The Death of Altcoins, AI Bots for Crypto & Bitget’s New "Universal Exchange"

Transcript

Welcome to episode of the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization [music] and the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crane and today I'm speaking with Gracie Chen who is the CEO of BitGet. >> We want to grow the pie bigger rather than just cutting pie with from each other. So one way to grow the pie bigger is to offer more products especially valuable products that our users want to trade. And that's why we're working hard to build on our RWS. We see DX and CEX more as integration uh rather than pure competitor. Today Binance OKX probably offer about 200 to 300 cryptocurrencies.

We have 700 cryptocurrencies available on our CX. [music] I personally think there are about 70% possibility that [music] there is still another bull market. Thanks so much for joining us, Gracie. I'm curious, how did you get into crypto in the first place? >> Sure. Um, I had a mathematics degree from my undergrad. So, when I after I graduated from my uh from my bachelor's degree, I actually went to be a journalism about a decade ago. And when I was a journal uh TV journalist, I had a friend from uh my TV circle who asked

me you should check out crypto and bitcoin. So I look at with the Bitcoin white paper in 2015 and was immediately intrigued by the mathematical beauty behind uh Bitcoin and you know those 13page white paper how that created the the very ideal world uh of decentralized ledger. Uh and then I bought some Bitcoin um at the price of about 300ish. So that went pretty well. Um, but I haven't I didn't really I wasn't really working in this industry until 2022 when I joined Big as the first managing

director and of course two two years later I was promoted to be the CEO of Bigette. But my crypto investment journey journey started pretty early in 2015 but my crypto working journey only started in 2022. This episode is brought to you by Nosis, building the open internet one block at a time. Nosis was founded in 2015 and has grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open userowned finance. Nosis is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others like Safe and Cow Swap. At the center is Nosis Chain. It's a low fee layer 1 with zero downtime in

7 years and secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real world financial applications like Nosis Pay and circles. All this is governed by Nosis DAO, a communityrun organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run a validator from home. So, if you're building in web 3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at Nosis.io. What's the story of how you ended up joining BitKit? Um so when I when I was making investment in crypto industry earlier those some main secondary market investment but I did have some primary market investment. One of my investment

was beep which today is called big wallet. So in 2022 uh big was already invested by beette and then beette actually just you know randomly reached out to the investors asking if you have any recommendation for someone who has marketing background and are passionate about web 3. Uh so the founder of uh Beette reached out to me to uh force someone to recommend and I said it sounds like me because for for the past 10 years I was actually doing web two um startup either journalism well when I

even was a journalist I was reporting on finance and technology because of my mathematics and uh financial background. Um but just for one year in journalism I started to work in web two startups as CMOs or CEOs um mainly building on fintech and uh VR metaverse. So even if I wasn't working in web 3 I was working in web two but very much on marketing and uh um on something technology related. So I said, "Yeah, that that sounds like me because I do have this many years of, you know, marketing background and and are you interested in, you know, having me as your C your your manual director whose role is very

much like a CMO." Um, yeah. And we had, of course, we know each other before and we had a good chat. I then subsequently talked to all the higher executives at Beuette including the previous CEO Sandra and uh uh and I noticed this team is quite strong but they do lack marketing personality and uh uh someone like me who can kind of complement with this team. So um in 2024 sorry 2022 as you can imagine joining a centralized exchange is not an easy option um because there are so many competitors and uh this industry is what we call a a red sea means lots of competition like

very competitive market. Um so it definitely took some courage and uh wisdom hopefully that I chose to join be in 2022 and subsequently saw the growth of the company from maybe a top 10 or 10 10 plusish kind of ranking to where we are today top five or even sometimes top three in terms of the global CEX ranking. >> Okay. Okay. And what was the how old was bit back then and like what's kind of the origin story of bit?

>> Sure. So big started off in 2017. Uh and you can imagine that's like a a bare bull market uh the last cycle the ICO age. Um the the big original funding team did saw the huge potential of blockchain. Uh but that wasn't really an easy age or easy days to start a CEX because there were so many other competitors again. Um so the big get original you know funding team did um I actually chatted with our CEO previous CEO previous CEO Sandra on this as well like like there were a point of time that they nearly uh were not breaking even or nearly were closing down um

because it's so competitive if you don't find a product that you can stand out you are just gradually die so big had a I I think lack and also some sort of skill to be able to stand out as a derivative market before 2022 when I joined big and we later on together uh worked um when I joined big we had about 150 employees today we have 2,200 employees so you can see it's a big team and of course a huge growth in terms of team number in terms of the trading volume and user number as Um but together we shifted be get from

just a derivative market focusing more more on the East Asia market to a global brand which have 120 million users and not just derivative anymore. If you see our product offerings today, we have um derivatives of course, but also der uh also spot market crypto and not just crypto, we today we offer tokenized US stocks and we're going to launch the tokenized commodity and uh forex very soon. So um it's not just a you know smaller East Asia kind of exchange anymore. Today it's a it's a global brand.

So the initially the traction was with derivative you said was that for like perpetuals or >> it's mainly perpetuals. Yes. >> Well mainly perpetuals. Okay. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Um, so you mentioned, you know, exchanges being this Red Sea, and it's obviously interesting because on the one hand, exchanges are like by far the most profitable and powerful players in crypto.

Of course, Binance more than anyone or like Binance and Coinbase and then, you know, like others like Big Gat, right? Also up there. Um, >> and at the same time it's like super competitive which again you'd expect because the the payoff to being there at the top is so high. What do you what for big get now what are the main sort of ways you differentiate and you try to gain uh market share versus competitors? Mhm. Uh if we are talking about 2025, I would say what we are thinking today is definitely very different from 2022 when I joined the company and als of course

very different from 2017. Um but if we answer it from today's perspective, I would say we don't just think about how to differentiate us from another crypto exchange. we more think about how to differentiate us from a trading platform in general. What I mean by that is today I don't think my competitors are only Binance and OKX or Bybit, but my competitors should be Robin Hood, Futu in in Hong Kong or Asia market. Um, it Toro and of course it Toro Toro and of course other CEX and DEX. Um what we want to focus on is to

offer a a top-notch trading um experience rather than you know just offering crypto um and exact you know how do we attract new users I would say it's a good um combination of different ways there are of course events that we are attending there are online campaigns that we offer um there are koss who we work together with to promotion to promote um specific product offerings to specific markets in different languages.

So it's a it's a very holistic kind of marketing plan uh or user acquisition and previously people focus on SEO, search engine optimization. uh today we are not just focusing on SEO we we are also focusing on go which is you know AI kind of uh uh engine optimization generative uh um uh engine optimization so we we think from a very future perspective we're very bullish on AI and uh we've offer all all sort of tokenized products uh because we think crypto or just all coins are not enough for my users appetite Right. Um they are also

interested in um US dogs. For example, if you see the volume on our platform, it quickly surpassed 10 billion in like 73 days after we launched our tokenized US product. Um so there's lots of needs out there and uh um yeah I hope I hope I answered that question but I just feel it may not have like a like a straightforward answer because there's so many different ways or different things that we're looking at today. We I definitely think being off being able to offer all sort of tokenized asset is a differentiation factor from other CEX and then uh building some tools for our users to trade smarter especially on AI

is another differenti factor that we have. So you you mentioned the tokenized stocks and you know companies like Robin Hood or Futu as competitors that you know had their beginning in more trading trading of stocks. What what do you see as the pro and con between having tokenized stocks on the platform versus you know those platforms where you trade uh you trade stocks directly and there's not a tokenization layer. Does that matter or is it just like you know the users kind of doesn't really care or like how do you see the tokenization of stocks versus having you know directly trading stocks.

>> Mhm. Um so there are a few questions in here we'll answer them one by one. The first one which kind of users are we tackle who are not for or or some sort of needs right which are not fulfilled by the previous chaty brokers. I would say um it it may not be a huge problem with for some fully developed countries like for example the US US investors or US citizens can easily buy US stocks but that that's not true for many other parts of the world. uh there are so many people who can't even open a trading or or broker account with those platform.

So very troublesome KYC uh and if you do the um traditional financial way of uh trading US stocks there are usually t plus two kind of settlement period. we can do we can al kind of solve those kind of fees or time um and help those users who cannot go through a who cannot for example provide a US-based proof of address you know those sort of things is one problem that we are solving and the second one is um in terms of the money that they you know decided to access from bitcoin they were

only parking uh the idol money in USDT and today we we we tell our users you don't need to necessarily park them there. You can use your USDT to buy uh tokenized money market fund for example or tokenized US stocks or some other commodities that you are bullish on. I think that's the second way that we're looking at at it. And a third way would be of course we want to when when Robin Hood and Futu they they start to offer crypto. Uh one way to fight back is you you grab my market I grab your market.

So it's quite natural in a sense that when 2025 there are so many good service providers like XDocs who have that infrastructure and that compliance available to to make sure that they are doing this in the right way. uh that we don't mind partnering with. Of course, when we talk about tokenized US stocks, one thing that people really uh have have question about or are concerned with is how is this different from traditional US stocks? um all the tokenized US stocks versus traditional US stocks. tokenized US stocks indeed they don't have for for example voting

power um unlike the tra traditional US stocks or the the real US stocks but they do capture all the uh financial growth for example when there is dividend uh offered this dividend will also reflected in the tokenized stocks price because um underlying for example on those mechanism is that underlying they are holding those US stocks for for the users um and they have a different ways for example they have like uh like a redemption mechanism so that the users can um can can can redeem the underlying US stocks um if they went through a KYC with so that sort of mechanism are here

to make sure that the users are indeed purchasing uh the real US stocks rather than you know these two will be dagging easily or it's a little bit like fake that you you really need to um have a proper structure and mechanism to make sure that the tokenized US stocks are packed to the US stocks and also the financial gains are also all reflected here. Uh and we make sure that we look at all those um all these different product offerings to uh as we get we want to partner with the best service providers there.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And and so you've uh the universal exchange, right? That's kind of your guys's vision, which seems very much on this point. Um universal exchange like how do you define that vision and like what does a long-term sort of the end state of the universal exchange look like? >> Mhm. Um yeah, so by the way, it is a long-term version. is not just like a 2025 kind of marketing campaign or marketing idea that we came up with. Why we think this is uh this we are we are you know bullish on this concept in the long run is that again today the lines between US stocks and uh uh crypto

cryptos or the line between you know crypto stocks commodities is is gradually um integration integrating and in my opinion this this line will effectively disappear. here um and uh in in the future crypto exchanges will all offer some sort of onchain access to equities ETFs, commodities and indices while similarly traditional stock exchanges and banks are moving toward offering crypto trading and custody like you know Robin Hood for example. So um as this kind of trading infrastructure converges, all these assets will be less differentiation

differentiated by the idea of crypto versus trady which in in my opinion is more like a labor um but more defined by you know the liquidity, the accessibility, the settlement efficiency etc. Even if you are a you know US stocks but look at look at the market how many US stocks have the liquidity better than for example we don't need even need to talk Bitcoin maybe Solana you know so so it's not just it's not just like this kind of category it's more about in general how's the um how's this asset performing in the long run and how's the

liquidity um in this asset that's that's you needed or traded by many users around the world. So this convergence will eventually unlock uh all the c crossber capital flows and will increase liquidity for traditionally regional assets and of course normalize this 247 global trading as a baseline expectation. Today we offer our US stocks in 245 kind of uh time already to our global users.

>> So of course recently decentralized exchanges have also gotten a lot of traction especially hyperlquid and they've also started introducing you know stock tradings and you know I think listing other types of assets. How do you see the competition from decentralized exchanges? Mhm. Uh actually this the competition from DEX for me is not not really much. What I mean by that is in 2022 we've already seen uh DEX started to have some volume from especially FTX collapse when people lost faith and credibility and trust in CX. Uh of course all the CEX work together to rebuild that trust. uh but

from 2022 we've already seen that trend coming up and that's why to go back to our earlier story about how I get to know the big team is that big was already placing strategic investment into decentralized wallet and decentralized exchange already that's why we um acquired the bigger wallet bigger uh big and rebranded to bigger wallet uh so we see DX and CEX more as integration rather an pure competitor. For example, from a users perspective, most of the users will enter crypto industry through a CX because of the 247 customer service because of much easier onoff ramp. Um

well, when they cannot buy some tokens which are listed on CX today, Binance OKX probably offer about 200 to 300 cryptocurrencies. We have 700 cryptocurrencies available on our CX. Uh so when users cannot buy cannot find the volume that they the the the the token that they want to trade on CX, they went to DX. Um that's why we have our bigger wallet to capture that volume. But but in in total, I don't really think it's like a competition. It's more of integration of different users journey or certain other users need. And another thing that I'm also viewing from RNA CEX

versus the DEEX point of view is compliance and KYC. Today most of the major CEX are requiring all the users to do KYC. um because we want to we also don't want to get us into trouble with regulators and for big we think the future um landscape or the future competitiveness of running a CEX will be you have to be compliant otherwise you can't offer for example trai products um and you will get into trouble with lots of regulators and being fined or even prison uh today we don't see the regulators is tracing after the C uh DEX but they are tracing

after CX. Uh so there are some certain volume or users uh who don't want to do KYC may go to DX. Um but I don't think that will be sustainable. Uh I think one day regulators especially the US regulators will also chase after uh the DEX especially per DAX etc who don't do KYC. Um so I don't think that's going to be you know um any big issue for us. Again we want to grow the pie bigger rather than just cutting pie with from each other. So one way to grow the pie bigger is to offer more products especially valuable products that our users want to trade and that's why we are um we are working hard to to build on our RWS.

Does that make make sense from you know our CX point of view? Yeah. And then you are also I think you mentioned in your breakpoint talk that you guys are listing like lots of Salana assets sort of on big. So you also kind of try to integrate or >> it's not unl permissionless integration like enabling we've enabled uh at that time only five public chains but today six public chains which are all the base chain all the sorry all the base chain enabled uh contract address basically any token that's offered on Solana base ethereum BSC morph and mon so all these six tokens or sorry six chains token are

all permissionless tradable on beget >> and but then the liquidity is on the decentralized exchange when you trade >> it's on the so you basically acts as like unis swap or something like that >> that would get enterprise >> you get wallet etc. Yeah, let's talk about AI a bit. Uh what do you think is the role or like what's the role for AI today in big? How do you guys use AI?

>> Mhm. Uh AI's role today in big is definitely very very prominent. We use AI on both trading behaviors or providing trading tours to our users as well as an operational point of view. Uh let me give you a few examples from the trading perspective because our users want to uh use use AI tool to analyze their portfolio or analyze certain cryptocurrency and the trends. So we provided something called uh get uh sorry get agent which is a crypto advisory tool for our users. on Solena breakpoint. I also mentioned an example that about a year ago uh when I asked

big sorry I think it's it's either Salana break or maybe another event in Dubai but basically uh I told some people that about a year and a half ago when I asked CH GPT uh give me 10 tokens that I should invest in and keep in mind I'm a lowrisk profile person yet CH GPT gave me uh Luna which obviously collapsed already in 2024 because I asked them in 2024 but that happened in 2022 because all these general um AI tool or AI LLM one limitation of them is they have a cut off uh line for their knowledge uh and they are not

cryptospecific but crypto in our industry everything's 24/7 everything changes so fast and there's new concept coming up every day um you can't base your study and your um trading kind of advisor from someone who is not targeting this industry and that's why we build get agent for example today when you ask beget sorry uh beget agent um what's bitcoin's price and what's your knowh how what's your suggestion on whether I should buy or buy or sell today you will give you a very thorough analysis on fundamentals um technicals And also the price is very uptodated to

to even seconds because the underlying API uh is uh linked to our current trading price. >> Is that like a specialized model that's trained on or >> Yeah, it is a specialized agent and uh underlying there are I think 40 different LMS and APIs supporting >> uh this AI. >> Okay. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I think that will be I guess it's a tricky one too cuz probably it will still be wrong very often about what to do. So um yeah it is tricky but uh I've I've already I I've also you know tried it

myself many times and uh asked many of our for example KS to uh for feedback. I think what I heard a lot from our audience or users is that uh it's at least better than just you know human kind of thinking. It gives you also a very thorough analysis. uh no one can really predict you know whatever price right uh even if you are Warren Buffett but but what AI does is to give you different perspective so that you can make better decisions and you can see certain blind points that you didn't really realize um I think that's that's a great way of

using it and also attract different sorry not attract but like uh get or gather different information source course um I think that's another great way of using it um but those are all for trading uh in terms of big operational EOS that we talked about SEO AEO are not enough geos are the new um trend that uh exchanges are using to attract users in certain regions for example Southeast Asia and some other countries in Europe we see GEO attracting more than 40% of our users today so more than 40% It's incredible.

>> Those of those users come from GEO rather than SEO uh new users. >> And I'm curious h how what do you do to rank well in uh in AI systems? Yeah. >> Yeah. Um so I mean my AI team will give you a much better and thorough analysis. uh but my general understanding is that number one you have to feed the AI or different LLMs information that number one they want to they want to accept and number two of course uh you know slightly better towards your own platform what I mean by that is you can't only give AI information something

like you know big is great beget's grace is beautiful you know something only positive about your platform. You have to give them information that are quite um subjective like you you can write about maybe top five exchanges uh and then you know fit in begets information on for example AI's development for example UEX so that the AI will firstly think okay this is a very neutral kind of piece of information um and of course they will and when we write it we we also want to be neutral when we write about our competitors, we we talk about their good, their positive uh things as well.

We we try not to shade on any of our competitors. We try to be very collaborative. Uh but for example, that's a that's a good way of looking at AI optimization. uh you want to give them neutral pieces of information that also include your own platform include begats um own ability and differential factors like UEX and AI. >> Okay. Okay. Cool. Um well we are almost at the end of um as we record this almost at the end of 2025.

So as you look to next year, what's your what are your feelings, predictions for where things are going? >> Mhm. Uh this can have different angles. Do do we want to talk about more cryptocurrency price or different sectors in the industry? >> Let's talk about both. Let's let's talk about the market first. How do you view the market? >> Okay. Market wise, I I personally think there are about 70% possibility that there is still another bull market. Uh mainly due to the interest rate cut and more Fed QE, quantitative easing. So definitely macro rather than micro. Um

and then maybe maybe 20% or or uhish 20 15% kind of probability that this is a bare market already and it's going to be bare for a long time. Uh and another 15% or 10% thinking oh it will just stay flat for a while rather than going to dip. Um yeah, but I'm definitely more bullish than bearish in this point of view because uh I think there's still some sort of uh um liquidity coming from the US rather than and also Bitcoin price versus gold this year has been pretty low. So I'm more

bullish than than bearish in terms of 2026 in terms of the market price. I even think Bitcoin can potentially hit 150 if not 130 at least you know past all-time high if the interest rate continue uh goes down and uh more liquidity come from the US uh uh released um and of course today Bitcoin's price is largely affected by the Wall Street's prediction and and uh their uh sentiment rather than purely cryptonative uh communities And is there any question around that?

Because I think this is a little bit controversial in a way and of course um nobody can really tell. I'm I'm trying my best to give my point of view. >> Yeah, I mean I would personally kind of agree with you, right? Because on the also the sentiment is pretty bad and at the same time the macro condition should be getting better. So um I think there's a bit a question to what extent that also applies to the old coins right because I think we saw this year even so many altcoins are struggling so much and the retail interest doesn't really seem to be there very much. So I'm I'm wondering and I

I'm curious how you see that. I'm wondering what it will take to get a lot of just normal retail traders to come back to crypto. Do you how do you see that? >> Mhm. Uh well, me being relatively bullish on Bitcoin price and maybe large blue chip tokens, uh I'm quite bearish on the altcoins. Um this is actually quite controversial especially given that beet as an exchange are offering lots of altcoins.

Uh I personally think that the very early stage web3 projects uh much are very hard to survive in the current market because the cryptocurrency's major capital inflow comes from again Wall Street and those money come to our industry because of DAT digital asset treasuries and ETFs rather uh and and this money are not floating into the altcoins. So the retail investors who are trading altcoins has a terrible riskreward ratio. There there may be and there will be still maybe five or 10 or even 100 different altcoins which increase by 100

times but many many or most maybe 99.9% of the altcoins will not be performing as well especially given you know pom fun etc kind of uh launchpad platform just make it so easy to issue a new coin. uh today there are maybe a 100,000 more altcoins coming up today every day and the the altcoins that are already offered on CX most of them are not performing as well as Bitcoin in this current cycle. So uh I think alcoins are fading and uh the uh the so-called alcoin season may not even come in 2025

or 2026. uh but of course there are still you know some small memes and here and there they there are there are gains but most of them are not be are not uh it's not just something quite general uh but there are exceptions for projects that I'm bullish on I think the infrastructure projects with with real world resource uh and real world uh value such as stable coin payment rwas I think I think I'm quite bullish on them uh but I th those kind of projects most of them won't even issue a token they may do IPO if they can um and the same goes to us we are also you know trying

to uh think about being a listed company and uh um and and be more mainstream and be more compliant rather than just focusing on the uh relatively small market of alcoin Yeah. No, absolutely. I think it's a very difficult environment and I mean recently we saw I think circle right acquiring a project called Axelor. I don't know if you're familiar with it but it it's interoperability project that wasn't even doing that bad. think like you know the market cap was fully liquid 150 million FTB some trading some usage of the product but then it's kind

of the team just basically acquired by circle and then you sort of don't know what's going to happen with that with the token almost might be a bit abandoned and so I think it's yeah just very difficult I think for for tokens to to survive which is completely shift right cuz for a long time in crypto. Nobody wanted to invest in equity. Everyone wanted just tokens and that's uh yeah it's completely changing I think now. >> Mhm. Yeah. Uh I I think a reason behind it is again uh crypto is more mainstream and the pricing power of this industry is becoming more mainstream. is more uh

web 2 VC and uh uh Wall Street secondary money market fund sorry secondary uh funds rather than pure cryptonative uh users or project funders or CX um it's a it's a good thing about our industry in my opinion uh people may not fully agree with that but but I think being more mainstream and uh uh be able to you know fight with traditional financial industry players. That's where the real big money is rather than you know smaller group that we are too maybe slightly too focusing on.

>> Do you see any areas within crypto that you know you think they're going to do extremely well in the next one or two years and that people are not paying enough attention to? >> Uh I mentioned a few. I definitely think stable coins RWS and payment solutions if they have uh valid product market fit and strong user base they are going to do pretty well as for very crypto native kind of narrative uh such as you know gamefy social DP L1 L2 etc. um at least the current market and the current product they are offering I

don't really see strong product market fit and hence I'm not very bullish on >> cool well and what about um what's your biggest priority your biggest goal for next year >> for next year uh one big step that we are working hard on is compliance especially actually getting our Mika license down and uh build the whole uh fully compliant European sort of uh department and uh infrastructure for uh for our exchange. Another market we are paying close attention to is the US

market. So um we are still you know internally debating and thinking about launching our US operations website. It's a large market but the compliance call cost is relatively high. Uh and there are also large competitors like you know Coinbase um Robin Hood etc. So how to compete with them is definitely a question that I've been thinking very very hard. Uh but launching and uh launching and uh building our EU um exchange as well as US exchange are two priorities I have right now. and of course you know continue growing our user base, continue offering good

products. I'm actually quite looking forward into what we can build in 2026 because in 2025 we've had some very interesting product offerings such as you know get agent and uh um and and tokenized US stocks. Those are some of the things that I've never thought about um in earlier years. So 2026 could be also very challenging and interesting and especially being able to you know offer something that our users love is just one thing I love about uh running this uh exchange and being with the bigger.

>> Cool. Thank you so much for joining us Gracie. It was really great to talk with you and learn a bit more about Bigat and excited to see how the platform is going to evolve in the next year. >> Lovely. [music] Thanks.