From VIP to VVIP: We Changed the Ruler, Not the Ranking

 

Earlier this year, we rebuilt our VIP program and relaunched it as VVIP. I want to explain how the new system works, and why we designed it the way we did. The why starts with a weekend in February.

 

February 28 this year was a Saturday.

 

Every major traditional market was shut. The situation in the Middle East deteriorated sharply, and over the weeks that followed Brent crude went from the low-to-mid $70s to above $100, eventually approaching $120. Equities wouldn't open until Monday. Most futures and FX desks were dark too. For investors who needed liquidity immediately, whether to cover a margin call or simply to get flat before whatever came next, the practical choices narrowed sharply to markets that were still trading.

 

Bitcoin's drawdown over those two days wasn't especially large. It had already fallen from above $90,000 to around $65,000 in the preceding weeks, driven by several things at once. Easing expectations kept getting pushed out, technology names were under pressure, and institutional money had been flowing out. Very little of it had to do with the Gulf.

 

I paid less attention to the price than to what a liquidity squeeze like that means for the people who need to act inside it.

 

 

Gold was the part I did not expect.

 

By the textbook, a geopolitical shock plus an energy spike should have sent it straight up. Instead it lost more than ten percent over the course of March. Part of the answer was demand for dollar liquidity. Higher oil prices also pushed inflation and rate expectations higher, strengthening the dollar and raising the opportunity cost of holding gold.

 

I think that breaks an assumption this industry has been running on for years.

 

We are trained to ask what someone holds. Almost every framework we use for analysing a trader is built on that. But in a genuine liquidity squeeze, what you hold answers only half of it. The other half is whether you can move it when you need to.

 

And mobility does not always come free. In many conventional VIP systems, moving capital can also mean giving up status, fee benefits or other privileges. The more volatile the market becomes, the more flexibility users need. That is also when a static tiering model creates the most friction.

 

That stretch of the market hit VIP users at a number of exchanges. Many cut positions quickly, and their tiers fell along with their balances. In the weeks that followed, several platforms launched campaigns to win those users back. Those campaigns reflected something most people in this business already know. A few days of heavy selling says very little about what a user is actually worth. That period made it very clear to me that the model itself had to change.

 

 

Many conventional VIP programs still rely heavily on asset balances, rolling trading volume or similar financial thresholds. The mechanics differ from platform to platform, but the underlying logic is similar. A small set of financial metrics is asked to stand in for a much broader relationship.

 

When markets are quiet, balances barely move and a threshold rarely bites. When they turn violent, balances swing and users need to act quickly. That is when a static model starts working against the people it is meant to reward.

 

Someone who concluded the risk was no longer manageable, and who wanted to halve a position or move funds out and wait, may well have been making a perfectly defensible risk-management decision. What a system like that tells them instead is that doing so may move their tier, their pricing and their benefits along with it. The result can be an unnecessary trade-off, with risk management on one side and status on the other.

 

I don't think that trade-off should exist at all.

 

What worries me more is the sequence it can produce. In a violent market, balances can fall first. If tier status is tied to those balances, status can fall with them. If lower status then means higher trading costs, the user's room to manage risk narrows further. And the loop tends to begin at the worst possible time, when the user is least equipped to handle it.

 

Platforms that lean on win-back campaigns after a drawdown are treating the outcome and leaving the incentive that produced it in place. If recovery campaigns become the remedy, the underlying design deserves another look.

 

 

Account structure has changed over the past two years.

 

A single account today might hold crypto, tokenized precious metals, index exposure and equity exposure at once, with money moving between them several times a day. Hedging across markets used to be an institutional privilege. It is now ordinary.

 

Under those conditions, reading a balance at one moment and assigning someone a label gets less accurate every quarter. The balance is a snapshot. The behaviour that actually describes the person happens between snapshots.

 

Many conventional VIP programs also tie status directly to fees, so a higher tier buys a lower rate. In practice that turns VIP into a pricing ladder.

 

Which raises a more basic question. If VIP status is mostly a pricing ladder, what is it actually recognising about a user?

 

 

On April 2 we launched our VVIP system, built around a dynamic score we call M-Score.

 

It evaluates a user's ongoing relationship with the platform across multiple dimensions, including trading activity, platform engagement, account security and asset-related factors. New users enter the system at 350 points after their first full day, with scores settled daily and reflected the following day.

 

The program itself has three parts: the M-Score, the tier it places a user in, and the privileges that come with that tier. There are three tiers, Standard, Premier and Elite, and users move up automatically as their score improves. Higher tiers carry greater privileges and stronger protection, which means the users who engage most deeply are also the best supported when markets turn.

 

Pricing is also where VVIP departs from the conventional model. The tiers change the privileges and protection a user gets. They do not determine the base trading fee.

 

What changed is the structure of the assessment.

 

Assets still matter. The difference is that they no longer tell the whole story. Account balance is no longer a single threshold that determines a user's tier; it is one factor among several in a multi-dimensional assessment.

 

Which is why I also won't promise that a score can never fall when assets move. It can. Moving funds out may affect it. But in a multi-dimensional, continuously updated structure, weakness in one input can be offset by strength elsewhere. Your trading activity, platform engagement and account security all still count.

 

That is a weaker claim than "we don't look at your assets." It is also the true one, and it changes the March problem. Reducing exposure can still affect the score. It just no longer lets one balance threshold decide everything.

 

 

One thing we did not do was flatten everything.

 

There's a line in this industry suggesting that a genuinely user-first platform would treat everyone identically. I don't believe that, and we didn't build it that way. Users who engage more deeply should get more; that's ordinary in any service business.

 

What we changed isn't whether to differentiate between users. It is how we understand them. We moved from a narrow snapshot of assets or volume toward a broader view of what they hold, how they trade and how they engage with the platform. A balance is a moment. A relationship is not defined by one metric in one market cycle.

 

 

I don't want to present this as finished.

 

Any transparent scoring system creates the risk that people optimise for the metric instead of the behaviour it was meant to recognise. There is no final answer to that design problem. Weight the inputs too simply and you get "whoever trades most wins." Make it too complex and you get a black box. That balance will keep evolving.

 

We published the scoring inputs and tier thresholds anyway, because a scoring system users cannot inspect is not much of an improvement on the static models it was designed to move beyond.

 

I am certain of one thing, though.

 

The relationship between a trading platform and its users doesn't reveal itself in a bull market. Everyone is a good customer in a bull market. It shows up on a weekend like the last one in February, when only a handful of markets are open and someone has to make a decision that is correct and uncomfortable at the same time. In that moment, the rules are either on their side or against them. Being user-centric is the most important thing we do at MEXC, and moments like that are where it actually gets tested. VVIP is our attempt to build it into the rules themselves.

 

No one should have to choose between selling on Saturday and keeping their standing on Monday.

 

 

Vugar Usi is CEO of MEXC, where he leads the company's global strategy, growth, and long-term vision to build a more open and inclusive digital asset ecosystem. Prior to joining MEXC, he served as Chief Operating Officer at Bitget, where he played a key role in expanding the platform's global operations and user base. With more than 15 years of experience in marketing, communications, and brand strategy, Vugar has worked with leading global organizations including Carlsberg, Facebook, Coca-Cola, and Twitter. He holds a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University and serves as an advisor to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on minority issues.