequently” and generate materially higher volume in the first month.
He argues that every product rollout should include SEO content, webinars, tooltips, curated watchlists, and event-based push notifications. “This is not a content marketing function,” he says. “It is a product investment.”
Looking ahead, Galandzovskyi believes timing-based access may matter more than asset class alone. Demand for weekend and overnight trading has risen sharply, with search volume and support requests for “24/5” and weekend trading increasing 40–60% year over year in his segment.
Among specific products, he sees continued demand growth in US single stocks, especially around AI companies, GLP-1 pharmaceutical firms, and defense names. Thematic baskets, he says, are also gaining traction because they reduce the need for retail traders to select individual instruments themselves.
Crypto CFDs remain cyclical rather than foundational. “They belong in the catalog without anchoring the brand to them,” Galandzovskyi says, pointing to how revenues surged during the 2021 crypto cycle before falling sharply afterward.
The category he expects to move most aggressively over the next two years is retail options. While ESMA leverage restrictions still create friction in Europe, “the pressure from US-educated retail traders is building,” he says, and the sector is likely to move from early adopters into the mainstream over the next eighteen to twenty-four months.
CFDs, Not US Options, May Be Blockchain’s Bigger Disruption Story
Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, CEO of Ostium, argues that the next major blockchain-led disruption in derivatives may not come from the US options market, but from CFDs.
“If I were to make one bet on what tradfi sector or vertical is going to be the most disrupted in the next couple of years by blockchain, it is the CFD industry,” Kiernan-Linn says. “It’s built on a very antiquated tech stack.”
Her argument is that CFDs remain the dominant retail derivative outside the US and India, but much of the sector still runs on legacy infrastructure. Incumbents such as IG, Plus500, and CMC Markets built large businesses around that model, yet on-chain perpetuals now offer features the traditional CFD structure struggles to match.
Perpetuals give traders 24/7 access, transparent funding, and composability. Kiernan-Linn sees those traits as a direct challenge to a CFD model still tied to older rails and closed infrastructure.
The timing matters. Ostium has begun extending this model into traditional markets, including a Nasdaq launch, which Kiernan-Linn views as a step toward broader global access through deeper liquidity and wider asset coverage.
Her view is clear: if on-chain derivatives can combine retail accessibility with traditional market exposure, the CFD industry becomes one of the most exposed parts of the existing brokerage stack.
