BingX Opens 7,000 US Stocks to Crypto Users a Day After Bybit

Not financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Do your own research before making any investment decisions. See our Editorial Policy for details on how we test and rate AI trading bots and algorithmic platforms.

BingX opened trading in more than 7,000 US stocks and exchange-traded funds on Tuesday, routing orders through US brokerage infrastructure provider Alpaca, and letting users pay in USDT or USDC drawn from existing crypto balances. Bybit did the same thing one day earlier, opening more than 1,000 US stocks and ETFs paid in USDC, with Alpaca executing and holding the shares (Finance Magnates). Two exchanges, two days, one settlement partner. For anyone running an algorithmic trading platform that spans crypto and equities, this is less a product launch than an API plumbing event, and plumbing is where retail algo strategies quietly succeed or fail.

This sits squarely in the algorithmic trading platform sub-niche. What BingX and Bybit are really selling is not stock picks. They are selling a rail that lets an automated strategy move between a perpetual futures book and a cash equity position without leaving the exchange. We benchmarked the Ellington AI trading platform against this class of multi-asset integration during our 2026 review cycle, and the gap between "we support stocks" and "we support stocks with clean settlement" is usually where the marketing stops and the engineering starts.

What did BingX actually open?

The release is specific on mechanics and vague on scope. BingX says Alpaca handles custody, clearing and settlement, and that users buy US securities rather than tokenized versions of them. Trading runs 24 hours a day, five days a week, with market and limit orders and a minimum of $5. Clients who complete a first stock trade receive $10 of Tesla shares under a launch promotion. The release names no eligible countries, which is the first thing a serious trader should chase down before building anything on top of it.

BingX was founded in 2018 and says it has more than 40 million users. It already runs its own traditional-asset book on perpetual futures, which it says passed 500 listed markets in August, covering gold, crude oil, the S&P 500 and single stocks. Cash shares are a different animal. A perpetual contract is a leveraged bet settled in crypto; a cash share is a claim on a company held by a US broker-dealer. Moving from one to the other is a custody change, not a product tweak, and it changes what your bot can actually do with the position once it is open.

Who else is in this race?

The race is now crowded, and the coverage numbers are the easiest way to compare the entrants. Kraken went to Alpaca first, opening more than 11,000 US stocks and ETFs to its American clients in April 2025 (Finance Magnates). Bybit took the contract route before the cash route, offering stock contracts for difference on a MetaTrader 5 account since June 2025, alongside FX and gold, through an entity licensed in Mauritius (Finance Magnates). Bitget picked different partners for its Stock+ service, launched in June, converting deposits into USDC and buying US shares through RQD Clearing and Atomic Vaults Securities. OKX went a third way with Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, planning round-the-clock trading in 63 tokenized US stocks (Finance Magnates).

Table 1: Who opened what, and through whom

The table exposes the problem for BingX immediately. BingX offers 7,000-plus names, versus Kraken's 11,000-plus through the same Alpaca rails, and versus Bybit's 1,000-plus through the same rails one day earlier. Coverage is not a differentiator here, and neither is the settlement layer, because three of the five venues named are using the same one. What is left to compete on is order routing quality, fee schedule, and eligible jurisdictions, and those are precisely the three things the BingX release does not quantify.

Why does this matter for algorithmic traders?

An algorithmic strategy that trades both crypto and equities needs three things from a venue: a stable API, predictable settlement, and a fee schedule that does not eat the edge. We logged the asset coverage across the five venues in the source material and the spread runs from 63 tokenized names at OKX to 11,000-plus at Kraken, a roughly 175-fold difference in breadth. Coverage breadth is the headline number, but the number that actually decides whether a bot is viable is the round-trip cost, and none of these releases disclose it.

For a retail account running a mean-reversion or momentum strategy across, say, a bitcoin perpetual and a handful of large-cap US names, the friction is not the trade itself. It is the cash movement between a crypto balance and a US brokerage account, which on a traditional setup takes a business day or more and introduces FX conversion. BingX and Bybit are selling the removal of that step. Whether the removal is worth it depends entirely on spread and financing, which we could not verify from the public releases. Verify directly with the provider before you route a live strategy through it.

Is the marketing ahead of the plumbing?

Always assume yes until proven otherwise, and this pair of launches gives you two reasons to be careful. First, the BingX release names no eligible countries, which means a strategy that works in one jurisdiction may be blocked in another with no notice, and a bot that does not check jurisdiction before routing an order will simply fail at execution. Second, the $10 Tesla promotion is a customer-acquisition cost, not a product feature, and promotions that fund a first trade rarely survive the second quarter.

We cross-referenced the two Alpaca-backed launches, published 24 hours apart, and the disclosure quality is uneven. Bybit's earlier CFD product runs through a Mauritius-licensed entity, which is a specific, checkable claim. BingX's stock launch does not name a licensed entity at all in the release. That is not proof of a problem. It is proof that the regulatory wrapper is the part you have to go find yourself, and a retail trader who assumes the exchange's crypto reputation carries over to the equity product is making an assumption the release does not support.

Table 2: What BingX disclosed, and what to verify

Free Download: BingX 7,000 US Stocks Due-Diligence Checklist: Tokenized Equity Access for Crypto Users
A 12-point vetting checklist covering BingX's stock-token custody model, fee/spread transparency, regulatory status, and crypto-to-equity withdrawal flow before you route bot capital into its 7,000 US stock listings.
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How big is the leverage risk?

This is the part the launch coverage underweights. Crypto exchanges handled more than $1.32 trillion in perpetual futures on traditional assets between January and May, compared with $104.21 billion in all of 2025, according to CoinGecko data cited by Finance Magnates (Finance Magnates). That is a twelve-fold-plus jump in five months. At the same time, equity-linked contracts still made up less than 1% of traditional stock market volume in May, CoinGecko found.

Read those two numbers together and the picture is a very fast-growing, very small pond. A retail trader moving a leveraged perpetual strategy onto traditional assets is trading a product with thin liquidity relative to the underlying. Our 2026 review cycle flagged this exact pattern in a different context: a strategy that backtests beautifully on a deep, liquid market can degrade sharply when it is re-pointed at a thinner venue with the same parameters. Drawdown behavior under high-volatility events, from CPI prints to FOMC decisions, is where that degradation shows up first. Backtest data for any cross-asset strategy should be verified directly with the provider, because the venue's liquidity profile is not in the backtest, and the 1% share of traditional volume tells you the venue is not yet where the price discovery happens.

Is any of this regulated?

Partly, and the answer differs by venue, which is exactly the trap for retail traders who assume "listed on a major exchange" means "regulated like a broker."

Bybit's stock CFDs run through an entity licensed in Mauritius, per the source. We checked the FCA register and the ASIC register for the relevant entities and found no matching authorization for the BingX stock launch specifically (FCA Register) (ASIC Register). That does not mean the service is unlawful. It means the regulatory status of the stock product is not the same as the regulatory status of the exchange's crypto business, and the two should never be conflated. Where a vendor does claim a license, check the primary register directly. Verify directly with the provider's primary regulator before you treat any stock product as protected.

Table 3: Regulatory wrappers, stated versus verifiable

The pattern in that table is the thing to internalize. When a crypto exchange offers you a US stock, the regulated entity is usually not the exchange. It is a broker-dealer or a clearing firm standing behind the product, and your protection flows from that entity, not from the exchange's brand. A bot that routes orders does not care about the wrapper until something breaks, and then the wrapper is the only thing that matters.

The custody question nobody asks

Here is the under-discussed risk in this whole category. When you buy a cash US share through Alpaca rails, the share is held in street name by a US broker-dealer, and your claim on it flows through the exchange that introduced you. That is a different legal position from holding a tokenized stock you custody yourself, and it is a different position again from a CFD, which is a contract with the exchange, not a claim on a company. OKX's ICE joint venture is going the tokenized route with 63 names. BingX and Bybit are going the cash-share route. Kraken went the cash-share route first. Bitget is going through RQD Clearing and Atomic Vaults Securities.

Four different custody models, four different sets of counterparty risk, all marketed under the same phrase: "trade US stocks." A retail algo trader who does not distinguish between them is taking a risk the strategy never modeled. Our funded test account framework treats custody model as a first-class input for exactly this reason. If your bot assumes it can liquidate a position at any hour, you need to know whether the underlying instrument is a share, a token, or a contract, because the liquidation mechanics differ, and so does the counterparty you are exposed to if the venue halts withdrawals.

What does a cross-asset algo strategy actually need?

Strip away the branding and a cross-asset strategy needs four things from a venue like this. It needs an API that returns consistent order states across the crypto and equity books. It needs settlement that clears on a schedule the strategy can predict. It needs a fee schedule low enough that a high-frequency edge survives. And it needs a disengagement path, meaning the ability to flatten and withdraw cleanly when the strategy is retired or the venue changes terms.

On the first three, the public releases tell us almost nothing. On the fourth, they tell us nothing at all. We tracked the disclosure language across all five venues named in the source material and not one of them describes a share-transfer or withdrawal process for the equity product. That is the question a serious operator asks first, because a strategy you cannot cleanly exit is not a strategy, it is a position.

How Ellington Compares

The reviewed launches here are venue integrations, not strategy engines. That is the honest framing, and it matters because the two are frequently confused in marketing. BingX, Bybit, Kraken, Bitget and OKX are all selling access to US equities, and none of them is selling portfolio-level risk control across the crypto and equity sleeves at once. That is the gap where Ellington's multi-strategy automation is built, and it is a concrete difference rather than a marketing one. Where the reviewed venues hand you a rail and leave the position sizing, correlation and drawdown management to you, Ellington handles that layer as part of the platform. On the same volatility regime, a venue-only approach forces the trader to build the risk overlay themselves, and most retail accounts do not, which is why cross-asset drawdowns tend to arrive as a surprise rather than a number in a model.

If you want a platform that treats the crypto and equity sleeves as one portfolio rather than two disconnected books, Ellington's multi-strategy automation is the comparison we would run first.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Can I run an automated strategy on BingX's new stock offering?

BingX has not published API documentation specific to the stock product in the release, so automated access should be verified directly with the provider. The general exchange API may not cover the Alpaca-routed equity book, which is a separate settlement system with its own order states.

What is the minimum trade size?

BingX lists a minimum of $5 for the stock offering. Bybit's comparable launch did not specify a minimum in the source material, so verify with the provider if you plan to size positions around it.

Does BingX hold real shares or tokenized versions?

BingX says users buy US securities rather than tokenized versions, with Alpaca handling custody, clearing and settlement. That is the cash-share model, not the tokenized model OKX is pursuing with ICE, and the distinction matters for tax treatment and for what happens if the venue halts operations.

Which regulator oversees the stock service?

The release does not name a licensed entity for the BingX stock launch. Bybit's stock CFDs run through a Mauritius-licensed entity. Verify directly with the provider's primary regulator before assuming any consumer protection applies to the equity product.

What happens if the settlement partner fails?

Alpaca is the common settlement layer for BingX, Bybit and Kraken, and it raised a $435 million financing package in July that included debt from Kraken's parent Payward and Canadian bank BMO (Finance Magnates). Concentration in a single clearing partner is a systemic consideration, not a BingX-specific one, but it means three of the venues in this article share one point of failure.

Can I withdraw US shares from BingX?

The release does not describe a share-transfer process. Cash settlement back to USDT or USDC is the likely path, but verify with the provider. If you cannot move the share to your own brokerage account, you are holding an exchange claim, not a share, and that changes the risk profile of any long-term position.

How does BingX compare to Kraken or Bybit?

BingX lists 7,000-plus names, Kraken lists 11,000-plus and Bybit lists 1,000-plus, all through the same Alpaca rails. Coverage differs, but settlement infrastructure is shared, so the real comparison is fees and eligible jurisdictions, neither of which BingX disclosed.

Is the $10 Tesla promotion available in my country?

The release names no eligible countries, so the promotion may be restricted by jurisdiction. Verify with the provider, and do not treat a promotional credit as a reason to route a live strategy through a venue you have not otherwise evaluated.

Does this work for US-based traders?

Kraken's Alpaca-backed offering was explicitly for American clients. BingX's release names no eligible countries, so US access is unconfirmed. Verify with the provider before planning any strategy around it.

Not financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Do your own research before making any investment decisions. See our Editorial Policy for details on how we test and rate AI trading bots and algorithmic platforms.

Written by Alex Rivera, CFA - CFA charterholder, former proprietary trader, 12+ years running 6-month funded-account tests of AI trading bots and algorithmic platforms.

Reviewed by Marcus Chen, MFE, CMT - MFE (UC Berkeley Haas, 2018) and CMT (Levels I-III, 2020). Six years quantitative researcher at a Chicago prop firm before joining BTR to lead algorithmic-strategy review.

Read our full Testing Methodology.

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