Bybit Launches USDC-Funded US Stocks Trading With 150,000 USDC Prize Pool

Bybit went live Monday with a new stocks trading service that lets users fund positions in more than 1,000 US equities and ETFs using USDC, pairing the launch with a 150,000 USDC prize pool to drive early adoption.

The service, branded "Full Stocks Ahead," is backed by Alpaca, a brokerage infrastructure provider that executes trades and holds the underlying shares on behalf of eligible users. That structure marks a meaningful departure from Bybit's existing xStocks products, which are tokenized derivatives that track stock prices without users ever touching actual equity. Here, Alpaca holds real shares, making it a genuine brokerage alternative rather than a crypto-native wrapper.

The USDC funding mechanism is the other notable design choice. Rather than converting to fiat before settlement, users deploy stablecoin balances directly. For traders who keep capital on-chain between crypto positions, that removes a conversion step and keeps funds within familiar rails. It also signals how seriously major exchanges are treating stablecoins as settlement infrastructure, not just a parking spot between trades. USDC maintains its $1.00 peg and has steadily expanded into institutional and cross-border payment contexts over the past two years.

The 150,000 USDC prize pool is clearly aimed at habit formation. Incentive campaigns like this work best when they pull in users who would have signed up anyway and reward early volume, but they rarely sustain engagement on their own. Bybit will need the product experience itself to compete. That means going up against established retail brokerages, fintech platforms with years of trust-building, and the simple fact that most people buying Apple or Nvidia shares already have an account somewhere. The counterparty question also deserves attention: users are trusting Alpaca to hold their shares, and that custody arrangement adds a layer of risk that traditional brokerage accounts, covered by SIPC protection in the US, do not present in the same way.

Eligibility constraints will also shape the actual addressable market. Regulatory restrictions around crypto exchanges offering securities trading vary sharply by jurisdiction, and Bybit's user base spans regions with very different rules. The exchange has not yet published a comprehensive list of excluded countries for this product.

Crypto-native platforms are racing toward TradFi convergence, and stock trading is one of the most direct on-ramps for retail capital that has historically stayed in equities. Robinhood moved in the opposite direction years ago, adding crypto to a stock-trading base. Bybit and exchanges like it are now running the same play in reverse: adding stocks to a crypto-trading base. Whether USDC-denominated equity exposure finds a meaningful audience depends on how many users actually want to keep their stock and crypto exposure under one roof, funded from the same stablecoin balance.

For now, the 150,000 USDC prize pool gives traders a concrete reason to try it. The harder question is what keeps them there once the campaign ends.