Bitget CEOs New Years open letter: Innovate and continue to ride the bull market

Dear Bitget team, partners, and user friends:

In 2024, which just ended, our crypto jungle adventure has experienced too many important moments. We have witnessed together: At the beginning of the year, the much-anticipated Bitcoin spot ETF was approved by the US SEC, which gave more high-net-worth users, institutional users, and retail investors the opportunity to buy Bitcoin, marking that traditional finance is increasingly influencing the small circle of crypto assets. On April 19, Bitcoin halved as scheduled, and then Ethereum also ushered in an ETF. At the end of the year, the US election, crypto-friendly policies became the focus, and the final election results further boosted market confidence. Bitcoin broke through $100,000 for the first time in early December, and the market value of stablecoins exceeded $200 billion in the same month, and the crypto industry entered a new peak.

This year has been full of ups and downs, challenges and gains, and it is unforgettable. 2024 is also very important to me personally. I started as the CEO of Bitget in May, and I can stand on a higher platform to lead an excellent team and make greater changes. For Bitget, this year is also full of challenges and gains. We have more than 45 million users and firmly sit on the fourth position of the worlds crypto exchange. We can maintain rapid growth because we did the following things right:

Team Upgrade

Our team has grown a lot in 2024, especially with the addition of some senior executives: Chief Legal Officer (CLO) Hon Ng helped us build a more professional legal and compliance team; Chief Business Officer (CBO) Min Lin accelerated our global business expansion; Lawrence, the vice president in charge of coin listing, graduated from the London Economics (LSE) and has worked in two leading exchanges. After joining Bitget in September this year, he led the team to find high-quality assets; in addition, there is Xie Jiayin, who joined us last Christmas and leads our Chinese-speaking business. He is also the best customer service in the Chinese-speaking region.

As the saying goes, Good birds choose trees to inhabit, and good officials choose masters to serve. Top talents have many choices in the crypto jungle. They will choose a place that best suits their performance and a company with the most potential to work for. I am very happy that those who join Bitget and work with us have their own strengths, can focus on results, have a vision to change the world, and are long-termists.

Coin Listing Strategy

Since restarting spot trading in 2023 and making it a development focus, and supporting more high-quality crypto projects, Bitget has been actively expanding the richness of spot assets. As of December 30, 2024, Bitget supports more than 800 crypto assets.

Bitgets research and listing teams pay close attention to industry trends. For example, during the TON ecosystem explosion and Meme craze in 2024, they quickly screened and launched the top currencies in the relevant track. In 2024, 70%+ of the non-first-to-market assets such as PNUT and ACT launched on Binance were first listed on Bitget. This year, we also selected 21 Launchpool projects to give benefits to users, including star projects such as ZK, ENA, CATS, and SWELL. The average annualized rate of return of all projects on Bitget Launchpool in 2024 was 89%, and the highest rate of return reached 329%.

BGB

This year, our platform coin BGB has performed outstandingly, with a maximum increase of ten times compared to the beginning of the year. It has increased more than a hundred times since its issuance, and BGB is truly a hundred-fold coin. As the ecological core of the entire Bitget exchange, holders of BGB can enjoy benefits such as fee discounts, 0 fee withdrawals, participation in Launchpool new coin mining, and upgrading VIP status. Not only that, we recently announced the merger of BWB and BGB, making BGB the only ecological token of Bitget Échange and Bitget Wallet. On December 27, Bitget released a new version of the white paper, clarifying the repurchase and destruction plan and subsequently executing the first destruction, destroying 800 million tokens at one time, accounting for 40% of the supply, laying a more solid foundation for 2025.

Product iteration

This year, Bitget not only released multiple versions of product updates, but also launched a number of features that made users shine. For example, pre-market trading is a market that provides users with a one step faster way to invest in high-quality assets, and LaunchX is a new coin subscription platform designed specifically for the Web3 community. Next, we will also launch a unified account function, provide financial tools such as API upgrades and lending for institutional clients, and integrate AI more deeply, all with the goal of Trade Smarter to make trading smarter and more efficient. Behind all this, we cant do without our technical product team who work day and night, and give them a thumbs up.

Outlook for 2025: Innovate and continue to ride the bull market

In 2025, we plan to focus on developing three businesses while consolidating our existing products and services: institutional and VIP business, BGB and PayFi business, and continue to set industry standards in security and compliance.

Institutional and VIP business: moving towards a more diverse user structure

Whether it is a market maker, broker, asset management team, or large financial institution, we hope that everyone can come to Bitget to trade. We will provide better compliance support (KYB/KYC certification) and provide 7*24 hours exclusive services for institutional clients to ensure that any problems institutional users have in technology and trading can be solved in a timely manner. In terms of trading rights, institutional clients will enjoy lower transaction fees, faster transaction speeds, and higher transaction limits, helping them seize market opportunities and increase profit margins. The API interface will also be upgraded to ensure smooth and stable transactions.

In addition, we will also launch more comprehensive financial product support, including OTC services for large-scale transactions to provide the best quotes and low slippage, and low-interest loan products to support BTC and mainstream assets as collateral, helping institutions and VIP customers to flexibly allocate funds. The unified account function will be launched in the market for testing in Q1, supporting spot and contract shared capital pools, greatly improving the efficiency of capital use, and providing a dedicated data background to help institutional customers view real-time transaction data and efficiently manage investment portfolios.

We will also introduce more customized wealth management services and personalized asset allocation solutions to help users increase their wealth. Strengthening the VIP brand influence is also one of the links. We hope to enhance the brand value and market awareness of the VIP business through high-end events and precision marketing. In 2023 and 2024, Bitget has done a lot of internal sharing for VIP customers, such as talking about high-quality projects in the ETH track before and after the ETH Cancun upgrade, and capturing some meme coin opportunities very early. We will continue to do this in 2025.

At the beginning of December last year, I met some of our VIP users in Europe in Prague. Many of them were VIP users of other large exchanges with trading volumes exceeding 100 million. I asked them why they chose Bitget. One user told me: Because only at Bitget are we cared about. In other exchanges, there is no account manager to communicate with me, and no one invites me to meet, communicate, enjoy delicious food and beautiful scenery, and meet with the CEO like you do. I feel your sincerity, and now I only use Bitget. Every time I am perceived and recognized by users, I feel very touched, and I am very proud of my team.

BGB and PayFi business: BGB is the core currency and PayFi is its payment medium

2025 will be the first year of BGBs ecological blowout, empowering the crypto industry and the Bitget community. We will not only allow BGB to have more rights and interests on Bitgets exchange and wallet platforms, but also bring it into more on-chain ecosystems and off-chain payment scenarios. On the chain, we will cooperate with more leading ecosystems and DeFi applications to pledge BGB to earn income and use BGB as collateral for lending.

Offline, through Bitget credit card, users can use BGB to pay for dining, travel, gas, shopping and other consumption worldwide, and enjoy discounts. People holding BGB can also unlock more advanced rights, such as cash back, low rates and high-end services. The life and daily life of encrypted assets is the future we believe in.

Security and compliance: This is the basis for us to encourage the public to embrace crypto assets

Security has always been Bitgets primary concern: In 2022, Bitget launched the Bitget Protection Fund to ensure that user assets are protected even in extreme situations. As of November 2024, the fund holds 6,500 BTC, with a valuation of over $600 million, making it the second largest user protection fund among centralized exchanges. We also launched the first proof of reserves in December 2022, with data updated monthly to ensure that our customer funds have at least a 1:1 reserve ratio. According to data from November 2024, Bitgets reserve ratio is 137%, of which the BTC reserve ratio is close to 200%.

In 2024, we continued to strengthen our compliance system. Under the leadership of our new Chief Legal Officer, Hon Ng, the Bitget Compliance Team now has more than 70 professionals, doubling in size over the past year. As of November 2024, Bitget has become the third exchange in the UK to meet the UK FinProm standards, and has obtained relevant licenses or completed registrations in Australia, Italy, Poland and Lithuania. Our goal is to obtain important regulatory licenses and approvals in multiple markets including Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia in 2025, so that our business can continue to thrive in these regions. We believe that regulation is a powerful force in driving crypto assets into the mainstream, and we will continue to invest resources and energy in this area.

Looking back from the establishment in 2018 to now, the Bitget team and the crypto industry we are in have experienced exciting changes. In 2018, Bitget was just a startup team of dozens of people. The company also experienced many failed attempts, and at one point its cash flow was about to break. The outside world is mostly skeptical or even boycotted the crypto industry. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink have publicly criticized Bitcoin and crypto assets many times and expressed strong negative views. For example, in 2017, Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud at an investor meeting and said that if his employees used company funds to invest in Bitcoin, he would fire them. Larry Fink also publicly stated in October 2017 that Bitcoin is nothing more than an index of money laundering (the original words were index of money laundering).

By 2021, both JP Morgan and BlackRock had changed their views on Bitcoin. Jamie Dimon said in 2021 that although he still personally did not like Bitcoin, he did not intend to prohibit JP Morgans clients from trading Bitcoin. In fact, JP Morgan has since begun to provide investment products for crypto assets for institutional investors and launched its own digital currency, JPM Coin.

In 2024, the Bitcoin spot ETF issued by Larry Fink and BlackRock was approved. This move can be said to be the two most important events in the 24-year bull market, along with the US election. This transformation reflects the process of the crypto market moving from the fringe to the mainstream, and also reflects the acceptance of Bitcoin by mainstream institutions.

It took Bitcoin and the crypto industry more than a decade to go from doubt to misunderstanding to today鈥檚 acceptance.

The same is true for Bitget. From a startup team of dozens of people to a global and diversified company with 1,753 people, from a grassroots project that experienced failure to a large ecosystem with a market value of over 10 billion US dollars, it has not been easy for us to come this far. Today, as the CEO of the company, what I am most proud of is not just the growth in numbers, but the growth and transformation of our team and industry.

In the past two years, we have recruited many top international talents. We have a two-hour meeting with the heads of each region every two weeks. Each time, more than ten regional managers will report. Everyone has a different English accent, which I find very interesting. Looking back to when I first joined two and a half years ago, most of the participants were Chinese who spoke Chinese. Now when we have a meeting, English accents from all over the world gather together, and I stand in this team, looking back at the financial companies and Internet giants with valuations of tens of billions that I have come into contact with. Today, Bitget is getting closer and closer to them – we have international, systematic management, efficient processes, and most importantly, everyone is working towards the same goal.

But I also know that although we have achieved some results, we still cannot be complacent. Acceptance is not the end but the starting point. Next, how can the crypto industry evolve to be recognized and even respected?

I think more real technological innovation is needed next. Apart from stablecoins and exchanges, there are few killer apps with over 100 million users in the crypto industry. I once talked about SocialFi with TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi and asked him if there were any SocialFi products that interested him. His answer was no. Even though the blockchain industry has some well-known SocialFi products such as Farcaster and Friend.tech, this still cannot attract the attention of the Internet circle. When the blockchain industry can make more SocialFi, DEPIN, and GameFi products with tens of millions of users, we can truly explain how blockchain can empower traditional social, map software and hardware, and games. We need to use killer apps to make the value of blockchain as obvious as AI.

If you asked me two years ago when the moment of unanimous recognition by the world would come, I might not be able to answer, and I was full of uncertainty. But today, I have never been as determined as I am now: that day is destined to be not far away. I firmly believe that the key to the problem lies in winning the trust of the public, regulators, traditional financial systems and mainstream markets, and in making real universal applications with users and scenarios. For example, we have seen the real needs that blockchain solves in the payment field. It will have many advantages over SWIFT, an existing system that combines information flow with capital flow, 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 historical process. To go a long way, it is not the speed that matters, but the persistence of the pace. We have heard the story of the tortoise and the hare since we were young. It is always easy for smart people to become the hare, but now I want to be a tortoise – stick to long-termism and do the right things from a macro perspective rather than just locally. No matter what speed we are at, as long as we persevere, one day, more people will look back and see our efforts, how the crypto industry has grown from nothing, how it has changed the world step by step, and how everyone has gone from disdain and misunderstanding to acceptance and respect.

Every step we take is a cornerstone of the crypto industry. Although Bitget today cannot lead all innovation trends, every product iteration and every strategic layout of ours is paving the way for that day in the future. Our team, our partners, and every one of our users are proud of our efforts.

Thank you to every builder who has, is, and will continue to contribute to this industry. It is your persistence and struggle that gives us the courage to face challenges and embrace the future. You not only lay the foundation for today, but also write the future chapter for the crypto industry.

Ten years later, when we look back, I believe that Bitgets footprints will be deeply imprinted on the road of industry development. Even if there are obstacles, every footprint is clear and firm. This is a journey of constant exploration and courage to change, and it is also the glory of every builder.

Gracy Chen
Written in 2025 New Year

This article is sourced from the internet: Bitget CEOs New Years open letter: Innovate and continue to ride the bull market

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