Hi Fintech Architects,
In this episode, Lex speaks with Gracy Chen - Bitget’s CEO, who transitioned from a fintech entrepreneur to leading one of the top five global crypto exchanges. Bitget processes $10–20 billion in daily trading volume and serves 120 million users across centralized and decentralized platforms. Its geographic base is mostly in Asia, but it’s expanding into Europe through regulatory compliance and new products like tokenized US stocks, which have already surpassed $20 billion in trading volume.
Bitget differentiates through security features, including a $600 million protection fund, and user acquisition via both brand campaigns (e.g. Messi sponsorship) and local affiliate (KOL) marketing. Looking ahead, Bitget aims to move beyond crypto-native assets toward mass adoption, focusing on product-market fit and offering tokenized real-world assets and enterprise services.
Thanks for your time and attention,
Matt Low 🙌
Key discussion points:
Bitget Is Transitioning Toward Regulatory Compliance and Tokenized Assets
Bitget, historically an offshore crypto exchange, is shifting to a compliance-first strategy in key markets like Europe (e.g., under MiCA). It’s also diversifying its product offering beyond altcoins, including tokenized US stocks and forex, which have already generated $20B in trading volume. This reflects a broader industry trend where crypto platforms aim to integrate with traditional finance and support real-world assets (RWAs).Bitget’s User Acquisition Combines Web2 Financial Discipline with Web3 Community Tactics
Bitget uses a hybrid marketing approach: brand partnerships like the Leo Messi campaign and grassroots affiliate marketing via KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) who earn volume-based rebates. Additionally, local teams are given budget control and tailor acquisition strategies per market. This decentralized yet data-informed model mimics Web2 CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) analysis while leveraging crypto-native community dynamics.Exchanges Are Struggling with Unsustainable Token Launch Models
Gracy Chen criticizes the crypto industry’s overreliance on speculative “narrative-driven” token launches, noting that even well-funded tokens often fail without real product-market fit. Bitget is responding by requiring more tangible utility and sustainability from listed projects and aims to balance value across users, exchanges, and project teams through mechanisms like airdrop campaigns and launch pools with <1% token supply allocated.
Background
Gracy Chen began her career as a TV host and producer for Phoenix TV, one of Asia’s largest media outlets, where she covered international affairs and technology.
She later pivoted into tech entrepreneurship and co-founded a fintech startup in 2016 that offered financial services to freelancers. Gracy also holds a degree in Applied Mathematics from the National University of Singapore and earned her MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.
She became an early investor in several blockchain projects, including BitKeep (now Bitget Wallet), before joining Bitget in 2022 as Managing Director and later rising to CEO in 2023.
👑Related coverage👑
Topics:
Bitget, Bitget Wallet, Bitkeep, Coinbase, Binance, FTX, MetaMask, MicroStrategy, BlackRock, crypto, crypto exchange, token, altcoins, digital assets, tokenized assets, tokenization
Timestamps
1’03: A $300 Revelation: The Unlikely Path to Running a Global Crypto Exchange
4’00: From Offshore to Onshore: Scaling a Global Exchange for 120 Million Users
10’09: Chasing Real Value: How Product Market Fit Outlasts Hype
15’39: Market Structure in Flux: How Speculators Gave Way to Institutions
19’14: Inside the Exchange: How Marketing and Trust Drive User Growth
26’20: Balancing the Books: Navigating User Acquisition in Web3 vs Web2
30’38: Speculation and Signal: How Culture and KOLs Drive Crypto Adoption in Asia
34’11: Fixing the Feedback Loop: Rethinking Token Launches and Expanding Beyond Altcoins
40’42: Beyond the Hype: Building Sustainable Demand for Tokenized Assets
Illustrated Transcript
Lex Sokolin:
Hi everybody, and welcome to today’s conversation. I’m absolutely thrilled to have with us today, Gracy Chen. She is the CEO of Bitget, which is one of the largest global crypto exchanges. And we’re going to have a fantastic conversation. Gracie, welcome to the podcast.
Gracy Chen:
Thank you for having me. Hi everyone.
Lex Sokolin:
Let’s start with how you got involved with Bitget kind of what brought you into this industry. What’s your background?
Gracy Chen:
So, I the first time I heard anything crypto related was obviously like many of us was Bitcoin. So in 2020 sorry 2015. When I was a TV host, I was introduced to Bitcoin by some of my TV network friends and they said you should check out crypto, specifically Bitcoin.
At that time, I think Bitcoin was only traded around $300. And look at where we are today. So, I began by reading the Bitcoin whitepaper and was instantly hooked. I actually studied applied mathematics for my undergrad degree in Singapore National University of Singapore. So, as the mathematical background young adults, I just loved the mathematical beauty in Bitcoin that was like clearly written in the 13 pages. Very clear and simple. Bitcoin whitepaper. So, I was excited by also how democratic this system could be. I was drawn to the way it’s established, this new decentralized ledger that very much criticized a little bit. But, you know, not exactly a white paper, but very much criticized and complimented the traditional centralized financial industry. So, I started to look at not just Bitcoin, but also Ethereum and XRP. And that’s the only three cryptocurrencies that I bought in early days. I also later invested in some crypto startups, including something called BitKeep, which is later rebranded to Bitget Wallet. By that time when I started to know Bitget team, I wasn’t sorry Bitget a big keep was still kept.
It’s a decentralized independent wallet. So, in spring of 2022, some of the bigger team reached out that said Bitget was recruiting for a managing director whose role is very much like a CMO, and they asked me if I know someone. I immediately volunteered myself because I did have ten, seven, seven, eight-ish years background in marketing in web two world. So, I decided to join Bitget in 2022, and that was three years ago. One year ago, actually, one and a half year ago, when the previous CEO of Bitget stepped down, I was also approached by the board whether I want to take that role as the CEO. Then I said yes. So that’s where I am today.
Lex Sokolin:
That’s an amazing journey. I want to dive into a couple of parts of it, but before we do that, for some of our Western audience, can you give the scale of Bitget like, what’s the transaction volume per year? How many users does it have? You know. What kind of products does it offer? Just as an overview.
Gracy Chen:
As a centralized exchange, people look at typically users and trading volume. And also, it can be loosely divided into centralized change or decentralized exchange and the centralized exchange. There are spot market and derivative markets that we are serving specifically. So in either way of spot or derivative, Bitget is typically ranked top five in terms of total trading volume globally. For example, I’m looking at CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap which are two data aggregator websites and many people look into. So right now, Bitget is ranked top six for the centralized exchange spot market volume. And for the derivative it’s eighth. But typically, we are top five again the volume. Right now, the 24-hour volume of Bitget is about 10 billion. Again, this ranges or this volume number ranges by day to day. We have 24-hour volume to typically fall into 10 to 20 billion USD. That’s the total amount of trading that’s happening on Bitget. One of the best exchanges, including liquidity and coin offerings as well as volume together Bitget, as we mentioned earlier, Bitget wallet, which is how I was introduced to the team.
So today Bitget has centralized change component, which we call Bitget exchange as well as decentralized wallet where Bitget wallet earlier we keep are serving. So, in total we serve 120 million users on these two platform. Bitget exchange users are all KYC or bigger wallet users, just like the MetaMask wallet and some other disinterest wallet. Those users may not be KYC, but in total it’s a huge amount of user base that we’re looking at here.
Lex Sokolin:
I don’t know if these numbers are exactly correct, but maybe they’re directionally correct, you know? Compared to Coinbase, the volume that I see on CoinMarketCap is about half the size. But I’m sure that fluctuates. And in terms of people at the company there’s a little bit more over 2,000. Is that right?
Gracy Chen:
Yes. We have 2,200 people just on the centralized exchange side.
Lex Sokolin:
And then in terms of how you think about your operations and your customers, where is the concentration of that volume and those users coming from geographically.
Gracy Chen:
Geographically, more than half, slightly more than half of our users are from Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, even South South Asia, or all sorts of like Asian markets.
But in terms of growth, we see a lot of growth in Europe as well as Latin America, right? Right now, the approaches of all the exchanges are historically important in terms of some exchanges are heading the offshore way. Some exchanges are more heading to the fully compliant way. Some exchanges are fine, are trying to find a balance in between. And of course, strategy shifts when there are especially clear regulatory frameworks coming out in certain markets. For us, we were mostly viewed as an offshore exchange serving the global market, meaning whichever market that we don’t have license. But there is a clear framework, for example, the US, we tend not to serve, by the way. We don’t we do we do not serve the US market. But moving forward, our strategy is more towards the compliant way because in 2025 we just thought, thought that the global market is sorry. The global crypto market is more and more related to the full traditional financial market. So, moving forward, you have to be compliant and you have to be able to provide the services in a compliant way, as well as to some enterprise level kind of B2B service that’s going to really bridge the gap and bring crypto to the mainstream, serving the very small niche.
You know, crypto native users were our previous approach. But strategically, we think we want to be the bridge to for more mass adoption. So geographically we are also developing a lot in especially Europe under Mica. We are applying for license. We want to serve that market fully compliant and strategically. We are more heading towards the more mass adoptions RWA’s UX, which we can definitely chat more into. UX stands for Universal Exchange, by the way.
Lex Sokolin:
I want to spend a little bit more time on kind of the early days and then the consumer profile or the behavioral profile of the users. You know, and you have this fantastic marketing background across entrepreneurship in China. And if you kind of roll back the time to, let’s say, 2018 through 2020, can you paint a picture of who are the early adopters of crypto? Like, why are they doing it? Why are they trading it? You know, and maybe crypto or fintech solutions in general, like 120 million users is a very large footprint.
If we rewind back to the early days where you kind of still having to identify what people want. Tell us about that initial spark. Like what are the personas of the people who are early users and in your career, you targeted?
Gracy Chen:
Just to highlight. I joined Bitget in 2022. Before that, I wasn’t that involved in the crypto space other than being an investor holding some cryptocurrencies. But I did have another interesting background, maybe very relevant to what you are interested in, which is in 2016, the first startup after my journalism career, a very short journalism career. I had, as we mentioned earlier, along experiencing web2 startups, the first startup that I that I co-founded in 20, actually late 2015. So, it’s 2015 2016 ish. That is a fintech company and it still exists today, serving lots of freelancers to provide them with fintech B2B service. Sorry, extra to B2C service. Okay. We can talk about that a slightly more later if that’s relevant. But basically in 2016 I started to build in fintech already.
And I guess that’s another reason why in 2022 when I joined Bitget, although I don’t have that much crypto specific experience, but I did have a few years of fintech startup experience and get to know how this world works. So back to your point. In terms of co-founding a company and find that product market fit. I think that’s probably the most important thing that a co-founding team should do. Should focus on today. This is an issue still in many crypto companies, which rely too much on narrative. Different, you know, layer one, layer two solutions ZK sort of technology. Not necessarily a very appropriate product market fit. Like who exactly are we serving? What specific needs are we serving. But that’s different in Web2 world. You know, there isn’t much room for narrative speculation in Web2. You either make it or your goal. Right? You have to be able to identify your users and provide a top-notch user experience for them. So that’s something I learned, although quite naive, but very important lesson that I learned in my early days of startup.
Lex Sokolin:
So why is that naive? First of all, and then what is narrative speculation mean?
Gracy Chen:
Why is it naive because as a startup, in my humble opinion, as a startup you have to solve a need. It has to be a need, not even something people desire. So, feasibility, viability, desirability of your product is so key in a startup. For example, on very day one of my startup journey, I look at those certain tools like a link canvas, a business plan canvas. Either way, whatever framework you use in a, you know, entrepreneurial entrepreneurship 101 kind of class, it doesn’t really matter which framework do you use, but what matters is you have to look at who is your user. You know, what’s the current solution, what’s the pain points, how do you make money? Things like that. Again, in my opinion, very naive. But when I entered the crypto world, I noticed, especially in early days, you know, the ICO age.
Maybe it’s still work in 2022, 23 kind of bear market with some projects are building and maybe in 24 ish the early bull market. But if you look at 2025, it doesn’t really work anymore. Even if there are tokens who may perform okay or even well, but it’s short term if you don’t have fundamental value, if you are not generating, you know, real utility, you can pump and dump your token price, but you can’t do that sustainably in the long run. There are some recent launch of very highly expected layer ones and layer twos in the past few months, but many of them are in terms of the token price is not as high as early days. Even you even force under their private market investment. You know, some VCs complained about this a lot. I think for the past one year, many crypto industrial people, including projects, VC, SME managers or even exchanges fail. It’s just harder and it’s more and more hard and harder to get users, hard to make money. And in my opinion, you will just become even harder if you don’t have proper product market fit.
Lex Sokolin:
I’m definitely interested in opening up the market structure question, because I think it’s been a drag on markets and projects and so on. Let’s go back to that question of like, there’s not one persona of a target client for a crypto exchange, but if you could paint a picture of like some of the clumps of the types of people that were being targeted in the early days that were adopters.
Gracy Chen:
I think early days, if we’re talking about as early as 2018 that we just started off. Many of the users are highly speculative. They may even consider exchanges or purchasing trading crypto more like gambling, especially if they are trading for example, meme coin, meme coin by default or by definition doesn’t have utility, doesn’t have fundamentals. But there are definitely hypes and speculation and expectation built in, especially when there is some celebrity kind of involvement. Governance officials people like that did a lot of meme coins this year.
So many people come to crypto for that kind of more, more gambling or speculative point of view. Let me take the 2022 to 2024 era, for example. That’s when we see, you know, exchanges like FTX fell down and then ETF went approved in January 2024. So, this is an interesting period of time that the market had a lot of shuffling. What I mean by that shuffling is also relevant to Bitcoin price. You know, 2022 to 2020. Sorry 2020 to 22. That kind of last bull market, the highest pinpoint the highest price of Bitcoin was around 65 K. Today it’s 85 K 88 K. You know changing and moving. But basically, it’s not that different in terms of Bitcoin prices. It’s a 30% up round. But the shuffling Happens in these 4 or 5 years because there are a lot more early retail users sold Bitcoin and then a lot more institutional users ETFs, pension funds, Wall Street dates, digital asset, treasury.
These kind of users become the new holders of Bitcoin. If you look at again to be more specific. MicroStrategy, I think today holds about 3% of the total Bitcoin supply that never exists in 2022. MicroStrategy wasn’t adapting a data strategy in those early days. ETF I bit by Blackrock etc. or these ETFs holds another few you know single digit percentage of bitcoin. So that’s what I mean by the shuffling of the market structure. And for exchanges we are still serving more mainly the retail users. But our institutional, institutional and organizational kind of volume went up a lot. Some of them are market makers. So not necessarily the end users. But we do see a shift from pure retail user more speculation to today a more matured market structure. Have a good balance between retail and institutions.
Lex Sokolin:
So, on the retail side, what’s the average account size and how does a person find out about Bitcoin? Like what are the marketing programs that put the brand in front of them and onboard them? Like what are some of the flows by which people were brought into the exchange?
Gracy Chen:
So, market in terms of account, it could be quite different if we look at, again, VIP clients and just retail users and then institutional clients.
So it could be as small as, you know, 100 bucks USDT just, you know, in a single account. Just purchasing some cryptocurrency. It could be also as high as multi million or a few, a few dozens of millions on average for some high layer, top layer, top tier VIP clients. And then for institutional users. Many of them are market makers, but they are also family officers, VCs, hedge funds who open an account with us. And given that we are going for a more compliant ways in certain markets, I think that that market structure will also shift a bit in those markets in terms of when you are more compliant than definitely more institutional clients and more large tickets. So comfortable of putting their money with you. Then back to your second question how we onboarded our users. This is a definitely a combination of a few activities. It could be offline events that people learn about us, mainly crypto native. But sometimes we go to a fintech conference.
We go to even certain not finance related. For example, maybe this education conference or event that we want to onboard high net worth individuals, etc. So, it could be offline events. It could be unlike campaigns. It could be through some sponsorships and the spokesperson that we have. For example, in late 2022, a major campaign that we had was through Leo Messi actually signed Leo Messi up before the World Cup in 2022. And that’s obviously a very good bet that that before he won the championship, or he and Argentina team won the championship in the World Cup in 2022. It’s much cheaper to sponsor him and then that that sponsorship starting in 2022 ended in 2024 and we had a few other sports budgets, partnership including La Liga, etc. so sport partnership is definitely another one. Media activities, you know, the conversations like what we are having right now hopefully can introduce Bitget to some users who may not know us and build some trust. And other than just simple marketing campaign, I also want to highlight that after 2022 people, when people think about exchanges, they definitely want to look more into security and protection, mainly because of FTX.
So, people will not just, you know, blindly see, okay, they offer the best fee structure. They have a lot of coins available. The user experience is okay, then I just want to use it. They want to make sure that their money won’t be commingled. They want to work with only the top exchanges. And I think that’s one strategic move that we did in 2022 that kind of separates us apart from smaller tier two, tier three exchanges. And one of the turning points for us is that we establish a lot of security and protection methods. For example, we have the second largest centralized change protection fund, which is bigger protection fund today, 600 mil set aside in open wallet where people can check so they know you are a big exchange and when anything bad happened. For example, a hack, although we’ve never had any major hack, but if some users found were stolen or were lost due to not their own fault. We can use the protection fund as an insurance method to accommodate them, and we also publish Proof Reserve Mercury Pool Reserve on a monthly basis.
Be very transparent about users found, not commingled. Set aside every individual you can. You can check that you know, things like that. More and more important in terms of building the trust and onboarding users. So, it’s just something interesting that I think worth highlighting. Other than pure, you know, outgoing marketing campaigns.
Lex Sokolin:
Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, the reason I’m asking is in part because there is this distinction between Web2 and Web3 customer acquisition, where in Web2 fintech people take really deliberate ways to grow their business. You know, it’s like, okay, if I’m trying to bring in an account that’s going to have $1,000 balance, then that thousand-dollar balance might be worth $50 in revenue per year, and the net present value of that might be 300 for a customer lifetime. And so, my customer acquisition cost to get that 300 worth of value is going to be, you know, I can pay 250 or 150 to get that 300. Right. And we see from all of the neobanks that have launched over the last decade, like we’ve seen the numbers, we know that it can cost anywhere between 10 to $50 per user to acquire a neobank user.
And then, you know, profitability in the early days was challenged. So, there was lots of kind of conversation about, can you scale up to ten, 20, 30 million people? And if you do that, is it even going to be profitable on the margin in terms of lifetime value? That’s the type of conversation that I’m familiar with on the Web2 fintech side, you know, and then on the web three side, you know, when I was the chief Marketing Officer ConsenSys, and our MetaMask wallet grew from 250,000 users to about 10 million users. Now it has about 100 million users, and we were never really able to get down to the economics of a Web3 or a crypto user. Like, you couldn’t really spend $10 in ads, and then no on the other side that you could have somebody that was using your app and that you knew you were commercializing somehow. So part of what I’m trying to get to with the question is when you’re running like an industrial scale exchange like Bitcoin and you have this enormous user footprint, like, do you feel like you have control over user acquisition through the sort of like financial approach, or is it much more you do heavy brand marketing like you described through partnerships and so on, and then the brand marketing is really there and the rest is organic interest in the crypto assets. And people sort of just like discover you.
Gracy Chen:
That’s a very good question. I’m glad to know that you had this similar background, that this whole all those numbers makes more and more sense when we’re discussing them. You’re right. Actually, some sometimes we do rely. So, it’s a good combination of the brand marketing then the more financial driven kind of marketing. So, I was. The previous examples were mainly brand marketing. And you are right about that. And then in terms of the more financial data kind of marketing, what there are few metrics we look at, number one is when it’s an online campaign through a third party like Facebook or Google, it’s slightly easier to capture what’s your investment and what’s your return. And that also varies a lot in various markets. So how we work is we do have very specific 15 sort of different teams globally. And they each cover a market jurisdiction wise so that they know that specific market better. How I as a CEO is, I look at the specific data in that market in terms of our yearly basis, how much we are spending and what’s the user base, what’s the new user base, what’s the total trading volume? What’s the what’s the trading volume per user per month? What’s the door, what’s the daily average asset number of cases, etc.
So, all these metrics and we kind of adjusted along the way. But when we decide on the budget it’s very much like I have a specific budget set aside. And then you guys can decide how you want to spend the budget at this local team, because in certain countries they just can’t do online marketing. And then there are certain countries that that the barrier is not about marketing. The barrier is an off ramp. So, they may, you know, and then in certain countries it’s the VIP clients driving the user base or the growth rather than pure retail. So, they might need to do more VIP targeted small scale face to face events. So, this can be very diversified in each jurisdiction. But how we manage the whole company and work together is we have this structure, organizational structure that is more like a matrix. So, each individual local team, they have their own PR team, they have their own event. they have their own product, team or product support and this small little team. They both collaborate on the horizontal line, maybe to the local in the local leader and then for the vertical line.
They may also report or collaborate with the global team of product, global team of marketing, global team of technology, etc. So, the local team actually has a lot of power over the specific activities that they drive.
Lex Sokolin:
I think from an organizational design perspective, like you have to be very on the ground. So exactly what you’re saying makes sense. One more question on this. Just because for me, it’s kind of infinitely interesting, is that in parts of Asia, the investing behavior is it’s a lot more speculative. You know, and you mentioned kind of hyper gambling and meme trading then like asset allocation or more conservative approaches that you see in the West. And then there’s also the concept of like key opinion leaders. Like I feel like in the US and UK you’ve got financial advisors and you might have, you know, like talking heads on TV, but you don’t really have calls in WeChat group or telegram groups that are coordinating investing behavior. Can you talk about that cultural aspect of how people interact with crypto as well?
Gracy Chen:
So yes, we do work with KOLs a lot, and most of the cases we give KOLs a rebate of the volume of the profits that we are earning, which is very typical of how not just crypto, but the world interacts with the KOLs.
And again, this decision, we also rely on our local team especially they need to make the connection, maintain a good relationship, solve their problem if there are any, not just for the chaos, but also for the users that they brought to us. So QR marketing is a very typical way of exchanges increasing their user base as well as their volume. We see the speculation. You write that more from more from Asia, but also in terms of new token launch. That’s like listing different cryptocurrencies. That’s a good way of bringing new users. One advantage about Bitget is we actually have a pretty good balance between offering new tokens, but not as many as some other exchanges who may have listed or already like 3,000 tokens. Not to mention the fun kind of business model where 1 million users can 1 million different cryptocurrencies can come up suddenly. We do have about 700 cryptocurrencies available on our platform much bigger or much, much bigger base than. For example, Binance and Coinbase, which have about 200-ish.
So, there are lots of users who probably can’t find certain tokens in other platforms, and they came to us. So, when we are listing a new token, that’s another way of onboarding users and also CL marketing. They also like to promote certain tokens which are available on you exclusively. For example, one major token that’s launching this week is Mona. Mona is available in the Bitget App, but not Binance and OKEx. So many of the Asia users who may have all these different exchange platforms available, and they want to trade monad, they typically what should we get because it’s available on us, but not some, not on some other platforms and will promote that as well.
Lex Sokolin:
Got it. Okay. Yeah. So, it’s kind of like a version of affiliate marketing, but with local communities. I want to revisit the market comment you had before around the sort of like market structure between venture investors, early token investors and exchanges over the last two years. That has put some pressure on the whole model. And, you know, in particular sort of the caricature of this is that, you know, venture investors are bidding up tokens to really high private valuations.
Then these tokens launch on exchanges and then they do poorly. And its sort of just like sells off. And post-launch investors have a bad user experience. And so, I feel like there’s been like a really weird and not super constructive feedback loop between exchanges and pre-launch investors and retail. What do you think can be done to or what has been done to improve this dynamic and, you know, are there good and bad examples that you’ve seen?
Gracy Chen:
Well, I would divide this question into maybe two dimensions. One is if we still focus on the current more crypto native market, you know, how to strive this balance between all these different market structures so that there is a win win situation rather than a lose lose situation? Typically, among three parties that I want to highlight, which is exchanges, crypto projects and users, if we are looking at a new token listing and then the second dimension that we can dive deeper into later is probably if we zoom out a little bit. Crypto native sort of tokens is an existing market.
Is there any other market that could be valuable for us to tap into that? That is not necessarily a more zero-sum game. Right. So that’s I think that’s two ways of looking at this question. if we look at the first part, the first dimension still focus on crypto market, specifically what we are trying to do, for example, through our listing team and operational team, is that when we launch a token, we try to get a small percentage, usually less than single. Less than 1% sort of their token available from the project to AirDrop or to the launch pool for the users to gather with a lot of marketing campaigns to drive the awareness of this token and trading behavior of this token so that there are more users can know, this project can interact with the protocol. Of course, if it’s a meme coin, if it’s a layer one, layer two project, or if it’s a game five project, the kind of interaction can be very different, but the goal is to bring value to the projects as well as users can go value because they can get AirDrop, they can do launch pool. And then as an exchange platform, we create this win win situation.
Lex Sokolin:
You know, selfishly from an investor point of view, especially like institutional investor point of view, at what stage is it reasonable to participate.
Gracy Chen:
If we are talking about angel investor or even seed around of investor or VCs? I by the way, I also did some investments myself as an angel. I think for the past few years, 2 or 3 years, most of the projects that we invest in. And I’m pretty sure this is not just me, not sure if you feel the same, but definitely lots of VCs or angel investors will feel it’s just very hard to make money. Most of the projects are actually losing money, And I think the key thing there is the altcoins kind of pricing is very different from early days. You have to, again, have a very strong product market fit and a very dedicated team building on that, and then you can have a high token price sustainably. Again, pure speculation and just narrative.
Even, you know, this project invested in by A16Z sort of like very good fancy background, you know. However, MIT grads not necessarily work anymore. So as an investor, I feel it’s quite hard to make money. Probably not worth the effort than just holding, you know, buy and holding your bitcoin. sorry to say that, but that’s just how I feel economically, financially in this cycle. But another way is also, you know, for us, as it’s change, we want to zoom out and think about globally, what are some other opportunities that lies ahead. I think there are two that I’m personally very interested in. And Bitget exchange or our ecosystem partners are very interested in. One is stablecoin. Another one is RWAs of for example, US stocks, tokenized US stocks, tokenized commodity, tokenized forex, etc. that we are also building on as a platform because cryptocurrency, you know, those 700 altcoins that we offer together with Bitcoin theorem is what we started off with.
But today, with very good infrastructure around RWAs, we don’t necessarily need to only offer altcoins. We can offer US stocks tokenized, US stocks we can offer. Tokenized forex, which for us is the part of the growth assets that we are looking into and may also have more long-term sustainable value. Especially many of those projects like M7 in the US do have very strong fundamentals and very strong trading volume. Yeah. So that’s a that’s another market we’re looking at for to offer to the crypto users. Meaning not necessarily just trade cryptocurrencies altcoins but also swaps that they can look into.
Lex Sokolin:
All makes sense. My last question will be of course about the future of Bitget, and I’ll ask it through the lens of product development and product preferences. You know, and I think we started talking about buying spot. So, owning large crypto coins right. Bitcoin, Ethereum and so on and just purchasing it and holding it and then the markets evolved into derivatives, which largely are perpetual in crypto. And then there is the whole sort of swath of DeFi opportunities across lending and yield and stablecoin yield.
And you’ve mentioned tokenized stocks as well. You know, market makers have very successful businesses around exchanges going forward. What are the places that are drawing the most consumer demand? And I know that tokenized equities are very interesting as a new product line, haven’t quite scaled up yet. But there are product lines that have growing demand today. And so what do you see as the things that your clients are most likely to adopt over the next few years?
Gracy Chen:
Again, we talked about some of them already, by the way. I think for examples like tokenized US stocks, although the trading volume of US stocks began is not as high as the altcoins or cryptocurrencies in general, but it’s also growing very fast. I think we just passed like what, 20 billion in terms of total trading volume over there. But recently. So that’s just the number that that was zero about a month ago. So, the growth there is quite strong. And also, we see some other competitors like Binance also adapted the tokenized US stocks yesterday.
So, some of the competitors are also picking up. For this specific asset class. And it’s again not just US stocks. It’s a lot of other traditional financial assets we are looking into, which is a multi-trillion market by default. And in our opinion, many of those assets can be tokenized. Many of the current traditional structure when it goes to cross-border transactions when it goes to supply chain fintech solutions. When it goes to the current stablecoins use in smaller countries, and then when it goes to maybe two big kinds of services, are thriving and has a lot of opportunities. But also, we need to know that these sectors, it’s not like very sexy, fancy, quick money kind of project or sector. It’s actually like running a marathon. You really need to build a strong team, provide very good UI UX to your either be customer or see kind of end customer. Either way, you have to run a marathon and be, you know, just step by step, build something there. It’s not about telling a story and oof like rocket launched.
At least we don’t think that way. Moving forward, anything that has strong product market fit, you know, really can make money solving a pain points. That’s where we are heading to as an organization. So those examples like stablecoin are always to be services actually makes a lot more sense for us moving forward.
Lex Sokolin:
Fantastic. Thank you so much Gracy for joining us today.
Gracy Chen:
Thank you.
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