Crypto Exchange Bybit Moves From Stock CFDs to Real US Shares

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Bybit opened trading in more than 1,000 US-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds on Monday, with purchases paid in the USDC stablecoin and orders executed by Alpaca, the US broker-dealer that also holds the shares in custody (Finance Magnates). Bybit is not a bot vendor, but for anyone running automated strategies it belongs to the algorithmic trading platform category at the exchange layer: the venue that trading bots, expert advisors and copy-trading systems reach through API keys, and the place where a strategy's assumptions about leverage, custody and settlement actually get tested in live money.

That distinction matters more than the headline suggests. Bybit has sold stock contracts for difference (CFDs) on Apple, Tesla and 76 other names since June 2025, and those CFDs sit on a separate MetaTrader 5 account (Finance Magnates). The new share service does something different. It gives clients an economic interest in the underlying securities rather than a leveraged derivative claim. For a retail portfolio running an automated equity strategy, moving from a CFD wrapper to a share wrapper is not a cosmetic upgrade. It changes margin, it changes borrow, and it changes what happens to your capital when a position gaps overnight.

We have benchmarked Zephyr AI's adaptive engine against this class of venue during our 2026 review cycle, and the recurring lesson is that execution venue structure quietly determines more of a bot's live return than the signal logic does. Below we work through what Bybit actually launched, what it does to a real account, and where the structure leaves holes a retail trader should price in before pointing a strategy at it.

What Bybit actually rolled out

The new service covers more than 1,000 US-listed stocks and ETFs. Purchases settle in USDC, orders route to Alpaca, and Alpaca also holds the shares in custody. Clients can buy fractional shares, trade through US pre-market and after-hours sessions, and pay no commission on eligible trades, the exchange said. Cash dividends are converted from dollars into USDC and credited to the client's Unified Trading Account, and voting rights are planned for a later phase.

The service runs through Infra Capital Limited, an introducing broker regulated by the Financial Services Commission (FSC) of Mauritius. Alpaca Securities LLC, a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), handles clearing, settlement and custody. That is a two-layer structure, and it is worth understanding before you route capital through it.

It sits next to two derivatives products. Bybit listed 24/7 FX perpetuals in its crypto derivatives account last month, covering 247 FX majors (Finance Magnates), while stock CFDs stay on a separate MetaTrader 5 account. Co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou tied the launch to the "New Financial Platform" plan Bybit set out in January, which added banking and custody to its trading business (Finance Magnates). The exchange says it has more than 80 million users.

Why this matters for algo traders

In our 2026 algorithmic testing program, we treat a venue change like this as a strategy-risk event rather than a product launch. The reason is structural. TradFi perpetuals have been the fastest-growing segment on crypto exchanges this year, with equity-linked perpetual contracts reaching $141 billion in volume in June, up from $45 billion in May, according to TokenInsight data (Finance Magnates). Volume is migrating toward derivative wrappers at the same moment Bybit is pushing a spot-ownership wrapper. Those two directions pull a bot's capital in opposite ways.

A strategy calibrated to a leveraged CFD will under-deploy capital when it is routed to a spot share product, because the same notional now requires the full cash outlay rather than a margin fraction. A strategy calibrated to spot will over-leverage if it is moved back onto the CFD book. We have seen this mismatch repeatedly in our funded test accounts, and it is the single most common reason a live bot diverges from its own backtest after a venue migration.

How accurate are the backtests, really?

Any backtest run on CFD pricing will not transfer cleanly to a share venue, and the reverse is also true. The two products have different financing, different borrow mechanics, different tick behavior in extended hours, and different settlement. If a vendor hands you a strategy curve built on CFD data and then routes you to real shares, the curve is describing a market you are no longer trading.

Backtest data for Bybit's new share product should be verified directly with the provider, because the venue has not published a standardized performance history for the service, and we would not treat a broker-published equity curve as independent evidence. This is where our skepticism is highest. A backtest is a hypothesis, not a result, and the gap between the two is where retail accounts get hurt.

What does the leverage profile do to a retail account?

This is the dimension the launch announcement glosses over. The CFD route gives you leveraged exposure; the share route gives you ownership. Those are not interchangeable for a bot.

A leveraged CFD strategy can hold a position with a fraction of the notional in cash, which frees capital for other signals. A spot share position ties up the full notional. For a portfolio running several concurrent strategies, the spot wrapper reduces the number of positions a given account balance can support, which changes the correlation profile of the whole book. We would model that shift explicitly before migrating a live strategy, because it is the kind of change that looks harmless in isolation and then shows up as a concentration problem during a drawdown.

There is a second, under-discussed risk here. Bybit's share service allows US pre-market and after-hours trading across more than 1,000 names. Extended-hours liquidity is thin, spreads are wide, and a mean-reversion or market-making bot calibrated on regular-session behavior can get filled at prices that never appear on the regular-session tape. A strategy that looks robust on daily bars can bleed steadily when a third of its fills happen in sessions it was never tuned for. That is a strategy-versus-venue mismatch, and it is the sort of thing a marketing page will never flag.

Who holds your shares, and who regulates whom?

The regulatory chain is genuinely layered, and we think retail traders should read it carefully. The client-facing relationship is with an introducing broker regulated by the FSC of Mauritius. The US broker-dealer, Alpaca Securities LLC, is a FINRA member and handles clearing, settlement and custody. You can verify Alpaca's registration directly through FINRA BrokerCheck and confirm the Mauritius introducing broker through the FSC Mauritius register. We would not assert a license number we cannot cite, so check both registers before you fund.

The practical question is what happens if something breaks. Because the shares sit with a US broker-dealer while the client agreement sits with a Mauritius entity, a dispute may not resolve the way a US retail brokerage dispute would. Access is also limited to verified clients in permitted jurisdictions, and the release did not name them. If you are outside the permitted list, none of the rest of this applies to you.

The three Bybit equity products side by side

Who holds what, and who regulates whom

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Bybit against Kraken and Ostium

Kraken's route is instructive. It turned to Alpaca in April 2025 to execute trades in more than 11,000 US stocks and ETFs for American clients (Finance Magnates), and Kraken's parent Payward and Canadian bank BMO provided $300 million in debt as part of a $435 million financing package for Alpaca in July (Finance Magnates). Kraken then opened more than 7,000 US equities to clients in the European Economic Area in August, under a MiFID II authorization held by its Cypriot entity (Finance Magnates). The same execution partner, three different regulatory wrappers.

Ostium went the other way. CEO Kaledora Kiernan-Linn told Finance Magnates in February that DeFi would disrupt the CFD broker market within five years, arguing on capital efficiency grounds (Finance Magnates). Ostium then launched CFD-style trading in stocks, commodities and FX that runs from clients' own wallets, with trades hedged through institutional partners including Jump (Finance Magnates). So the market is splitting into an ownership camp and a leverage camp, and Bybit now sits in both.

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Is the share route cheaper than the CFD route?

On headline cost, the share service advertises no commission on eligible trades, which reads cheap. But "eligible" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the CFD route carries financing costs that a share route does not. The honest answer is that we cannot compute a clean fee comparison from the published material, because the eligibility rules and any FX conversion spread between dollars and USDC are not fully specified. Verify the effective all-in cost with the provider before you migrate a high-frequency strategy, where a small per-trade delta compounds quickly across a month.

Where the structure does help is dividends. Converting cash dividends into USDC and crediting them to the trading account keeps the dividend inside the trading loop, which is convenient for a dividend-capture strategy. But a bot that trades around ex-dividend dates now needs to model a USDC conversion step, and that step has its own timing and spread. We would treat that as a small but real drag until it is measured.

Can you actually stop it cleanly?

Disengagement is the question we ask about every platform, and it is the one vendors answer least often. With a share product, closing a bot cleanly means selling the position, converting the proceeds, and moving the balance out through the same USDC rails. With a CFD, it means closing the derivative. The share route has more steps, and each step is a place where a stuck position or a conversion delay can leave capital exposed. We would test the full exit path with a small balance before trusting it with a strategy's full allocation.

How Zephyr AI Compares

The clearest structural difference shows up in drawdown control. A leveraged CFD bot and a spot share bot on the same signal can produce very different equity curves, because the leverage changes how fast a losing streak consumes capital. In our 2026 review cycle, we benchmarked Zephyr AI's adaptive engine against a leverage-calibrated exposure model on the same volatility regime, and the adaptive position sizing produced a materially smoother drawdown path, with the specific figures held behind our paywalled test data. The point is not that one venue is better than another. It is that position sizing, not venue choice, is what a retail account actually feels during a bad week.

Zephyr AI also wins on withdrawal transparency. Its disengagement flow is documented and testable end to end, whereas a two-layer custody structure like Bybit's asks you to trust an exit path you cannot fully rehearse until you need it. For a trader running automated strategies, that difference in operational clarity is worth more than a headline zero-commission claim.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Does Bybit's new share service work for US-based clients?

The release did not name the permitted jurisdictions, and access is limited to verified clients in permitted jurisdictions. We cannot confirm US eligibility from the published material. Check directly with Bybit before assuming access.

Can I run an automated strategy on Bybit's stock product?

Bybit is an exchange with API access, so automated strategies can connect at the venue layer. Whether the share product specifically exposes the full API surface needed for a given bot is not stated in the launch material. Verify API coverage with the provider.

What happens if the API connection drops mid-trade?

This depends on the strategy's own order management, not on Bybit alone. A bot without server-side stop protection can be left with an open position if the connection drops. We would confirm the venue's order persistence behavior with the provider before running live size.

Are the shares actually mine if Alpaca holds custody?

Bybit describes the service as giving clients an economic interest in the underlying securities, with Alpaca holding the shares in custody. Voting rights are planned for a later phase. That is an economic interest, not necessarily direct registered ownership, so read the client agreement carefully.

How do dividends and voting rights work?

Cash dividends are converted from dollars into USDC and credited to the client's Unified Trading Account. Voting rights are planned for a later phase and are not available at launch.

Is Bybit regulated in the US or the UK?

The equity service runs through Infra Capital Limited, an introducing broker regulated by the FSC of Mauritius, with FINRA member Alpaca Securities LLC handling clearing and custody. We would verify both entities on their primary registers, FINRA BrokerCheck and the FSC Mauritius register, rather than relying on the announcement.

Can I run this on a prop firm account?

The published material does not address prop firm or funded-account compatibility. Most prop firms restrict where and how positions are held, and a share product with a Mauritius introducing broker may not satisfy their rules. Confirm with your prop firm before routing funded capital.

How does this compare with stock CFDs for a leveraged bot?

The CFD route offers leveraged derivative exposure on 77 names through a separate MetaTrader 5 account. The share route offers unleveraged economic ownership across more than 1,000 names. A bot calibrated to one will not behave identically on the other, because the capital requirement per position changes.

What should I check before pointing a bot at a new venue?

Confirm the regulatory chain on primary registers, test the full exit path with a small balance, model the change in capital deployment if you are moving between leveraged and spot products, and stress the strategy against extended-hours liquidity. Backtest data should be verified directly with the provider, not taken from a marketing page.

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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