Bitget CEO New Year Open Letter: Embracing Innovation and Riding the Bull Market

25-01-06 18:47

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Source: Bitget

Dear Bitget Team, Partners, and Users:

The just-ended year 2024 has witnessed many important moments in our crypto jungle adventure together: At the beginning of the year, the much-anticipated Bitcoin spot ETF was approved by the U.S. SEC, providing more opportunities for high-net-worth users, institutional users, and retail investors to buy Bitcoin, marking the increasing influence of traditional finance on the crypto asset space. On April 19, Bitcoin halved as scheduled, and later Ethereum also welcomed an ETF. By the end of the year, the U.S. presidential election, with its crypto-friendly policies, became a focus, and the final election results further boosted market confidence. In early December, Bitcoin broke through $100,000 for the first time, stablecoin market cap exceeded $200 billion in the same month, and the crypto industry reached a new peak.

This tumultuous year, with its challenges and rewards, has been unforgettable. 2024 was also significant for me personally, as I took on the role of Bitget CEO in May, being able to stand on a higher platform to lead an outstanding team and make greater changes. For Bitget, this year has also been full of challenges and achievements. We now have over 45 million users, firmly establishing our position as the world's fourth-largest crypto exchange. Our ability to maintain rapid growth is due to doing the following things right:

Team Upgrade

In 2024, our team has grown significantly, especially with the addition of some executives: Chief Legal Officer (CLO) Hon Ng has helped us build a more professional legal and compliance team; Chief Business Officer (CBO) Min Lin has accelerated our global business expansion; Vice President in charge of listing Lawrence, a graduate of the London School of Economics (LSE) who has worked at two top exchanges, joined Bitget in September this year to lead the team in seeking quality assets. In addition, we welcomed Xie Jiayin last Christmas, leading our Chinese-language business and being the best Chinese-language "customer service."

As the saying goes, "A good bird chooses the tree to nest, a wise minister chooses the monarch to serve," the selection of top talents in the crypto jungle is particularly diverse. They choose a place that suits them best to settle and a company with the most potential to work for. I am delighted that these individuals who have joined Bitget alongside us can leverage their strengths, focus on results, have a vision to change the world, and are long-term thinkers.

Listing Strategy

Starting from 2023 by restarting spot trading and making it a development focus to support more high-quality crypto projects, Bitget has been actively expanding the diversity of spot assets. As of December 30, 2024, Bitget supports over 800 cryptocurrency assets.

Bitget's research and listing team pays close attention to industry trends. For example, during the TON ecosystem outbreak and Meme craze in 2024, they rapidly screened and listed relevant top-tier coins. Non-initial spot assets like PNUT and ACT listed on Binance in 2024 were first listed on Bitget by over 70%. This year, we also selected 21 Launchpool projects to reward users, including star projects like ZK, ENA, CATS, SWELL, among others. The average annualized return rate of all Bitget Launchpool projects in 2024 was 89%, with the highest return rate reaching 329%.

BGB

Our platform's token, BGB, had an outstanding performance this year, reaching up to ten times its value compared to the beginning of the year and increasing over a hundred times since its issuance. BGB has truly become a hundredfold coin. As the core of the entire Bitget exchange ecosystem, holding BGB brings benefits such as fee discounts, zero withdrawal fees, participation in Launchpool coin mining, and VIP status upgrades. Furthermore, we recently announced the merger of BWB with BGB, making BGB the sole ecosystem token for both the Bitget exchange and Bitget Wallet. On December 27, Bitget released a new version of the whitepaper, outlining a buyback and burn plan and subsequently executing the first burn, destroying 8 billion tokens in one go, accounting for 40% of the total supply, laying a more solid foundation for 2025.

Product Iteration

This year, Bitget not only released multiple product updates but also launched many eye-catching features. For example, pre-market trading provides users with a market to invest in high-quality assets ahead of time, and LaunchX is a new coin subscription platform designed for the Web3 community. Next, we will introduce features such as unified accounts, API upgrades and financial tools for institutional clients, lending services, and deeper integration of AI, all aimed at the concept of "Trade Smarter," making trading more intelligent and efficient. Behind all of this, we cannot forget our tireless technical product team, a big shoutout to them.

2025 Outlook: Innovate Continuously, Ride the Bull Market Waves

By 2025, we plan to focus on consolidating our existing products and services, while also developing three key areas of our business: the Institution and VIP Business, BGB and PayFi Business, and continuing to set industry standards in security and compliance.

Institution and VIP Business: Towards a More Diverse User Base

Whether it's a market maker, broker, asset management team, or large financial institution, we welcome everyone to trade on Bitget. We will provide better compliance support (KYB/KYC verification) and offer 24/7 exclusive services to institutional clients to ensure that any technical or trading issues are promptly resolved. In terms of trading benefits, institutional clients will enjoy lower trading fees, faster transaction speeds, and higher trading limits to help them seize market opportunities and increase profit margins. The API interface will also be upgraded to ensure smooth and stable trading.

In addition, we will introduce more comprehensive financial product support, including OTC services for large trades to provide the best quotes and low slippage, low-interest lending products to support BTC and major assets as collateral, helping institutional and VIP clients flexibly allocate funds. The unified account feature will begin testing in Q1 to support spot and futures contracts sharing a liquidity pool, significantly improving fund utilization efficiency. We will also provide an exclusive data backend to help institutional clients view real-time trading data and efficiently manage their portfolios.

We will also introduce more customized wealth management services and personalized asset allocation schemes to help users increase their wealth. Strengthening the VIP brand influence is also part of the plan. Through high-end events and precise marketing, we aim to enhance the brand value and market awareness of the VIP business. In 2023 and 2024, Bitget has conducted many internal sharing sessions for VIP clients, such as discussing high-quality projects in the Ethereum ecosystem before and after the ETH Cancun upgrade, as well as early identification of opportunities in meme coins. We will continue this in 2025.

In early December last year, I met some of our VIP users from the European region in Prague. Many of them were VIP users of other major exchanges, with transaction volumes exceeding one billion. I asked them why they chose Bitget. One user told me, "Because only at Bitget do we feel cared for. No other exchange has customer managers to communicate with me, nor do they invite me for meetings, exchanges, fine dining, and sightseeing like you do, or even have the CEO meet me. I feel your sincerity, and now I only use Bitget." Every time a user perceives and appreciates us, I feel very moved and proud of my team.

BGB and PayFi Business: BGB is the Core Currency, PayFi is its Payment Medium

2025 will be the year of explosive growth for BGB's ecosystem, empowering more for the crypto industry and the Bitget community. We aim not only to increase BGB's presence on Bitget's exchange and wallet platform but also to integrate it into more on-chain and off-chain payment scenarios. On-chain, we will collaborate with more top-tier ecosystems and DeFi applications, allowing users to stake BGB for earnings, use BGB as loan collateral, and more.

Off-chain, through the Bitget credit card, users can use BGB for payments in global scenarios such as dining, travel, refueling, shopping, with added discounts. BGB holders will unlock premium benefits like cashback, low fees, and high-end services. We believe in the future of making crypto assets part of everyday life.

Safety and Compliance: The Foundation for Encouraging Mass Adoption of Crypto Assets

Security has always been Bitget's top priority. In 2022, Bitget introduced the Bitget Protection Fund to safeguard user assets even in extreme circumstances. As of November 2024, the fund holds 6,500 BTC, valued at over $6 billion, making it the second-largest user protection fund among centralized exchanges. In December 2022, we introduced the Proof of Reserve for the first time, with monthly data updates to ensure our customers' funds have a reserve ratio of at least 1:1. As of November 2024, Bitget's reserve ratio stands at 137%, with the BTC reserve ratio nearing 200%.

In 2024, we continued to strengthen our compliance framework. Under the leadership of our newly appointed Chief Legal Officer, Hon Ng, Bitget's compliance team has grown to over 70 professionals, doubling in size over the past year. By November 2024, Bitget became the third exchange in the UK to comply with the UK FinProm standards and has obtained relevant licenses or completed registrations in Australia, Italy, Poland, and Lithuania. Our goal is to obtain significant regulatory approvals in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia in 2025, allowing our business to thrive in these regions. We believe that regulation is a powerful force in driving crypto assets mainstream, and we will continue to invest resources and effort in this area.

Looking back from our founding in 2018 to the present, Bitget's team and the crypto industry as a whole have undergone exciting changes. In 2018, Bitget was just a startup team of a few dozen people, experiencing many failed attempts and facing near-cash flow disruption. The outside world mostly questioned or even resisted the crypto industry. CEOs like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan and Larry Fink of BlackRock have repeatedly criticized Bitcoin and crypto assets, expressing strong negative opinions. For instance, in 2017, Jamie Dimon referred to Bitcoin as a "fraud" at an investor conference, stating that he would fire any employee using company funds to invest in Bitcoin. In October 2017, Larry Fink also publicly called Bitcoin an "index of money laundering."

By 2021, both JP Morgan and BlackRock had changed their views on Bitcoin. In 2021, Jamie Dimon stated that, although he still personally did not favor Bitcoin, he had no intention of banning JP Morgan clients from trading Bitcoin. In fact, since then, JP Morgan has started offering cryptocurrency investment products for institutional investors and launched its own digital currency JPM Coin.

Fast forward to 2024, a Bitcoin spot ETF issued by Larry Fink and BlackRock was approved. This move, arguably alongside the U.S. election, is considered one of the two most important events of the 24-year bull market. This shift reflects the cryptocurrency market's move from the fringes to the mainstream, showcasing mainstream institutions' acceptance of Bitcoin.

From skepticism to misunderstanding, up to today's acceptance, Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency industry have gone through over a decade to achieve this.

Bitget is no exception. From a founding team of a few dozen people to a globalized and diversified company of 1753 employees, from a grassroots project that experienced failures to now a large ecosystem with a market cap exceeding tens of billion U.S. dollars, our journey has indeed not been easy. Today, as the CEO of the company, what I am most proud of is not just mere numerical growth but the growth and transformation of our team and the industry.

Over the past two years, we have recruited many top international talents. Every two weeks, we have a two-hour meeting with each regional head, where over ten regional managers provide reports, each with a different English accent, which I find very intriguing. Looking back two and a half years ago when I first joined, most participants were Chinese-speaking Chinese. Now, in our meetings, various English accents from different countries converge, and as I stand in this team, reflecting on those several hundred billion-dollar financial and internet giants I have encountered before, Bitget is increasingly resembling them — we have internationalized, systematic management, efficient processes, and most importantly, everyone is striving towards the same goal.

However, I also deeply understand that, although we have achieved some results, we cannot be complacent. "Acceptance" is not the end but the beginning. What is the next step for the cryptocurrency industry to evolve to be recognized and even respected?

I believe that moving forward, more genuine technological innovation is needed. Apart from stablecoins and exchanges, there are few cryptocurrency industry killer applications with over a billion users. When I once discussed SocialFi with TikTok CEO Zhang Yiming and asked if there were any SocialFi products that interested him, his answer was "none." Even though the blockchain industry has some well-known SocialFi products within the circle like Farcaster and Friend.tech, they still fail to attract attention from the Internet industry. When will the blockchain industry develop more SocialFi, DEPIN, and GameFi products with tens of millions of users so that we can truly demonstrate how blockchain empowers traditional social, mapping software and hardware, and gaming? We need to use "killer applications" to make the value of blockchain as evident as AI.

If you had asked me two years ago when the moment universally recognized by the world would come, I might not have been able to answer, filled with uncertainty. But today, I have never been more certain than at this moment: that day is destined to be not far from us. I firmly believe that the key to the issue lies in gaining the trust of the public, regulatory bodies, the traditional financial system, and the mainstream market, as well as in creating a truly mass-market application with users and use cases. For example, we have already seen the real needs that blockchain has addressed in the payment field; it is poised to surpass SWIFT as the existing system that combines information flow with fund flow, offering many advantages in cross-border payments — real-time, low cost, and more transparent.

As a member of the Bitget team, each of us is part of this historic process. Endurance does not lie in swift progress but in steadfastness. We have heard the story of the tortoise and the hare since we were young; smart people are always easily the hare, but now I want to be the tortoise — to stick to long-term thinking, to do what is right from a macro perspective rather than just a local one. Regardless of our speed, as long as we persist, one day, more people will look back and see our efforts, see how the crypto industry has emerged, how it has step by step changed the world, how it has led everyone from disdain and misunderstanding to acceptance and respect.

Every step we take is a cornerstone of the crypto industry. Today's Bitget, although not yet able to lead all the innovative trends, is laying the groundwork for the future with every product iteration and every strategic deployment. Our team, our partners, and every one of our users are proud of our efforts.

Thanks to every builder who has ever, is currently, and will continue to contribute to this industry. It is your perseverance and struggle that give us the courage to face challenges and embrace the future. You have not only laid the foundation for today but also written the future chapter of the crypto industry.

Ten years later, when we look back, I believe that Bitget's footprint will be deeply imprinted on the industry's development path. Despite the rugged obstacles, every footprint is clear and firm. This is a journey of continuous exploration and courageous change, as well as the honor of every builder.

Gracy Chen

Written on New Year 2025