The Midas Effect: How a Turkish App Gave 3.5 Million Investors Access to US Markets

Five years ago, the idea that 3.5 million Turkish retail investors would be actively trading US equities from their phones would have seemed far-fetched. Turkey's domestic brokerage landscape was oriented almost entirely toward the BIST, foreign-currency restrictions made offshore investing cumbersome, and the handful of Turkish funds offering international exposure charged steep fees for the privilege. Then came Midas. The app, which launched in 2020 and grew explosively through word of mouth and social media marketing, offered something no Turkish financial product had managed before: a clean, mobile-first interface that let ordinary investors buy fractional shares of Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and hundreds of other US-listed stocks for a flat per-trade commission. By the end of 2025, Midas claimed 3.5 million registered users and reported processing hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly trading volume routed to US exchanges. For a generation of young Turkish investors who grew up watching US tech stocks dominate global headlines, Midas did not just offer a product. It offered access to a market they had been locked out of.

The architecture behind Midas is worth understanding, because it is not unique to Turkey. The company's Turkish entity holds a technology services licence. The actual brokerage function, including custody, execution, and settlement of US equity trades, is performed by an offshore partner domiciled in a jurisdiction common to cross-border fintech platforms. The Turkish user sends an order through the Midas app, which transmits it to the offshore broker, which routes it to a US execution venue. This structure is essentially identical to how retail trading apps operate across emerging markets, from Brazil's Avenue Securities to India's INDmoney to South Africa's EasyEquities. In each case, a local-facing technology company partners with an offshore brokerage to bridge the gap between domestic investors and foreign markets. The model exists because most emerging-market regulatory frameworks were not designed with cross-border retail equity trading in mind. Building the full stack domestically, a locally licenced broker with direct access to US exchanges and full compliance with both SEC and local regulations, would take years and tens of millions of dollars in capital. The offshore partnership model lets fintech companies move faster and reach consumers sooner, which is precisely what Midas did.

The question now is how Turkey's regulatory landscape evolves to accommodate the demand that Midas has revealed. The 3.5 million users on the platform are a signal that Turkish retail investors want global market access, and they want it at a price and convenience level that traditional domestic products have not provided. Turkey is not alone in grappling with this. India's SEBI has introduced a liberalised remittance scheme framework that allows domestic fintech apps to offer regulated overseas investing. Brazil's CVM has created specific licence categories for platforms facilitating cross-border trades. In each case, regulators have moved to bring offshore-structured platforms into a clearer domestic regulatory perimeter, not by blocking them but by creating frameworks that preserve consumer access while adding transparency around execution quality, fee disclosure, and investor protection. Turkey's SPK has signalled interest in a similar direction, and industry participants expect clearer guidance on cross-border retail trading platforms in the coming regulatory cycle. For Midas and its users, the likely outcome is not restriction but formalisation: a regulatory framework that preserves the access and convenience that made the app successful while adding the disclosure and oversight standards that come with serving millions of retail investors. The democratisation of global market access that Midas represents is not a problem to be solved. It is an achievement to be built upon.