Ben Zhou on Bybit’s technology and derivatives exchange platform

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have been Zhao the CEO and co-founder of the by bit exchange Ben thank you so much for being on the show it's a pleasure to have you here today Thank You Ashton for having me on the show as a pleasure you're very welcome if you could start with a little bit of

0:20a backstory into how you got into the cryptocurrency industry and started the vibe exchange that would be great yeah my background I was running a retail retail Forex exchange for about seven years and I got into crypto in early 2017 at the time there wasn't a lot of choices or exchange available for crypto to build the exchanges so with my previous background and I saw some

0:48marketing efficiency that could be improved on and that's one of the reason I decide to fund pipe it so Bible was funded last year in March and we officially launched in December last year that's awesome Congrats and now as a derivatives exchange platform what is the biggest problem that you would say a pirate is solving right now in the industry I think a lot of exchange focus

1:11on the external issues where where as the space is really like in exchange actually focus on the fundamentals so at this stage we don't even have exchange that would work or handle all the volume with the current people so what I bid is focusing on is to make sure we actually provide exchange where we focus on matching we focus on liquidity we're giving the clients best trading

1:37environment so they can actually execute orders during volatility that's great and do you see a lot of people coming in rapidly as the user adoption is growing or is it sort of a slow climb right now yeah no I guess as far as for by bit it we have been growing one of the fastest company I guess this year so we've been gaining new clients every day and we

2:01almost get a doubling or 50% to 80% increase every months ever since March since the market picked up so I guess in a way that also proves that our strategy works to provide clients a solid product for them to trade on definitely and as a derivatives platform there's a lot of the viewers that we have that are you know institutional investors or people

2:24that are just getting into cryptocurrency for the first time and they trade on traditional platforms before but a lot of them have asked about the security of security of the exchanges sorry um why would you say is the private exchange very secure and how much do you guys focus on security obviously security is the number one concern for any client so because we're

2:48derivative exchange we don't have to be as much or with your client doesn't have the withdraw urgency as much as the spot exchange like finances so that we can actually use a multi signature code wallet for all clients fund so all of a clients fund is stored in a multi signature code wallet and all the withdraw process are down manually even though it's a bit hectic but in the end

3:14it's proven to be one of the most secure ways so far for all the exchanges and number two is really the internal measurement how do you control your clients data privacy how do you manage the employees different authorities and Inter procedures so we actually just had one of the head of chef security officer coming from Yemen hoop which is one of the largest insurance book in China and

3:42they are he is in charge becoming our CF CSL helping us with all these internal procedures so it's very crucial for us to make sure that we have all the procedures in place that's great to hear so you mentioned that you have different measures for different employees to make sure that the proper protocols are in place and only certain people have access could you talk a little bit more

4:05about your team maybe about your founding team and do they have any experience in the industry and and how large is your team yeah currently we have around 115 people and most of them are developers so I will start off with our CTO Owen he used to be working for $0.10 which is one of the largest corporation China and then after that he left the ten cent and went to no wealth

4:32which is also another huge fund trading or exchange and he actually designed the underlying infrastructure of exchange in matching system for lower ratings so he brought in all the talents from traditional sector I guess ten cent and over trading and brought into knowledge and how to make a proper stable matching engine and exchange so he contributed a

4:58lot in our product and then our operation is in charge of she's yeah yeah she another founder who has also been a very experienced in operation she used to actually shows a life popular poker star as well so a lot of people know her in the polka star industry yeah so we have the other talents from traditional sectors coming in and this is how it got exchanged yeah that's

5:27great and 115 people sounds like quite a lot of hiring you've said considering you just started last year are you guys continuing to grow rapidly and how large do you expect your team to get in the near future actually when we launched in December we only had about 30 people so now from 30 to 115 it took us less than a year so we are I don't have the exact

5:54number where the team is heading because as long as Cline's is growing customer support team is always going and the developer team is always growing as more products and more things in place we want an update but is a very crucial thing we want to focus a lot on internal management structures and all that to make sure that we keep the same culture and same value and always for our

6:19customers first I was just gonna say that as well and I recently read coinbase went from 250 people to 750 in such a short amount of time and when you hire so many people how do you keep that you know same culture that you wanted when there was only you know a few founders so that seems very important doesn't it yeah it's very important as actually from my previous experience

6:42I was managing a little over 200 people it is very crucial for a recruiting process or hiring process so I actually sit in every single final interview whenever we have hire a new person even the front desk so to make sure that this person understand where we're heading and take a perspective fected from me as the founder and also also your internal

7:05KPI and also your performance manager do you actually put down your culture and pour value into place and into how you measure your employees performance and their behavior so these are the key points to make sure that you have what you want deliver to the clients and to your team yeah that's great Benham that's amazing to hear that you're sitting in on on the interviews it

7:29sounds like you're a very busy person and I know you're traveling a lot and we did meet recently at the world crypto con in Las Vegas so that was a great event um how do you manage your time you know while you're traveling and speaking and trying to manage by bit all at the same time I I got a lot of help that the co-founder has helped a lot and also we

7:50hired a lot of talent people into a team who share the same value and similar division so our vision is to become one of the not the number one but the most respected platform in the industry so when you sort of share that value and always put your clients first whenever a product is coming out whenever a new complaint is coming in that team can feel the vibe so and then they can help

8:12you out so it's definitely not one-man show and now my job mostly I joke around I said my title should be the CTO the chef traveling officer so so most of meetings I are doing the jumping Misuzu more phone calls and you guys are based in Asia mainly is the customer base global or are you focusing on any geographic regions or do they just come

8:39you know whichever cryptocurrency people wherever they are in the world they're just joining yeah our headquarter is in Singapore and our clients distribution is very global actually so we have a lot of European clients Japanese korean-chinese I mean it's all over the place yeah it's great and there wasn't many options to choose from another derivatives platform you know bit Mex

9:04was sort of one of the popular ones before buy bet got so popular have you guys found any strategies to either you know take people's attention away from bit max to buy bit or how else are you acquiring new users quickly a lot of people say we are very aggressive on marketing I mean I agree because especially from my previous experience I was competing in a very mature and

9:28competitive environment in forex so we're moving into crypto I simply used my previous knowledge in marketing operation nor that but what really explained them the the significant growth of by bid is the retention and that's coming from our product so I still believe the whole industry it's to do a product driven industry and clients for sure they would get you get clients

9:52attention if you have a very aggressive marketing campaign but and the end of the day if they choose to stay it's because of your product so I think one of the reason main reasons because we are so stable actually ever since we launched we never had a server downtime all of our system maintenance or updates are done so hot patches so our system has never gone down and that sort of

10:17gave clients a lot of confidence and believing that the system it's stable and doesn't have any overload so that's why they did this day mmm-hmm that's great and speaking of the product being strong I know you guys already have derivatives for Bitcoin aetherium and a couple of the top coins are your developers working on a roadmap to introduce any more types of products

10:39either just more coins to trade or other types of trading on the platform yeah we are exploring new products not necessarily new coins so we currently have inverse all the inverse product we're working on the linear contract using a stable point so while you can actually use the USD P or another stable point to trade all the pairs at the same time and after that maybe a futures

11:05contract either quarterly or how year these type of new we want to English basically increase our horizon on the product line first and then maybe going to after next year maybe go into more horns definitely I know looking at finance recently it seems like they have everything from margins futures staking and lending and all these products do you think that adding more products to

11:30buy bit is one of the ways to attract new customers or is it simply just the security and the uptime and those other things that you mentioned it's definitely a product we will keep you new clients but and they it it's how well is your product built and how this is really suitable for traders so even though we are increasing our horizon and increase our production line we will

11:54still focus in the track of derivative exchange so I don't think we are going to have any spot landing or this type of non derivative related product so we would like to focus on what we're doing and also so that clients can identify Bible as being a professional especially focused in the relative exchange that's great and what do you see as one of the main

12:20obstacles that's going to be in the way when buyback continues to grow and this may apply to the industry in general you know how do we get more institutional investors and crypto investors to use by bit yeah I see that as the opportunity and a challenge I think differently is the regulation I mean coming from forwards I've seen how forwards developed from a

12:42unregulated space into a very heavily regulated industry now so my private company company we had about 16 different licenses so I would assume crypto would even starting from under this year or next year was you will start to see more regulation popping out and which I guess is a good thing in a way because for example right now we have to bend at the u.s. IP on the US

13:09clients because simply the law isn't clear there so if there is a regulation with clear guidance on how to get a license how to deregulate we would love to apply and be able to officially legally taking in u.s. clients so did its opportunities also a challenge definitely yeah well let's hope that that plays in their favor in the next year here so now what what is

13:35by but mainly looking for right now as you continue to grow are you guys looking for strategic partners more team members or just more customers or anything else um definitely strategic partners we're actually talking to a few we I think at the end of the day and we have the responsibility when we grow bigger to help ecosystem so you have different water service providers we're

13:59actually looking for custodian services see if we can work with to increase the credibility of the exchange and also our trust Explorer simply explore maybe decentralized cryptocurrency exchange so we actually have a small team looking into that I guess under the end of the day we need to contribute back to the ecosystem and see where the new opportunities are yeah

14:21definitely that's great and that's sort of been a trend in the industry is you know people are sort of interested in a decentralized exchange or some kind of forms of decentralization but at the same time there's been problems with having a good user experience and customer support do you see a trend like that for bi bit in the future possibly yeah I think the whole concept of

14:44decentralized especially for the derivative is very contradicting because when it comes to derivatives all clients first priority is execution so you obviously would have one search engine one node centralized who have the maximum mentioned capacity so uh but I think there might be different way to do it and definitely I think everyone is looking into it and if we able to find a

15:09way to do it even just to separate the matching power or with the clients on part so that client can feel more secure there'll be a huge achievement so so we want to explore the area and we don't want to be six minded and because we are in crypto we're in blockchain I think we encourage our employee and the whole team to explore and with new innovations

15:32yeah that's great I love that mentality now if people are looking to get involved with by bit or just learn more or just start trading what's the best way for them to reach out by become our homepage if it has everything and also I mean our community you can find me on Twitter on telegram should be is fun awesome well I'll leave those links for everybody in the description boxes below

15:56and I thank you for your time Ben I really appreciate you coming on and it was great to hear about by a bit and let's follow up in the near future when you continue to grow thank you guys