Stocktwits Jumps On The Crypto Bandwagon

By: forbes - crypto & blockchain|2025/05/12 20:30:12

Howard Lindzon, cofounder and CEO of Stocktwits, at MoneyConf 2018 in Dublin. (Photo By Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images) Stocktwits is launching its boldest expansion in years with Cryptotwits, an offshoot of its 17-year-old social media platform for traders and investors, now with a focus on digital assets. This isn’t just a product update. It’s what prompted founder Howard Lindzon’s return to the CEO chair after an eight-year hiatus, and a bet that the same formula that once worked for equities can resonate with the crypto crowd. He left the post in 2016 after nearly a decade at the helm, thinking someone else might steer the company better. But by 2024, dissatisfied with its drift toward brokerage, he decided to come back. An early investor in Robinhood and eToro, Lindzon believed Stocktwits had missed the window to compete with them. Shortly after his return early last year, the company sold its 15,000+ brokerage accounts to Public. “I thought, let’s just focus on what we do well—the ‘degenerate’ betting economy, crypto, having fun—and then AI will make our data more useful,” he says. “It’s taken about a year for the vision to happen.” Lindzon, 59, has a whole spiel about the “degenerate economy.” What was once considered irresponsible behavior—speculative trading, high-risk bets, meme stocks and coins—has been normalized by a generation raised on smartphones, gamified finance apps and commission-free platforms. He even created a “Degenerate Economy” Index composed of stocks like Robinhood, Coinbase, Reddit as well as bitcoin. It’s up 38% over the past year. “I do not endorse crypto,” Lindzon says. “I don’t endorse 99% of the stuff that kids are playing with that they don’t understand. But I believe that these products are coming whether we like them or not. So we better learn how to trade them.” Cryptotwits is Stocktwits’ answer to this new reality. It features more than 17,000 coin pages, proprietary indicators that blend message volume with trader sentiment and customizable watchlists. Rug-pull and FUD scores are on the way to help users avoid dubious projects. An integration with Gemini enables an easy navigation to trading dozens of popular cryptocurrencies, while Grayscale will co-sponsor a new Stocktwits show offering bite-sized market insights. Additional launch partners include crypto tracker CoinGecko, payments provider MoonPay, Alto CryptoIRA and Helix App. All of that data may be valuable, but much of crypto’s social activity already happens on X, in Discord servers, Telegram chats and bottom-of-the-barrel shitcoin groups. Lindzon isn’t blind to it. “Hats off to Telegram and Twitter (X), but that’s just an opportunity for Stocktwits, for this next generation of curious people who are already here and just discovering crypto,” he says. “People still use Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Apple Stocks. It’s a huge white space, and we believe it’s just the beginning.” The traction helps make the case. Since Lindzon’s return, Stocktwits says monthly active users are up 20%. The total user base now exceeds 10 million, primarily aged 25 to 35. It’s not X-level scale, but it’s not nothing. And in Lindzon’s view, you don’t need 100 million users to matter. He sees room for a platform that lets people talk about crypto without diving headfirst into the deep end of the degen pool. Stocktwits’ relatively strict moderation and 17-year-long history, in his view, are trust factors. The challenge, of course, is that much of the "degenerate economy" thrives on precisely the kind of unfettered, often toxic behavior that Stocktwits tries to filter. Can a platform that prides itself on rules and fighting bots truly capture the zeitgeist of a market that often glorifies anonymous founders and treats rug-pulls as a cost of doing business? “Everybody’s gone for the fast buck. Everybody can now be Goldman Sachs,” quips Lindzon. “And that’s not going to end. Nancy Pelosi is trading stocks (she has consistently denied this). Trump’s got a Trump coin. The nihilism, or the degeneracy, is coming straight from the White House. Platforms like us, and hopefully X, and Telegram, and other companies that we’ve inspired will put up more guard rails because the government's not going to help us.”

-- Price

On June 9, The Kobeissi Letter, citing Goldman Sachs data, reported that global investors are selling South Korean stocks at an unusually rapid pace. In the latest trading session, foreign investors sold about $801 million worth of Kospi constituent stocks again; total foreign outflows last week reached about $10 billion, and the market has been in net foreign selling on nearly every trading day over the past month. According to the data cited in the report, foreign investors have sold about $75 billion worth of South Korean stocks so far this year. Meanwhile, South Korean retail and institutional investors together recorded roughly $69 billion in net buying over the same period, suggesting that the market’s main buying support has come from domestic capital rather than returning overseas funds. The information currently disclosed still mainly comes from The Kobeissi Letter’s retelling and Goldman Sachs data summaries, while public details on the statistical period and the specific definition of “selling” remain relatively limited.

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In the fast-moving digital asset ecosystem, derivatives platforms face an extreme architectural test. High-leverage futures markets demand more than just standard security—they require absolute operational precision, zero-latency matching engines, and ironclad structural scalability, all while navigating intense market volatility.

As global platforms scale to meet these demands, the industry is shifting away from rigid, monolithic setups toward a more agile, "decoupled" infrastructure philosophy.

The Blueprint for High-Volume Copy Trading

For elite global exchanges like WEEX (founded in 2018), this architectural choice becomes critical when scaling high-volume retail features like social copy trading. When thousands of users automatically mirror the real-time strategies of elite traders simultaneously, it triggers sudden, monumental spikes in concurrent transactional volume.

To prevent execution latency or settlement bottlenecks during these peak volatility events, a platform's primary engine must remain entirely dedicated to risk management, copy-trade synchronization, and order matching.

The Architectural Rule: New-generation platforms must separate front-end user execution engines from heavy backend infrastructural overhead to eliminate operational friction.

By separating these layers, platforms can maintain complete sovereignty over their trading environments and user experiences while strategically aligning with institutional-grade infrastructure ecosystems. This strategic framework allows modern exchanges to leverage advanced Digital Asset Custody infrastructure such as Cobo’s behind the scenes, ensuring that backend wallet management scales elastically alongside trading spikes.

Capitalizing on Market Momentum and 400× Leverage

In a derivatives arena where platforms offer up to 400× leverage on perpetual contracts, capital efficiency and market agility are core business metrics. To capture market momentum, an exchange needs the ability to rapidly expand its asset offerings, supporting everything from legacy crypto assets to sudden, trending altcoins across a massive library of trading pairs.

Adopting a flexible, scalable Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS) solution such as Cobo’s could completely rewrite the development timeline for high-growth exchanges. Instead of spending months of engineering capital building out custom backend wallet architectures for every new blockchain network, platforms can deploy localized infrastructure in days.

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A Mature Foundation for Growth

The synergy between trusted infrastructure ecosystems and global trading platforms represents the natural evolution of a maturing crypto market. As WEEX continues to scale its global spot and derivatives offerings for over 6 million users, adopting robust backend paradigms proves that platforms no longer have to compromise between cutting-edge trading velocity and uncompromised structural security.

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