#GateUS与RQDClearing达成战略合作 Infrastructure is the decisive factor in the next round of competition

What is truly worth watching about Gate’s strategic partnership with RQD* Clearing is not the alliance between the two companies itself, but that it has brought “clearing and custody”—the most fundamental layer of traditional finance—to the forefront of competition in the crypto industry.
What RQD* Clearing is doing is quite interesting. In the first seven months of 2026, it processed approximately 69.5 billion shares and 64.8 million options contracts, with a notional value of approximately $2 trillion, accounting for 2.4% of stock trading volume in the US National Market System. More importantly, in March this year, it partnered with Blue Ocean Technologies to advance clearing and settlement infrastructure for tokenized US stocks, while aligning with the DTCC’s framework for tokenized securities. In other words, RQD* is not merely a traditional clearing firm; it is building a compliant “rail” for on-chain securities.
This precisely explains why Gate chose to partner with RQD at this point in time. Gate founder Dr. Han explicitly stated in the announcement that the partnership focuses on three areas: clearing, compliance, and tokenization. The response from RQD CEO Michael Sanocki pointed to the same conclusion: the connection between digital assets and traditional securities is becoming increasingly close.
Therefore, if we are discussing the direction most worth anticipating next, my answer is the tokenization upgrade of clearing infrastructure and the compliant integration of tokenized real-world assets. Why clearing rather than custody or trading? Because custody addresses “where assets are held,” trading addresses “how to buy and sell them,” while clearing addresses “how to safely complete final delivery after a trade.” The first two already have many players working on them, but the compliance and on-chain transformation of clearing is the weld that truly fuses traditional finance with digital assets.
In July, DTCC completed production-environment trading of tokenized stocks, ETFs, and US Treasuries, and plans to launch full commercial operations in October. RQD*’s clearing channel is aligned with this framework, meaning that what Gate may connect to in the future will not be a simple combination of “crypto + stocks,” but a hybrid financial infrastructure capable of 7×24-hour settlement under a compliant framework.
What I look forward to most is Gate following this clearing rail to bring more traditional assets onto its platform in tokenized form, while allowing crypto asset liquidity to provide incremental growth for traditional markets in return. Infrastructure determines how far a system can scale, and this move by Gate follows precisely that logic.$GT