Gate Token (GT)

Gate Token (GT), also written GateToken, is the exchange token of Gate, the crypto exchange known until 2025 as Gate.io. It cuts trading fees for customers, pays the network charges on GateChain and on Gate Layer, the exchange's own blockchains, and is bought back and destroyed with part of the company's profits. Its maximum supply is 300 million tokens, a figure that has been shrinking through regular burns.

GT is one of the few exchange tokens that has its own base-layer chain as well as an exchange behind it, putting it alongside BNB (BNB) and OKB (OKB). Like them, it is issued and managed by the exchange's own group of companies rather than by an independent foundation.

Think of a shopping centre that issues its own gift cards. The cards buy goods at a discount, and they are also the only way to pay at the centre's car park and on its little road train. Every few months the centre's owners buy some cards back with part of their earnings and feed them into a shredder that anyone can watch.

GT plays all three roles. Traders on Gate use it for cheaper fees, people sending transactions on Gate's blockchains spend small amounts of it as fees, and the scheduled buybacks keep reducing the number in existence. Like any store card, its usefulness rests on the shopping centre: if fewer people visit, there is less reason to hold the card.

The exchange began in China in 2013 under the name Bter and was renamed Gate.io in 2017. In April 2019 it raised about $64 million through a sale of "Gate Points" that converted into GT, GT was adopted as the exchange's main platform token in March 2020 and also became the native coin of GateChain, a public blockchain built by the company. GateChain's design included vault accounts, which hold outgoing transfers for a waiting period so that an owner with a separate recovery key can cancel them, a feature meant to limit losses when a private key is stolen. Gate was also among the first large exchanges to publish a Merkle-tree proof of reserves, starting in 2020.

In May 2025 the company adopted the single brand name Gate and the domain gate.com. On 25 September 2025 it launched Gate Layer, a layer 2 network built with the OP Stack software developed for Optimism (OP), compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and settling to GateChain. GT is the only gas token on Gate Layer, which launched alongside Gate Perp DEX, a decentralized exchange for perpetual futures, and Gate Fun, a launchpad for new tokens. The aim was to give GT a role in on-chain trading as well as on the exchange, following the path taken by other exchanges that built their own networks.

Gate says it uses part of its trading profits for quarterly buybacks of GT, and GateChain also destroys part of each transaction's fee, a design similar to Ethereum's fee burn. Together these are often called a dual deflationary model. Progress is usually expressed as the share of the maximum supply already burned:

• $p$ is the percentage of the cap that has been destroyed.
• $B$ is the cumulative number of GT burned.
• $300{,}000{,}000$ is GT's maximum supply.

Gate reported more than 180 million GT burned by the third quarter of 2025, so $p = \frac{180{,}000{,}000}{300{,}000{,}000} \times 100\% = 60\%$. In other words, at most about 120 million GT could remain. Burned tokens are sent to a burn address that no one controls.

• Trading fees. GT gives discounts on fees on the Gate exchange.
• Gas. It pays gas fees on GateChain and Gate Layer.
• Staking. GT is staked to help secure GateChain and Gate Layer.
• Token launches. Holding GT gives access to Gate's sales of new tokens and reward programmes.
• Investment. Many holders buy GT as a way to follow the fortunes of the Gate business, whose trading volumes drive the buybacks.

Gate operates through several regional companies, and its European business has sought authorization under the EU's MiCA rules. Its global platform has drawn warnings from regulators in countries where it is not licensed: Italy's securities regulator blocked access to its website in December 2021 and Spain's issued a warning in February 2022. In 2024 Gate stopped serving customers in Japan and withdrew its application for a crypto trading licence in Hong Kong.

As with other exchange tokens, critics point to the company's control over buybacks, supply data and the networks GT runs on. Activity on GateChain has been modest next to larger chains, so much of GT's demand comes from the exchange rather than from its blockchain. Burn totals are reported by Gate itself, and while burn transactions can be checked on-chain, the profit figures that set the size of each buyback are not independently audited.

• Gate
• GateChain