Philippines Crypto Community Energizes, MEXC CEO Says After PBW2026

MEXC’s chief executive quote-tweeted his exchange’s regional account this week to call the Philippines crypto community energy real. The June 30 post was a quote of MEXC SEA’s wrap of Philippine Blockchain Week 2026, the country’s flagship Web3 conference, held June 19 to 21 at SMX Convention Center Manila.

The same exchange had a booth on the floor under the MEXC Ventures banner. Usi Zade is MEXC’s CEO as of Q1 2026, per the company’s quarterly report, and the MEXC Foundation has already run Philippine education programs through the first quarter. His post reads less like a casual sign-off and more like the closing line of a market entry that had been in the works for months. The market the post describes is one of the most active crypto communities in Southeast Asia, the kind of room a global exchange leaves nothing to chance on.

Six Lines on a Tuesday Morning

Usi Zade posted six lines to X at 9:13 a.m. on June 30. “Great energy from the Philippines crypto community this week,” the post read. “Real conversations, real people. Thank you.” The closing line: “We’re just getting started.”

The post was a quote-tweeted repost rather than original copy. Above his text sat a longer post from MEXC SEA (@MEXC_SEA) titled “That’s a wrap on Philippine Blockchain Week 2026.” The MEXC SEA account called the MEXC Ventures booth at SMX Manila the event’s “basecamp” and thanked traders, builders, and “first-timers” who stopped by. The regional post carried the campaign hashtags #MEXC, #PBW2026, #PhilippineBlockchainWeek, #MEXCSEA, #CryptoPhilippines, and #MEXCVentures.

Great energy from the Philippines crypto community this week. Real conversations, real people. Thank you. We’re just getting started.

Usi Zade posted the quote-tweet from his account @usithetalk on June 30. The post carried 730 views, 17 likes, five retweets and zero replies. He holds the title of CEO at MEXC as of Q1 2026, per the exchange’s Q1 2026 quarterly report published April 14.

Three Days at SMX Manila

Philippine Blockchain Week 2026 ran June 19 to 21 at SMX Convention Center Manila. The conference’s X account framed it under the slogan DECODED: DEPLOYED and billed it as a gathering of Web3, AI, and Fintech voices.

The event was an edition of Philippine Blockchain Week, organized locally and supported by a roster of crypto sponsors. MEXC Ventures was among those sponsors, with a booth on the floor that MEXC SEA later described as more than a stop on a tour. The MEXC SEA wrap-up called the booth the event’s “basecamp,” language that suggests the team treated the conference as a multi-day on-site operation. MEXC also published a dedicated news item on the conference in advance, framing Philippine Blockchain Week’s expansion into creator culture, fandoms, and live entertainment. The Bworldonline-sourced coverage dated June 8, 2026 carried the line that “influence increasingly transforms from a metric to a full-blown movement” at this year’s edition.

• Dates: June 19-21
• Venue: SMX Convention Center Manila
• Theme: DECODED: DEPLOYED
• Sponsors included MEXC Ventures
• Hashtags: #PBW2026, #CryptoPhilippines, #MEXCSEA

The Philippine Blockchain Week 2026 main event page lists the conference as “The Philippines’ Most Premier Blockchain Event.” That framing matters because it sets up Usi Zade’s later “real conversations, real people” line as a continuation of a longer MEXC narrative that built on more than a one-day reaction.

The conference had a stated focus on Web3, AI, and Fintech. MEXC’s coverage noted an expansion into creator culture, fandoms, and live entertainment, a direction that puts the event closer to a fan convention than a banking seminar. The shape of the booth, three days, multiple communities, basecamp, reads as deliberate positioning for a market where crypto adoption is already part of the cultural conversation.

MEXC’s Philippine Footprint Beyond the Booth

The booth was one slice of MEXC’s Philippine activity. The exchange’s Q1 2026 quarterly report listed five CSR programs the MEXC Foundation ran during the quarter. “Providing educational resources and direct community support in the Philippines, Australia, Korea, and Syria,” the report reads.

The Philippines sits alongside Australia, Korea, and Syria in that list, four geographies chosen for different reasons. Foundation programs typically pair local-language content with on-the-ground events, the kind of work that takes weeks of lead time before a single social post goes out. Usi Zade’s quote-tweet landed after Philippine Blockchain Week ended, suggesting the Foundation’s Philippine work has its own calendar independent of the CEO’s posts. The shape of that calendar, and whether it lines up with new product launches, is the kind of detail MEXC does not break out in its quarterly reporting.

MEXC’s broader footprint gives the Philippine push context. The exchange says it serves more than 40 million users across 170+ markets, a base it has built around a 0-fee spot model that covers more than 3,000 trading pairs. The Philippines, in this context, is one of the regional growth bets the company has chosen to back with both money and senior-level airtime.

The CEO Behind the Post

The title is new. A May 2025 piece from Sportsbytes covering a Bitget running event in Metro Manila named him Bitget’s chief operating officer. A separate Token2049 Singapore sit-down with BeInCrypto around the same period described him in the same Bitget COO role. The shift between those two titles and the MEXC CEO role points to a move that took place during the second half of 2025 or the first quarter of 2026, a window MEXC has not publicly marked.

In the Q1 2026 report, Usi Zade framed the exchange’s expansion in trader-focused terms. “In fast-moving markets, opportunity doesn’t wait,” he said. “Traders need immediate access to the right instruments, in one place, at the exact moment it emerges.” The quote is about products, not people, but it sits next to a CSR line that includes the Philippines, which is how his June 30 quote-tweet reads as the public end of a multi-month internal build rather than a one-day reaction.

The Quarter That Funded the Expansion

The numbers behind that build came in MEXC’s Q1 2026 report. The exchange said it added 399 new token listings during the quarter and saw its top ten by spot trading volume post an average peak gain of 2,534%. TradFi Futures was the breakout vertical, with listed instruments growing from 71 in January to 115 in March and trading volume surging over 246% across the same span.

Capital flow into the platform kept up with the product push. MEXC said it recorded net capital inflows of approximately $22.97 million in March alone, enough to rank among the top five exchanges on DeFiLlama for that month. Daily spot volume hit $1.999 billion at the same time, with open interest reaching $7.564 billion. The exchange said the average leverage ratio sat at 1.91x, a figure that suggests users were sizing positions carefully.

The metric that matters most for a regional CSR push is the human one. MEXC’s AI tools averaged 138,274 daily active users in Q1, and the MEXC-AI bot answered more than 5.1 million user queries across the quarter. The exchange has also been collecting industry recognition, including the “Fastest Growing Exchange” award from TokenInsight for 2025 after futures and spot volumes jumped more than 130% year-over-year. The 0-fee model across more than 3,000 pairs saved 3.44 million users a total of 1.1 billion USDT in trading costs over the course of the year. The mix of CSR, sponsorships, and a product roadmap heavy on new listings and AI tools is what funds the kind of multi-day booth operation MEXC ran in Manila.

A Market the Rest of Crypto Watches

The Philippines has been on crypto adoption lists for several years. A 2023 BusinessWorld piece reported that the country was posting the highest crypto adoption rates that year, citing data attributed to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. The central bank has continued to tighten the regulatory perimeter, with a 2026 memorandum on Crypto Asset Service Providers (CASPs) laying out risk identification and mitigation measures for BSFIs.

The regulatory tightening has not been a brake on adoption. A 2025 Disruption Banking analysis described the Philippines as “Asia’s Crypto Giant,” with Chainalysis’s 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index placing the country 9th worldwide and TRM Labs ranking it 4th globally. The same analysis estimated roughly 10% of Filipinos, or over 12 million people, engage with cryptocurrency, with the figure projected to reach approximately 12.8 million by 2026. The estimate sits in an analysis piece rather than an official registry, so the headline number is one analyst’s projection rather than a regulator-confirmed count.

Usi Zade’s June 30 quote-tweet reads as the most public-facing signal yet that an exchange with more than 40 million users has decided the Philippine market is worth a CEO’s airtime. The signal is small in absolute terms, six lines, a quote-tweet, a regional wrap-up re-shared.

The next proof point is whether MEXC’s on-the-ground work expands into product. The Q1 report already lists tokenized stocks, a Prediction Market beta, and AI tools as live or launched, none of which are Philippine-specific. A Philippines-tailored rollout would be a louder signal than a CEO quote-tweet, and the foundation work the exchange has already done gives it a base to build from. The MEXC SEA account’s line that this is what the Philippines crypto community “looks like” and the company is “just getting started” sits as the open question MEXC will be measured against over the rest of the year.