Gate wants its 60 million users to buy coffee with Nvidia stock after the market closes

"You can buy a cup of coffee with Nvidia stock," Han said. "You cannot do that with any app in the world right now." ^[7] CoinDesk calls the ability to spend assets without first holding cash in the account Gate's most ambitious claim ^[16]. The coffee shop still has to be paid in money, so a coffee funded by Nvidia shares needs someone to sell those shares, or lend against them, at a price. According to CoinDesk, Han did not explain how such conversions would be priced or executed when the underlying market is closed ^[6].

I can see three ways that price gets set, and each sends the cost to a different place. Gate could mark the shares at the last close and absorb the overnight move on its own book. Every user would then hold a small free option against the exchange. It could quote a spread wide enough to cover that risk, so the user pays for the convenience at the till. Or the more than 12,800 stock assets Gate lists, about 2.4 for every digital asset on the platform ^[14][18], could be instruments that trade on Gate's own venue around the clock, priced after hours by Gate's order book alone.

CoinDesk puts Gate at $2 billion of 24-hour trading volume and over 60 million users ^[5][2], or roughly $33 of trading per user per day ^[17]. (Gate told Crypto Briefing it has more than 61 million ^[3].) An average is not a profile of the typical account, but it fits the customer Han said he is after. "We don't want to stay with a small group of people who are professional at trading," he said. "We want to provide this product to a wider range of customers." ^[8]

Han said he sees Revolut, Cash App and Wise as more immediate competitors than traditional banks, alongside other exchanges building similar products ^[9]. He said the biggest market may be Asia, where people want U.S. stocks but have restricted access to international brokerage accounts ^[19]. The licences Crypto Briefing lists for Gate are a MiCA CASP licence and a PSD2 licence in Malta and a VASP licence in Dubai, and the outlet describes them as covering crypto services and traditional payments ^[15]. Han said crypto firms now have the technology, licensing and banking relationships to offer services that once sat largely with banks and brokers ^[10]. For a Cayman Islands-headquartered firm ^[2] selling U.S. stock exposure into Asia, the stock leg is the part of that claim the listed licences speak to least directly ^[15].

I think the after-hours conversion price is where this product's margin and its risk both sit, and Gate's published terms will show which of the three designs it chose. The counter-case is that coffee-sized conversions are too small for overnight moves to matter, so Gate can treat any loss as a customer-acquisition cost. If Gate converts against a stated reference price at a narrow spread and card volumes stay small, that case is right, and the pricing question becomes a line in the marketing budget.