CoinW’s ninth anniversary: From crypto trading to an AI-driven financial ecosystem

Nine years in crypto feels like a lifetime. When global crypto platform CoinW launched in September 2017, the industry was still finding its feet: liquidity was fragmented, institutional participation was negligible, and most exchanges offered a fraction of the infrastructure traders now take for granted. Now, almost a full decade later, the crypto markets look unrecognizable in comparison.

And so do the exchanges that have successfully navigated the industry’s many shifts. CoinW is one such exchange, having expanded beyond basic spot trading and into derivatives, copy trading, Earn features, on-chain products, AI trading tools, and more. It now serves over 20 million registered users and processes more than $5 billion indaily trading volume.

In the midst of CoinW’s ninth anniversary campaign — dubbed “Will Be The 9ext” — we sat down with Chief Communications Officer Yoka Zhou for a retrospective on the platform’s evolution and, more importantly, a look at where both the platform and wider crypto industry is heading next.

The first challenge: Making sophisticated trading more accessible

Zhou believes that CoinW’s user activity offers some clues as to where the future of crypto lies. Today’s traders want access to traditional assets alongside their crypto assets; AI trading tools, once the preserve of the most technically proficient market participants, are seeing broader adoption; and the demand for trust and protection has risen markedly as more institutional investors enter the space.

For Zhou, those trends point toward an industry increasingly focused on strong infrastructure, intelligent trading tools, and ways to reduce the burden of navigating markets that never sleep.

Expanding the lineup of assets, markets, and sophisticated professional tools is one aspect. Today, however, Zhou asserts that the real challenge is making sophisticated markets accessible to everyday users without the need for professional-grade knowledge or expertise. In other words, leveraging technology to lower the barrier to entry.

CoinW’s On-Chain Smart Money product provides one example of how the exchange is approaching this. The platform analyzes on-chain data to identify actively trading wallets based on historical metrics including win rates, trading activity and other available performance indicators, presenting this information for users to review. It then allows users to copy-trade those accounts, without any profit share fees, directly within the CoinW interface. 

AI-powered analytics is another way that CoinW expands the capabilities of everyday traders. GPT-TradeAI allows users to request market insights, technical analysis, and strategy recommendations conversationally which users can independently review and evaluate. Other tools use machine learning to expedite technical analysis by comparing candlestick patterns to a bank of historical data, or simulating possible future price paths.

Of course, traders can still place losing trades even with advanced analytics on their side. That’s why CoinW also runs a Futures Insurance Fund, which allows eligible users to claim subsidies following liquidation. The fund has already “run through 16 phases, with more than 8 million USDT committed by the platform,” Zhou said. “Tens of thousands of users have already claimed protection subsidies after qualifying liquidation events.”

From crypto exchange to an AI-driven financial ecosystem

While crypto originally began as something of a curiosity for technology enthusiasts, it has now grown into a parallel financial system. DeFi summer brought onchain yield and permissionless financial services, stablecoins brought blockchain-based dollars into payments and savings, and now major financial institutions are beginning to tokenize real-world assets onchain. 

CoinW has continually widened its own scope to match these changing trends.

Over years of iteration, CoinW has built a diversified product line spanning spot, futures, ETFs, copy trading, and strategy tools. It has also deepened user engagement through academy courses, research reports, and live sessions. Last year the exchange completed a full-stack ecosystem upgrade that unifies on-chain early-stage asset trading, decentralized derivatives trading, and prop trading under a single account.

In its latest upgrade, the platform is advancing toward what it calls an “AI-driven crypto super app,” further strengthening its product lineup with a special focus on expanding AI trading capabilities and reshaping itself into infrastructure more readily callable by agents. “As the ecosystem expands,” Zhou said, “we feel the obvious and urgent demand for a unified value connector that can reach and knit every layer together.”

Toward this end, CoinW recently announced the launch of its upgraded platform utility token CWC , scheduled to begin trading soon. In contrast to the prior CWT token, CWC is designed not only to connect trading benefits such as spot fee discounts and earn-related benefits, but also to provide tiered access to higher-capability AI services and to ignite the growth of the platform’s creator ecosystem.

CWC has a fixed total supply of 200 million tokens and incorporates a periodic buyback-and-burn mechanism intended to reduce token supply over time, subject to the applicable CWC terms and mechanism.

The agentic trading evolution: Five key steps

Zhou believes that the most radical change to the exchange model will not come from simply adding more tools or asset classes; the future of trading will see AI agents becoming major market participants, working in tandem with their human users. She divides the development of agentic trading into five stages.

CoinW currently places itself around stage two. Zhou envisions the exchange's in-house agentic capabilities expanding rapidly towards the fifth stage, but not at the cost of user security; the main challenge is ensuring agents can carry out their roles without compromising user funds or autonomy.

“A responsible platform should not leap from stage one to stage five,” Zhou said. Progressing without the proper safeguards and infrastructure runs the risk of erratic or harmful behaviour by AI agents.

CoinW's approach to this challenge is multi-layered, with the aim of keeping users in ultimate control. Agents are confined to explicitly authorized parameters and risk rules, while strict isolation and permissioning are combined with real-time monitoring and circuit breakers. Every decision is transparently logged, and new capabilities are rolled out gradually with human-in-the-loop safeguards.

But AI safeguards are only one element of its wider security policy.

The security frontier: Protecting an increasingly complex platform

Crypto’s past decade has seen some major incidents involving centralized exchanges, which have brought the importance of security into sharp focus. The collapse of FTX marked what Zhou calls an “industry reset,” placing renewed attention on risk management and user protection. She notes that CoinW itself has no publicly reported major security breaches since its founding.

However, as the platform evolves into the AI-powered super app it envisions — combining CeFi, DeFi, TradFi, and agentic trading — the attack surface inevitably expands and new threats will emerge. Zhou outlined how CoinW is approaching that challenge, drawing on the work of Chief Security Consultant Dr. Michael Liu, whom we interviewed earlier this month.

On a technical level, CoinW’s approach combines strict access controls with safeguards on where and how funds are stored. The exchange operates a zero-trust security architecture, under which no internal or external role is trusted by default, reducing the risk of any single point of control over user assets. The company also shores up its preparedness with regular phishing simulations to test the vigilance of employees.

Over the years, CoinW has also invested heavily in developing its own MPC wallet infrastructure, maintaining strict separation between hot and cold wallets and securing cold wallets using hardware security modules. The exchange also makes use of independent security assessments and regular proof-of-reserve reporting. “Continuous runtime monitoring and AI-driven threat detection become essential for identifying novel attack patterns,” Zhou added.

The overall result is what she calls “a security system in which culture, technology, and people reinforce one another.”

CoinW’s trajectory for its tenth year

As CoinW enters its tenth year, its continuing evolution reflects several major trends in the crypto industry. If Zhou’s projections hold, one year from now AI agents will have claimed a greater share of trading activity, billions more dollars in equities and other RWAs will be tokenized, and security will become an even more crucial differentiator between platforms as cyberattacks grow in sophistication.

By its next anniversary, Zhou hopes CoinW will be at the forefront of these shifts. This means deeper integration across CeFi, DeFi, and traditional financial markets; more mature agentic trading infrastructure; and expanded practical utility for CWC. As CoinW becomes a multifaceted financial hub, the goal is to have more users engaging with multiple parts of the platform, rather than using CoinW for a single purpose.

CoinW’s first nine years were defined by adapting to a rapidly changing crypto market. The next test is whether it can successfully anticipate how the market evolves from here.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice, an offer, recommendation or solicitation to acquire, hold or trade CWC or any other digital asset. Digital assets are volatile and may lose value. References to CoinW utilities, platform features, AI functionality, governance, buyback-and-burn mechanisms and other future developments reflect current plans and expectations as of the date of publication and may be modified, delayed or discontinued. AI-generated information and tools should not be regarded as guarantees or predictions of market performance. Users remain responsible for reviewing and authorizing their trading decisions and should independently assess the risks associated with an AI-generated information, strategy or functionality. CoinW products and services are available only to eligible users in jurisdictions where permitted and may be restricted or unavailable in certain countries or regions.

This post is commissioned by CoinW and does not serve as a testimonial or endorsement by The Block. This post is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment, tax, legal or other advice. You should conduct your own research and consult independent counsel and advisors on the matters discussed within this post. Past performance of any asset is not indicative of future results.