Bitget Wallet marketing chief Jamie Elkaleh said retail traders and semi-professional quantitative traders were driving adoption of decentralized exchanges, while institutional desks continued to value centralized services.
In a September 27, 2025 interview with Cointelegraph, he pointed to incentives and programmable trading as attractions for the former groups, and fiat access, compliance services and prime brokerage as reasons institutions used centralized platforms.
An industry participant’s assessment
The comments offer a perspective from a wallet provider. They are not a representative survey of every trader or proof of the composition of an exchange’s user base.
Trading volume also cannot be treated as a count of users. Repeated trades, leverage and incentives can increase turnover without a corresponding increase in distinct customers.
Compare the mechanism and its risks
Elkaleh also identified operational concerns involving price feeds, infrastructure control and liquidations. Readers should evaluate those features for the particular venue rather than infer safety from the DEX label.
Our decentralized exchange guide explains how trading mechanisms differ, while the oracle guide covers the role of external price information.
Editor’s note: The article now attributes the adoption assessment and avoids equating turnover with user growth. Unverified volume comparisons and an incorrect blanket classification of exchange mechanisms have been removed.