GM guys, welcome to Inside Indonesian Blockchain Week. So today we have a very special guest, Gracy Chen, the CEO of Bitget. Welcome Gracy.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Wondering is this your first time in Jakarta?
It is my first time in Jakarta.
How do you feel about Jakarta? I just ended yesterday, but it was evening, so the traffic was okay, but I heard the traffic can be pretty bad in the daytime.
In the traffic hours especially.
All right. All right. Welcome. And let's start with questions. All right.
Okay. So, Gracy, you introduced UDX, the universal exchange, like almost a year ago. So, feel free to share with us like what has actually worked and what turned out harder than you expected.
Yeah. First of all, let me quickly explain to our users what UDX is. Crypto community people usually think about exchanges into CEX and DEX, centralized and decentralized exchanges. So since last year, earlier last year, we've embedded a lot of decentralized assets like all the millions of coins in crypto, a CEX experience where users can just fill in the contract address and start trading that cryptocurrency on Bitget. So we don't feel we are just a CEX anymore, or we're not a DEX. And another more important trend that we were seeing last year was also real-world assets going on chain, and that's why we started to think about, you know, what is another term that we define as UDX. And then we thought about, yes, universal exchange, to cover universally valuable assets, not just crypto, not just tokenized stocks, but also even real-world assets which are really not very accessible to retail clients, right? So universal exchange covers universal assets. Also, it's a new way of running an exchange in our opinion, that users should have like the universally available trading hours, trading justifications, like basically for almost anyone, almost any time, and from almost anywhere. So that's the goal of UDX.
But then back to your question of what are the hard part, what are the easy part? I think launching a token is just step one. So I would call that the easy part because many people when they think about RWA just sort of, okay, RWA is tokenizing assets. I can just put this whatever assets, maybe a land, maybe an art, maybe a stock, just tokenize it and that's all. But in our opinion, and because we've already done tokenization of many valuable assets out there, in our opinion, that's just the first step. The more important, harder part of running RWA is how to provide a more not fragmented user experience among different assets and then how to provide the liquidity. For example, trading hours of the US market, like the weekend. And this year if you think about it, there are so many big announcements happened in the weekend. Donald Trump started the war on Saturday, that the financial market will react very quickly but there isn't that much liquidity because the market is closed if it's US stock market. So how to deal with situations like that is a much harder part.
Understood. I think again you described UDX, you know, like as breaking the impossible triangle of user experience, like variety, and also security. Which of the three was the hardest?
I would say security-wise. So again, providing a good user experience is relatively easy. We just need to launch many assets, many justifications. Of course, there's compliance involved. But when I say security, it's also about, number one, dealing with regulations, right? There are jurisdictions who look at RWA differently. There might be markets like the US who are very friendly, and even NYSE and NASDAQ are looking at their tokenization strategy, which is a very important trend for the global financial market. But there are some other jurisdictions that move much slower. They probably even, I think Southeast Asia is one of those markets generally that may spend slightly more time to come up with regulations, need to learn what's happening, how to deal with potential fraud, anti-money laundering issues, KYC issues. And we are of course very friendly with regulators that we want to do this properly. But being able to provide the same sort of services in more than 100 countries that we cover is nearly impossible. Again, every single country, every single jurisdiction may look at things very differently and we need to be compliant. We need to make sure our users' assets are secured. That's hard.
And think about what happened to Bitget last year. The hackers have always been targeting the major exchanges and now you guys are not just providing crypto assets, you're also providing for example stocks. So for example for us, how to make sure when we tokenize our stocks, our sorry, US stocks, for example, through our platform, the custody is correct, it's with a US registered broker-dealer, and the tokenization process is right. The price is always pegged to the underlying assets. So everything around that is part of the security that we care for our users.
Nice. Nice. Nice. And I think now like around half of Bitget users I can say now they both hold both crypto and also tokenized assets right in eligible jurisdictions. So did that number like actually surprise you? And does the behavior indicate the boundary between crypto platforms and traditional broker is becoming less distinct in a way?
I would say that number, the number itself doesn't surprise me as much but the speed of us reaching this number is actually quite surprising. Because think about it, we've only listed and exchanged tokenized stocks solution since a year ago, but we've only also launched gold and silver like commodity CFDs earlier this year. We've only launched our own tokenized solution, Reallit, in early June. And it's just everything just happened within a year. So it's surprising to see what we achieved within a year and how many users are both interested in holding crypto and TradFi assets.
And by the way, I think it was early Q2, late Q1 when we put TradFi as a major category on our first page of the app. And that's very important because all your volume comes to your app on the first page and separating all the TradFi assets on one category and put it on that page is a strategic move. It's not just like a random change on your UI/UX. It's a strategic statement that for me, TradFi is so important. Now actually Dian, who is our head of community, and myself, we were discussing yesterday, we should probably change our Twitter handle from, you know, just Gracy at Bitget to Gracy at Bitget TradFi.
Wow. Well, he did that already. He's called Dian TradFi something something, like TradFi. He's stating that he's a TradFi guy. And that is important if you think about it, like how we want to convey that message and how we position.
And Bitget has been very focusing on the users right? And now the users has grown over 125 million users I see. And then what is the biggest thing that changes when you get that big?
I guess managing people is hard. And how we think about enabling this exchange or trading experience for the 125 million users we have as well as managing the 2,200 employees that we have at Bitget is that, number one, we want to be globalized, but number two, we also want to be localized. So that's a good balance we need to strive between globalization and localization.
Let me give you an example. At Bitget, many of the, we call middle office, like marketing, finance, product, technology, everything of them, middle office is a globalized hub where all these different functions support our frontliners differently. If you want to do a marketing campaign, there are teams behind you to help you design, to help you maybe come up with a proper plan. We have event team talking to all the event organizers around the world. But that's the globalization part. And we want to make sure the product that we're offering has the same elements, right? The same UI/UX, good 24/7 customer service, like everything of them is globalized. Yet this more than 100 countries of people that we are serving, they have their own needs. Language are different. Culture is different. The product that can be accessed in that market for market reason as well as for regulation reason are also different. So we need to rely on our local team to decide, for example, do I go to Indonesia Blockchain Week or another event in Indonesia? How often do I do certain promotions and who are the good KOLs like yourself that we should work with. So all these things we rely on the local team to make decisions. And for me, finding that balance and being able to empower all my 2,200 team members around the world is a very hard part of my job.
