Bitget CEO Gracy Chen: Discovering Public Companies via Meme Coins
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen stated that the fastest way to discover a public company by 2026 is not by reading the 10-K, but by looking at its meme coins, acknowledging that it sounds absurd but is happening. She did not name specific companies or token contracts.
During the same period, Bitget positions itself as an all-in-one exchange, with traditional assets accounting for about 20-30% of spot trading, and over half of users holding both crypto and stock products. The platform launched tokenized stocks and rTokens, claiming a scale of over $100 million in the first month, and is discussing the distribution of tokenized traditional assets with the NYSE and NASDAQ. There are also Pre-IPO token products on Solana, allowing low-threshold tracking of economic rights in unlisted giants. The meme coin market remains highly concentrated: only a few, like Dogecoin, can maintain a long-term market cap of a billion dollars, while the vast majority of launchpad tokens fail to graduate to sustained trading. Celebrity and event coins are discovered and priced within hours, then quickly retract.
The 10-K remains the statutory annual report for U.S. public companies, disclosing business, risks, and finances; meme coins have no equity or dividend promises, with prices determined by pool depth and attention. Chen's comparison points to the speed of discovery in the attention market, rather than the effectiveness of disclosures.
In market mechanics, buyers are short-term funds treating company names as trading symbols, while sellers are exchanges listing coins and launchpads; the driver is that emotional discovery outpaces quarterly reports. Funds flow from spot and contract fees to the platform, rather than entering the company's balance sheet. Benefiting are exchanges that can simultaneously trade tokenized stocks and meme coins, while under pressure are fundamental accounts still pricing from the 10-K, and late buyers misreading meme volatility as company fundamentals.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The exchange head downplaying the 10-K is supporting the listing rights: whoever appears first with a trading pair gets "discovered" first. Tokenized stocks and meme coins settle in the same account, making it unclear for users to distinguish between tokens tracking stock prices and those spoofing company names, while the platform collects fees from both sides. Pre-IPO tokens turn unlisted giants into tradable contracts, further shifting "discovering companies" from research reports to candlestick charts.
The capital pathway merges the compliant securities entry with a casino entry in one app. The increasing proportion of traditional assets aims to provide a legitimate shell for meme traffic. Launchpad statistics show that the vast majority of tokens do not survive sustained trading, indicating that most "discoveries" result in zero, with only narrative peaks remembered. If regulators include launchpads in registration, the speed of discovery will decline, and platforms will emphasize tokenized securities.
Similar to the SPAC craze using merger shells to discover companies, and social media pricing rumors earlier than press releases. The industry phase is a challenge of attention intermediaries against disclosure intermediaries. The 10-K is slow due to auditing, while memes are fast because there is no audit.
Structurally, this represents a transfer of pricing power: the first sight of a company being seen shifts from SEC documents to token boards. The mechanism is that searching and listing coins is cheaper than reading notes, thus rewriting the discovery function into transaction volume; legally, the two are still not the same asset, and the confusion itself is a product of the exchange.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- The fastest discovery market often has no disclosure obligations.
- Stocks and memes in the same account have equally high fees.
- The 10-K is written for audits, while candlesticks are written for emotions.