Igneus Terrenus on Bybit’s rise to second largest Bitcoin futures platform

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media in the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have igneous terranists the head of communications at buy bit exchange igneous welcome to the show and it is a pleasure to have you here today thank you for having me ashton very happy to be on the show likewise i'd love to start by just

0:20hearing a bit from you about buy bit and what makes it so special among cryptocurrency exchanges that so many people are now using the platform right um by the way is uh uh like at the moment we are specializing in derivatives we are one of the fastest growing uh the relatives uh exchange and uh uh what we really proud uh pride ourselves upon is just the uh open interest and and the

0:43liquidity that we present uh as a really kind of like great value added for traders so at the moment according to the latest numbers we have already surpassed cme as the second largest uh btc uh exchange and uh in terms of open interest uh btc opening just we are actually uh ahead of uh everyone and for eth we are currently the second behind the democrat leaders which i

1:09shall not name here but uh we're catching up fast uh so i think in q1 we had a 34 increase well as the leaders had a nine percent decrease so you know maybe in a couple of quarters we will be taking overtaking them as well that's very exciting and yeah it seems like you know bitcoin has had such a year so far with 2021 it seems like the last few weeks

1:31the rest of the cryptocurrency exchanges and those secondary leaders are starting to catch up and seems like everything is exploding you know with the coinbase listing it seems like mainstream is sort of noticing the cryptocurrency industry and i think it's a good time for bibit um and i know that your team is based in singapore i did speak with ben

1:48the ceo last year and you were in explosive growth then so i can imagine since then it's been growing even more and you mentioned that you're the fastest growing and you've been expanding operations beyond singapore um can you talk about where you've been expanding i know you have more offices now and where you guys at with that right now uh we kind of like uh taking a

2:10decentralized approach just like the english we are in so we have multiple uh locations in asia as well it's like uh some kind of like a remote contributors in places like europe and beyond uh we have recently kind of like uh uh on boarded a number of ambassadors who are uh working on our behalf and uh you know uh speaking to uh customers traders and

2:32uh doing kind of like some of these uh educational material for uh you know that the next uh 10 percent of kind of like the uh the global population in terms of uh uh the exposure to crypto um so our main focus is still uh in asia but we have a very sizable kind of a user base in europe as well at the moment it's about 50 50. um but yeah asia is is our home base yeah it's interesting

2:59because the people that are in north america you know they're they don't know that like the asian markets really are just growing i believe so much faster and it's just it's a numbers game right as well and i'm expanding into the other southeast asian countries and i saw that you're adding more trading pairs with japan the korean one are you seeing a lot of

3:19growth right now in asia and are you continually adding uh you know more tools and options for asian traders yeah asia is just like being growing tremendously um i think so like most of the crypto media are uh north america based so like uh it's understandable that sort of like the majority of coverage do come from uh you know about north american exchanges

3:45but uh asia like you know uh asia owns like maybe uh 70 or more of the uh uh bitcoin uh money hash rate and uh we are looking at kind of like uh um just investors and traders who have been in space for much longer than kind of like some of the uh newly onboarded uh uh traders in in north america um yeah uh japan korea vietnam we're just looking at uh

4:12explosive growth and uh i think it's just kind of like really uh kudos to our strategic team and in our product team and uh really kind of our id team in anticipating that kind of growth and they're really kind of building anti-fragile uh measures and kind of expanded our capacity to handle those uh traffic so like we like till this day uh you know uh

4:36three years in a row we haven't had uh any downtime uh and our services are available 99.99 which is the uh service availability of bitcoin itself this is something that we are really proud of that is amazing igneous i didn't know that um and that's very impressive and you did mention that you surpassed the cme to become the second largest futures exchange for bitcoin

4:59that's a feat in of itself so congratulations to that and you were just talking about the the strength of your team i'm curious what are you attributing to that success of growing so quickly is it also just the bitcoin price or is it some internal measures that you guys have really honed in on yeah i think it's it's it's a confluence of things of course like uh we can never discount the

5:22very fact that we are in a historic war and one that uh is even catching the mainstream's eyes but like i think kind of like our team have had the foresight to kind of foresee this is an eventuality and we have been prepared for it uh preparing ourselves for it so we we expanded our server kind of a capacity way ahead of the uh the actual kind of like uh uh

5:45explosion in in terms of traffic and uh we also kind of like we're building all those infrastructure like in you know every market that we enter we make sure that uh the traders in those markets are supported so we provide in language support uh in like a dozen of languages and and we have kind of a local community community managers talking to our users

6:08uh all the time i think one thing that um that kind of like the marketers do not do enough and one thing that really will just like make uh we make us much better at what we do is just to talk to customers more a lot of times they will have the exact insight we need they will tell us the exact pain point we need to address and sometimes they will even give us the

6:28exact words that we can kind of market our solution back to them yeah i definitely believe it's great to be community oriented and listen to your customers and support them and i know in the past people that have had issues with exchanges or they put in tickets and if that takes too long to resolve those then that's a there's a lot of negative press around that so i think supporting

6:49your customers should come first yeah and that about that uh one thing that we're really proud of is uh we we make a deliberate effort to get to any customer query within three minutes so if you survive submit a ticket on in the in the health help desk in a multilingual 24 7 help desk you will get a response in three minutes and then we uh endeavor to resolve it uh like no more

7:16than 24 hours lots of times it's much faster so this is one thing that we really kind of stress and sometimes like maybe if i have some questions about kind of like our our platform instead of kind of like go asking a colleague i would just like type into the the help desk block it's like yeah actually it shows a faster resolution because like you know our

7:35colleagues are very busy and like just to deal with kind of like all the uh uh just inflow of traffic but uh because this is something that we have uh committed ourselves to just to kind of get to our customers needs and requirements as soon as possible so like that three minute thing is is something that we really uh uh kind of like have have a standard upon definitely

7:56that's amazing i did not know that so congratulations to that that's very impressive and i've had issues before on other exchanges where it's taken days days and i'm like this is ridiculous so that's amazing to hear and i'm curious and i'm guessing this is something that your team has has put a lot of effort into but you know with exchanges in the past there's always been uh you

8:17know security flaws sometimes where the integrity of this change goes down or people lose their funds or their data you know how important is that for bibit in protecting the security of of the users funds and their data and just the servers overall yeah uh security is of course the most important thing like as uh we are currently still a centralized

8:39uh uh exchange and uh you know the the the danger that comes with that of course there's a single point of uh of failure but at the same time we kind of like we have already started to uh implement those kind of decentralized ways so we use multi-signature wallet to kind of ensure that uh no like a single isolated event could uh cause any harm and also

9:02uh all our phones currently all 100 of our phones are stored in uh offline code wallet and uh that just kind of like just ensures the the security and and like all the funds are safeguarded um we have uh knock on wood we have never had any uh um kind of like a security uh event where our phones are stolen so yeah uh and we like we have always kind of

9:29really been uh focused on kind of like uh just uh strengthening up our security poster and we actually spend uh around 25 of of our budget on security which is uh above the industry average i think the industry averages but between about 10 to 15 so we almost doubled up that's good to know and that that is quite comforting and you know uh with with the centralized exchanges

9:56there is that single point of failure and with smart contracts you know there's that open code and you don't really know how secure it is until it gets hacked you know because uh so it's good to know that uh that there's been no issues and that you know obviously there's a lot of people that trust buybit right now being being the number two in volume there and in terms of the

10:15growth right now i are you guys doing any cool interesting marketing and advertising to help expand you know i recently saw ftx exchange just bought put their name on a nba arena which is pretty cool uh for north america and hopefully that expands the exchanges out into north america are you guys doing anything interesting like that or how are you mainly marketing

10:35to new users yeah i think uh what ftx did was very cool and uh like even though kind of like uh you know exchanges they kind of tend to have uh this kind of level of competition but i think overall we are not competing amongst ourselves there's uh 98 of uh uh the general population that haven't uh had any exposure to crypto yet so we are going like we there's there's so much kind of like

11:01uh area of uh of just like collaboration to go for the legacy guys in terms of marketing we actually sort of like uh uh started uh earlier than the ftx kind of like uh uh fora into sports so we uh late last year we actually uh sorry uh we had a a partnership with uh bundesliga uh football team borussia dortmund which is one of the best teams in the world

11:28and you know if we had them online they would have told us they are the best football clubs and the most passionate football clubs in the world and uh yeah we've been getting uh very very positive uh feedback from our customers because borussia dortmund they really kind of like stand for this uh youthful uh enthusiasm and you know uh players like holland and sancho and uh

11:50you know they are barely like 20 and they are scoring like 34 goals in in 38 matches and that we think kind of like the the uh philosophy and just like the identity behind the borussia dortmund is really kind of like one thing that we identify with we also have the same color so yeah very cool and that's great to know yeah and i think those kind of partnerships it

12:12seems like uh the crypto sort of creeping into sports and it's becoming gamified in the same kind of ways so i think that's sort of a uh a good route to go into these kind of partnerships and i also saw that you guys have great partnership programs and affiliate programs a lot of the cryptocurrency influencers seem to be using bybe you know some of my best friends

12:33swear by using buybit um and they have brought a lot of their friends in people that are already involved with cryptocurrency but are sort of looking for an exchange to choose have chosen buy it through that route so has that been a successful marketing tactic as well yeah definitely our affiliate program as well as uh like we also have ambassadors in a

12:54number of uh uh markets and and we we also have a very strong kind of referral program um i i think i think one thing that we really do well is just uh not only do we provide kind of like a really clean and sleek uh user interface for our traders but also we actually have a very good uh back-end dashboard for our affiliates so uh they can see kind of like uh um

13:18the performance of their uh ads the performance of of their marketing campaign uh was was just a hundred percent uh transparency and they can see kind of what is performing well they can even do a b testing uh in terms of how their campaigns are doing so i think yeah the the the philosophy the principle behind it is just like we really take care of uh

13:38anyone who is a customer or who work with us we just like basically we think of put ourselves into their issues and what we like to see uh you know as as an interface or as kind of like uh the touchpoint wisdom where's the platform and then we provide them with just that definitely and that's great to hear and i was looking at a few of the other exchanges and i

14:00noticed that more recently you know in this bull market there these exchanges are very lucrative and they're starting to give back a lot and there's charitable initiatives charities being opened up and i'm curious is bibit taking some of those initiatives to help overall in charitable ways or you know with the pandemic and in other ways definitely um last year during our uh

14:22in uh inauguration at the very first uh um uh biggest trading competition that we had wsot we donated a large portion of the proceeds to unicef to combat kind of like uh the the downside children uh experienced during uh as a result of the pandemic uh and and this year we are also

14:49looking at uh multiple uh charitable organizations and uh yeah we've been working with borussia dome down there and as well uh so like we have hosted uh football clinics in uh multiple uh countries to help kind of like kids who are negatively impacted to you know rediscover joy in sports in kind of like football and uh uh yeah we are also looking at uh more

15:12opportunities uh around the globe and uh uh you know as a crypto company we off we sort of try to prioritize those uh um uh charities that accept uh cryptocurrency but uh if it's a worthy cause we are open to really anything so yeah you'll be hearing more on that and in terms of charity because we think it is important uh to give back to the society when we

15:37have success so that uh you know uh everyone uh gets to enjoy the fruit of uh this uh revolution definitely igneous and that's and that's great to hear and we are running short on time but i want to talk about the future of buy bit and if you have any hints into what do traders have to look forward to in terms of things that are coming next uh and throughout the rest of this year

16:00um i think yeah we have like lots of uh exciting uh news uh currently being walked down um um but yeah that that uh we can't sort of give the exact detail here but i can give you some hints as to what's coming um we we are gonna expand uh dramatically in terms of our offering so currently we have uh uh you know perpetual contracts and and the quarterly futures

16:27but uh yeah we will be looking at other derivatives we will be looking at spot we'll be looking at uh uh you know divide as well and uh all those are coming in the next uh quarter or two so yeah not not too much detail i can go into right now but uh stay tuned and we'll be having a lot of exciting news for everyone that's very exciting and yeah i was looking for defy

16:48on the on the site and i know it's exploding right now and like there's just a lot of capital and value being locked into these decentralized exchanges and these protocols so that's definitely something to look forward to and for the viewers that are looking to follow along with these updates and just get started trading on buyback and get involved in the community

17:07what's the best way for them to learn more um we are very very active on twitter we have more than 120 000 followers on twitter and we tweet all the time and and we are also uh not uh above you know all the crypto means so uh yeah you can kind of like basically the best way to get uh any uh timely updates is on twitter but i we also uh you know we have multiple uh communities

17:33on telegram as well so it's very easy to find and our blog uh have the latest news in kind of like um you know uh press form as well and yeah uh there's of course our website um simple baby.com and uh yeah you can find us almost everywhere on the internet and youtube uh uh you know you name it awesome ignis i will leave all of those links in the description

18:00box below as well all the best with by bit moving forward in this amazing run we're having right now and let's follow up in the near future excellent thank you so much for having me ashton has been pleasure you