I don't think it's a typical bear market nor a bull market. I would call it a monkey market because it just jumps up and down. If you look at the four-year cycle, 2026 is similar to 2022. If that is the case, which I hope not because we don't want to see another FTX, but what that shows is also there could be another black swan event that drives the Bitcoin price further down.
Q4 last year we even contributed to 89% of on-chain total volume. So I was really surprised and, of course, I'm proud that Bitget is very pioneering on those things. That's a very important shift that we are seeing, and I think this shift is...
Quick one before we continue. If you're not subscribed yet, can you please check beneath and click that subscribe button? It helps us enormously grow this channel. Thank you very much. Welcome to the show, Gracy. It's an honor to have you on because it's not regular to have a female guest. We have been dying to get someone in crypto on the show, but it's a very male-dominated industry. And I don't really want to emphasize a lot on this topic, but I wanted to ask you a question in this sense: how it is for you to be in crypto in such a male industry, in the sense that it's not very common for women to be interested in crypto.
I wouldn't... I actually don't agree with the last comment, but I do agree with the fact and observations that you mentioned earlier around maybe there are fewer female leaders in crypto exchanges and in the crypto industry in general. But if we think that's mainly because there are much fewer women who are interested — at least I don't think that's the pure or simple one factor. That could be one of the factors. For me, I guess there are two thoughts that came to my mind about this particular topic. Number one, I don't want people to remember me as a female CEO. I just want people to remember me as a CEO who brought Bitget from... when I joined our company, we only had 150 employees. Today, we have more than 2,000 team members coming from more than 40 countries. Yeah, so not a female CEO, but just a CEO.
But secondly, I would also want to say sometimes I feel being a female gives me certain advantage. Like for example this, right, like you mentioned, because I'm a female CEO then more people know me because of the gender. Like there are only that many, for example, female CEOs or co-CEOs within the top 10 exchanges. The only two that I can think of are me and He from Binance. Yes, so that gives us a little bit of advantage that I would be invited to a female leader panel easily because again there are only that many choices out there. But there isn't something called a male crypto leader panel, right? You've never seen that.
And I guess waiting for toilets and restrooms in the crypto conference is a great experience for me because there isn't a queue unlike in many other occasions, but there's a long queue for the other gender's restroom. But those are jokes aside, I just want to say I think it's all about the result. It's all about your leadership and how this industry is evolving and whether you and your organization are contributing and innovating to those innovations.
I think it's not that women are not interested in crypto. I don't think the statement is completely correct from my part, but I think overall finance is not usually high upon the list when it comes to women's interest. But what I find interesting is that I'm working with my fiancée in the company and her sister-in-law, so we have 50% women, 50% men. Women are way better when it comes to managing risk or making decisions. So I'm just interested to know how it is that we are not seeing many women in leadership roles in exchanges or protocols. I would love to see more of a balanced view in there. So I would like to hear your opinion on that.
Yeah, I would like to see more balance as well. I think a key change that we need to make as an industry is shifting the mindset. By mindset I mean it's more of a stereotype that people thought men are better than women on, for example, STEM subjects, on mathematics or blockchain technology, computer science, etc. I do have very strong evidence, like for example I graduated from MIT. So it is typical that people thought, you know, MIT because it's a technology school, there should be more men than women in that university. That's not true. No matter if it's bachelor's STEM subjects or it's, you know, master's degree, we actually see a very equal ratio, maybe 40-60, maybe 45-55, but it's not something like 10 to 90.
So many times when we think about, you know, technology subjects or finance subjects, that at least as a subject for studying it's actually quite equal. But I do observe, for example, if you go to a company like an exchange, you may see pretty good balance ratio on the bottom layer of the hierarchy. If you rank everyone according to salary or their title, the higher you go, it seems that there are less female leaders existing.
And what can we do to change that? I would say number one, change the mindset. It's not just about men or women, you know, we need men's support on this as well. I've told my male colleagues that the single one question that I hate the most that I got asked a lot is: 'As a female CEO, how do you balance your work and life?' I'm like, you gentlemen also have a work and life that you want to balance, right? It's not like there's only female leaders who have a family. Yeah. So we want to cultivate a culture that everyone is equal, not like a specific gender will be asked about this sort of balance question a lot more.
At the same time we also want to provide support if we see a gap. For example, since last year, Bitget has started to work with UNICEF on empowering teenage girls to study more STEM subjects, financial literacy course for example, that I created with UNICEF that we provide for free. By the way, although in terms of distribution and some offline events we are a little bit biased, we invite more females and teenage girls because that's the spirit of those events, but those courses are also online, free and open to everyone. So I guess yeah, whenever we see a gap we want to bridge that. It could be through some sort of scholarship, some sort of course, some sort of membership community.
I've also hosted, you know, yoga sessions for female crypto — not leaders, but just whoever likes crypto or whoever goes to this blockchain conference or that blockchain conference. So there are different communities and we want to definitely support different genders.
I think that's actually great. And hopefully more companies are going to follow in your footsteps. I think I've listened to some interviews in preparation to this recording, and in one of them you've said that Bitcoin belongs in every household, and I want to know why is that still not happening at this point in time.
I think AI, Bitcoin, these great technologies — if you look at AI as an asset or technology, that works. Similarly, if you look at Bitcoin or blockchain as an asset or technology, that also works. But those sort of new things, in my opinion, yes, it belongs to everyone. Everyone should have it. But 'should' doesn't mean it is the case, at least not yet.
Still, I think today only about 2% of the world population has experienced good large language models, although maybe there are a lot more who have heard of AI or have heard of Bitcoin. But any new technology, the mass adoption will take a while. Have you seen this sort of adoption graph where it's always the early adopters, like you and I, right? We are very curious about new technology, we are adventurous. We heard Bitcoin, then we started to read the Bitcoin white paper and we bought our first Bitcoin no matter how hard it is, because I bought my first Bitcoin in Ethereum, remembering there isn't much... for example, XRP, that's the third cryptocurrency that I bought. But at that time, the exchanges don't really offer XRP. I needed to create a wallet, a soft wallet on Ripple Labs in order to purchase or to get my XRP.
So we will take that effort and achieve what we want to, you know, buy these new assets or try this new technology. But not everyone is like us. Again, I still encourage everyone to try the best AI tools. You know, there are Claude and Codex, those are the two that I love the most. Don't settle for just a smaller platform. Similarly, I think everyone should at least own one Bitcoin or, you know, 0.1 Bitcoin, at least own a portion and taste how cryptocurrency is different from your fiat currency and understand that technology. But again, I think the adoption will take time, mainly because it's a new technology.
I think yeah, that's true. I saw there are different theories when it comes to adoption. You have got like different phases in the growth curve that sometimes it flatlines for a certain period of time before there is a new breakthrough and then the adoption curve accelerates again. I kind of feel like AI has hit that first level and needs to stall for a little bit to get into newer or better products because I think marginally the latest versions of Claude and the latest versions of the LLMs are not so much better than the earlier ones, at least in my opinion. But I still think that AI is going to be huge. And then with crypto, I think we've been into four to five years of no developments at all, and then now it starts to pick up a little bit more in my opinion. But I'm also keen to hear from your perspective: where do you see the crypto markets at this point, and what would be the tipping point for crypto to get into a new wave of adoption?
I would want to firstly lay a foundation which I hope is not true, but I think it's more and more true in this cycle, which is: crypto lacks its own innovation. However, it is integrating into the traditional financial industry and becoming a very important infrastructure of TradFi.
Why I think this is becoming true is mainly for the last few years there aren't that many layer 1 and layer 2 sort of public chains that really survived and really provided utility. Now, although many of them still have a very high valuation or market cap of over a billion or so, but sometimes the real developers on that public chain is probably just single digit or double digit on a daily basis. So it's more like a dead chain to me.
And then if you look at the application layer, it's even worse. You know, GameFi, SocialFi, NFT — these quite exciting Web3 native applications are also not really, at least not really fulfilling the promises that they made. Not, you know, taking down Facebook or TikTok as a SocialFi, not as interesting as your PS5 as a GameFi, and NFTs — they are dead, right? Many of them would just go up and down like that, just like meme coins. So if you look at all these individual sectors, there aren't that many projects that make you feel there is long-term sustainability value, and many of them are dead or are dying.
And that's why I feel sad, and that's why I don't want this to be the case. But I still see the huge potential as part of the traditional financial industry. And in 2026, when you talk about Bitcoin, yes, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, they are still asset classes or assets that you can speculate. But I think the more important thing is about the underlying technology of blockchain that can make, for example, cross-border transactions much easier using stablecoins, financial settlement much easier for tokenized stocks, comparing with the traditional way of equity and stock settlement, for example.
So those are the areas that I think have more potential in the upcoming few years. You know, RWA, stablecoins, brokering the unbanked, maybe DeFi. I do like DEXs and CEXs — CEX and DEX. I think they still have an important say in the industry, but I worry about the smaller projects who were not really providing a very strong product-market fit. Yeah, I'll put it that way.
I think there's always the debate of whether or not a layer one should be valued based on its revenue or based on the TVL that's locked within the layer one. I think that's overall the debate on Ethereum at this point as well. I kind of agree with the fact that crypto lacks its own innovation in your opinion, because at this point the chains that are doing really well are the ones that are having a unique utility that people want to use. Like for instance, privacy for Zcash, or Hyperliquid with the DEX that they have built, or anything between the DEX and the CEX. But if you look at protocols themselves or like actual utility coins, they still can't find an actual way of generating value within its own protocol, aside from the fact that they have raised capital through VCs and then being dumped upon after it goes live because it doesn't generate any value at all. What is required in your opinion to actually change that?
I think we need to have our own killer apps. By killer apps I mean again real product-market fit. Right now we see why, you know, why Hyperliquid, why Binance, Bitget — these CEXs are doing pretty well because it's trading, it's a trading platform, and now crypto is still mainly in the area of finance, which is just the case. But earlier when you talk about Web3 or a decentralized world, there are much more promises that we made or much more different scenarios that we tried to build, right? But those things didn't really become strong in terms of product-market fit.
But I think stablecoins, again, stablecoins used in cross-border transactions, tokenized stocks, and even tokenized other commodities such as gold, silver, and oil — they are seeing a much stronger product-market fit. It could be about, you know, capital control in certain countries, it could be about it being very hard to open a broker account, it could be about just in terms of the traditional banking industry, like how many different layers your money needs to go through if you are sending your money from one country to another country, right? There are so many different settlement banks in between, and there are fees and time as cost involved.
I think the World Bank estimated that there is about 6% fees deducted due to transaction fees or forex fees, and those can be avoided much better by stablecoins. Yeah. So these are good points, but can we really, you know, do something to, for example, make those dead GameFi, SocialFi projects live again? I doubt, unless they can really have a strong product-market fit, which I haven't spent enough time thinking about those things because I'm not building a project on that.
But I've spent enough time thinking about, you know, how we as an exchange can stay relevant even if, you know, Bitcoin is not exclusive to us anymore, right? There are ETFs who are offering Bitcoin purchase and or trading in general. There are also DATs who give you that exposure. Then there are traditional brokers, or more of equity brokers such as Robinhood, such as certain banks, they also offer Bitcoin as a trading asset. And then why do we need Bitget? So that's a question that I spend more time thinking about, which I think is also important.
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We will touch upon that in a little bit, but I wanted to ask you one more question because I think the product-market fit is broadly being discussed over the past few years. Every time when there is a huge bear market, everyone starts to discuss whether or not we actually need crypto, which is a valid question. And apparently during bull markets, nobody discusses this topic at all. But then there are some people that are saying that the product-market fit is probably not for human people to use crypto, but it's more for AI agents. How do you look at that entire topic? And are you expecting to see more AI agents using stablecoins, but also using Bitget or trading on Bitget as an exchange?
Yes, we do see more AI trading activities on Bitget, and we've done a lot of different work, such as a chatbot in the early days, more than a year ago, that we've had the GetAgent, which is your crypto AI chatbot. And then we realized, okay, chatbot is not enough, we need real trading tools, which is about execution rather than just giving you advice. So there are different products that we built around that. And yes, back to your question, there are more trading activities from AI, and I think this is a trend that nobody can ignore.
There are also cases that, for example, I chatted with a stablecoin issuer the other day, and they were also telling me how they are opening accounts for AI agents. Like they allow their customers to assign, okay, this agent, maybe Claude, you have, let's say, 5,000 to start trading. And once you prove to me that you're capable, I can give you more. Which I think Claude officially is also working a lot on the finance industry, maybe, and the healthcare industry on some of those tools that they are building with large financial companies and healthcare companies. So those are all very exciting activities that we are seeing.
But as of now, because our users are KYC'd as an exchange, we want all of our users to be KYC'd and to be more compliant. So those AI agents still belong to our user, and the user needs to be responsible for that agent itself. It won't be like, okay, an agent can just come to me without giving me any KYC information, open an account, and start trading on Bitget. That's at least not happening on Bitget. But I think there are DEXs that support that. There are different scenarios and different things that people are trying, and I think that's an important trend. It's just not very big yet.
One of the things that I find very interesting is that all of a sudden the interest in crypto has risen through the RWA interest, and I think it was June or July, but any of the two months, the on-chain activity in trading RWAs exceeded crypto, which then shows that RWAs are more interesting to be traded on-chain in general, and perhaps there's not really a purpose for crypto at this point. How important do you think RWAs are, and how is Bitget positioning themselves when it comes to this entire market?
Yeah, I think this is a very big market. Also June this year, both Binance and Bitget launched our RWA equity products within, I think within a week, like we both launched it. And for Bitget, we have supported xStocks since a year ago. I think that was August or September last year that we first issued, and Q4 last year we even contributed to 89% of total volume. That's peros data. So I was really surprised, and of course I'm proud that Bitget is very pioneering on those things.
Am I surprised or not? I think a little bit surprised, but also not that surprised, because when we were thinking about the equity strategy, we realized again last year when RWA became a thing, we started to talk to all the service providers, and, you know, xStocks were pretty good, and we listed their token, and we started to see the volume going up. But it's mainly until this year when there are more stocks such as SpaceX listed, such as, you know, Binance also listed all those equities, that there are a lot more people started to trade the on-chain version of stocks through our platforms rather than going to traditional exchanges to trade the equities.
Yeah, so that's a very important shift that we are seeing, and I think this shift is going to continue. By the way, it's not just spot equity. It's not just spot equity. It's also about equity perpetuals, and there are a lot of potential on that. For example, in the US there has never been real perpetuals, like a lot of perpetuals that they claim to be a proxy. But now even SEC and CFTC are discussing, okay, how can we regulate stock perpetuals? Because stocks used to belong to SEC as a regulator, and then CFTC manages all the derivatives as well as Bitcoin as a commodity. But now there is this, you know, combined version called equity perpetual, then who manages it or who regulates it? Like they need to work together.
So those are some interesting conversations that I've been hearing from the US landscape. But for us as an offshore exchange who serve more than 100 million users, there are a lot of users who are trading equity perpetuals with us and equity spot in, you know, the tokenized version. What we call is Reality, our platform Reality, that similar to xStocks, that they are the issuers. Yeah. So we've seen a lot of volume around that. We also did a research recently on our own users' data. We saw nearly 50%, or 40-50% around that number of our users who hold both crypto and some sort of traditional financial instrument such as equity or commodity. Yeah. So those are all huge changes that we are seeing.
It's not a surprise to me at all. I mean, we are running our own funds, and having tokenized versions of stocks and commodities opens up the landscape for us to actually hold those which we couldn't before. So it's actually better to manage risk or to trade other assets when crypto is not doing anything at all. But the markets are now hopefully consistently waking up with Bitcoin breaking from like $65,000 to now $80,000. Does this excite you at all after all the years being in crypto, or are you still a little bit cautious when it comes to the sentiment change that we've seen over the past few weeks?
I think one thing concerns me is that within this one week the sentiment changes too fast. Also, Bitcoin price went up too fast. And if you look at the fundamentals, I don't think anything fundamentally changed other than, you know, President Trump hosted a White House crypto conference that he mentioned some very crypto-friendly frameworks, and, you know, he wants the Clarity Act to be passed. We always know that President Trump wanted the Clarity Act to be passed, right? But whether it will be passed or not is still an unknown today.
And similarly, we always know President Trump is pretty crypto-native or at least pro-crypto, like he and his family even co-founded World Liberty Financial. You know, all these things are already known information. Maybe, you know, the bond purchase is a little bit new, but basically I don't think the foundation or the fundamentals changed that much.
But the sentiment really changed a lot, and that's why I worry. And whether this is, you know, a bull market already, I doubt. To me, I feel, at least me personally, if I look at this market and I can name it, I don't think it's a typical bear market nor is it a bull market. I will call it a monkey market because it just jumps up and down. So I call it monkey market, and in a market like this people should be very cautious about, you know, adding very high leverage because again it can go up and down quite dramatically.
And if you look at the four-year cycle, this seems to me more of the bear market or starting of a bear market than a start of a bull market. At least, you know, again, if you just put the four-year cycle back four years, and 2026 is similar to 2022 in that sense. If that is the case, which I hope not, because we don't want to see another FTX, but if that's the case, what that shows is also there could be another black swan event in our industry that drives the Bitcoin price further down. I don't want to be bearish on my industry, but I just want to highlight that caution, at least we should be aware of.
I think I understand your view in that, and I think it's not uncommon to be cautious at the start. I mean, you could also argue that fundamentally nothing has changed, but given the fact that RWAs, for instance, or like revenues have been going up for so long and the underlying assets have been going down for so long, perhaps the pricing of most of those assets have been lagging quite heavily, and they needed or required some sort of trigger. And I think secondly to that, a lot of people assume that the markets are fairly priced, but there are always insiders having more info on where the markets are going to go to. You and I won't know that either.
So I think monkey market makes a lot of sense because it's indeed just bouncing around, and if you don't catch the big moves, you're basically not making any return at all. But what I see from my experience of having a social media account and running multiple companies over the past two weeks, all of a sudden old people that have not had any interest in crypto over the past two years start messaging me, and I can see that the activity in terms of volumes have gone up. So I assume that the activity on Bitget has increased as well. And then my question is, with all the decentralized exchanges that are happening right now and the centralized exchanges, how are you going to position yourself correctly in the markets that are crypto right now?
Sorry, what's your question again?
