The Cryptonomist interviewed Gracy Chen, Managing Director of Bitget, on the future of crypto and of the exchange in 2023.
Can you introduce yourself and your background?
Formerly, I was an anchor and producer at the technology and finance channel of Phoenix TV, one of the largest Asian media conglomerates.
That’s also around the time that some of my friends (who are famous crypto entrepreneurs and investors today such as He Yi, co-founder of Binance, and Tim Draper, whom I studied from when I was in his Draper University) introduced me to the crypto industry.
In 2014, I started to invest in cryptocurrencies including BTC, ETH, and XRP, but not huge amounts. I think people should expose their portfolios to a small percentage with crypto according to their own experience and risk-tolerance level.
And later in 2017, I started to invest more time and efforts in learning about the primary and secondary crypto market. I have also been an early investor in BitKeep, Asia’s leading decentralized wallet and Bitget’s sister company.
On this journey, I have witnessed the brand’s development and growth throughout the years and I am thrilled to be a part of Bitget, the fastest growing crypto exchange with a 1000-strong team full of driven and intelligent individuals.
Can you explain us how Bitget works and the best features
Social trading is the key feature of Bitget.
With the vision to increase financial independence, we focus on transforming the way people connect and share financial knowledge with social trading. We believe in the power of social trading and make it our quintessential feature, allowing us to differentiate among other exchanges.
The flagship offering, One-Click Copy Trade, is a pioneer in social trading and has amassed over 100,000 professional traders with approximately 3 million followers, and executed more than 60 million copy trading orders. The feature is innovating the experience for crypto derivatives traders worldwide.
“Bitget Insights”, is a new feature on our platform, which makes social trading more accessible to everyone. The feature is acting as a mixture of “social media + trading”, and verified “experienced traders” can post their chart analysis, technical strategies, and articles, to share their insights with followers.
Moreover, Bitget also launched Strategy Plaza and grid trading, focusing on automated quantitative trading strategies designed to maximize returns in a range-bound and fluctuated market.
All these will light a path to the full potential of social trading, facilitating users, KOLs and professional traders to exchange information freely, adopt multiple trading patterns and optimize strategies for their own benefit.
Why did you choose to collaborate with Messi? How is it going?
The crypto world has witnessed growing popularity among investors, but the adoption of cryptocurrencies is still low. To boost adoption and encourage a better understanding of crypto, we are working on partnerships with credible figures and entities, Messi is one of them.
The sports industry, especially the famous football players, enjoys a large base of dedicated fans and followers, which would help crypto exchanges to build up a better brand image and gain massive awareness.
At the same time, cooperation between crypto exchanges and sports is a win-win situation. Crypto and blockchain is the big trend embraced by different industries.
The use cases of new technology could help the sports players to increase engagement, such as NFT of athletes and special events.
It has been a wonderful and rewarding journey to partner with Lionel Messi, especially during the World Cup Qatar 2022 period, which helped Bitget better engage its community and expand reach in the sports space.
The marketing campaign and various activities done with Messi further escalated the brand attention to gain considerable visibility and trust thanks to the Championship of Argentina team largely contributed by the team captain – Messi.
What is your forecast for 2023?
In terms of the cryptocurrency trends in 2023, I predict several main directions will be observed in the market after all the incidents happened in 2022:
Tighter CEX regulation
The negative experience of FTX once again proved that the regulation and transparency of centralized cryptocurrency exchanges is a necessary step towards a safe and sustainable market.
Already, the FATF, the European Union, and several other regulatory institutions are ready to tighten controls over the work of CEXs. In my opinion, such a decision is fully justified because these frameworks make us accountable, instill trust with our customers, and will ultimately accelerate mainstream crypto adoption. Bitget is porud to be a completely transparent and open exchange.
In early December, we announced our Merkle tree proof of reserves, and we allow our users to verify their assets on our website. In addition, we increased the size of our Bitget Protection Fund from $200 million to $300 million to protect our users’ assets against any unfortunate or unexpected events.
New opportunities for decentralized finance and lending
After observing three major insolvency events this year, including Luna, Three Arrows Capital, and Alameda Research, the centralized lending business has been further disproven, and people’s trust and demand for “decentralized lending” will further increase, thus ushering in long-term opportunities and innovation for decentralized finance (DeFi). This will lead to the disappearance of most centralised lending businesses.
Development of the NFT sector and metaverses
Also in 2023, we will see the rapid development of the sector of non-fungible tokens and the metaverse. NFTs will become an integral part of GameFi and the entertainment market. If you look back, you can see that in 2022 several major film studios and music labels had already released their own NFTs, and this trend will continue in 2023.
As for the metaverse, they will receive special attention in the coming year. Major brands will begin integrating their products and services into the metaverse and Web3, and financial sector institutions such as exchanges, banks, and credit companies will provide services to virtual users.
Naturally, this will entail some changes related to the regulation and control of activities in the metaverse. However, this process has already started.
What can we expect from the future of Bitget?
A wise man once said, “Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.” We have the ambition to become one of the top 3 global crypto exchanges in the next three to five years.
Moving forward, Bitget is committed to strengthening and innovating its product range, as well as promoting the adoption of crypto trading around the world with the aim to be the portal that transcends Web2 and Web3, that connects CeFi and DeFi, resulting in an expansive bridge to the vast web of crypto.
For the next 12 months, we plan to continue offering the safest and most stable crypto platform, strengthen our market stand in futures, while further develop and expand in terms of product offering, trading volume, user geography, etc.
From the perspective of products, we will be focusing on social trading, a larger concept that Bitget is looking to place more emphasis on moving forward. Social trading allows people to interact and observe other traders, as well as follow or execute the strategies of more experienced peers. We will also provide multi-dimensional wealth management such as staking, launchpool, and fixed income and other products including swap and NFT.
In terms of marketing and operating, we will continue work with our global KOL network, providing good services and supports to individual and institutional users, do more educational articles and videos, sponsor more crypto events and sports and gaming teams to grow crypto’s impact and assist the brand of Bitget to further flourish.
As mentioned earlier, we are also looking to expand our workforce to 1,200 headcounts by the 1st quarter of 2023 to cater to the growth of our company.
