Hello, welcome back to the CoinTelegraph booth here at Paris Blockchain Week. I am joined by Ben Zhou from Bybit. Ben, thanks for joining us.
Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure.
We'd love to hear from you, Ben. Just to start up front, what is going on right now with the crypto market? Are we bottomed out? What is going on exactly?
Like from most people I talk to, they think we've bottomed out. And recently we've seen some movement with Bitcoin coming up a little bit. But, you know, a lot of the excitement and the talk is about TradFi RWAs coming on chain. How these TradFi assets, even gold, oil, can become using crypto as a vehicle to come on chain and trade. And we've seen a lot of volume coming out of exchanges on TradFi assets. So, that's a lot of the trend that's happening currently.
Well. And from an exchange perspective, have retail investors lost interest in crypto?
I think I would say compared to the peak time, maybe we have 30% less. But you know, that's normal. We've been through a few cycles and then it always happens when the market is a bit on the dip. But when the market picks up, everyone gets more excited again. So, I don't see anything that's special about this case.
And what do you think needs to happen for the market to get excited again, for people to get back into buying, you know, that 30% coming back in? What do we need?
I think we definitely need some catalyst. Probably whenever we see a catalyst is a new technology or new innovation that comes out. Like the last cycle, maybe it's meme coins, you know, all these things. This cycle maybe it's AI, I don't know. But I was in the Hong Kong conference maybe a month and a half ago. I thought it was an AI conference because everyone was talking about AI. Maybe we'll see some synergy there. Yeah, so but yeah, I think that'll be interesting.
Can you break that down because I think a lot of people use the AI buzzword in crypto, but a lot of people still don't know how the two are actually going to blend in the sense how AI is going to help the crypto market expand. So, can you explain how you think those are going to blend together nicely for crypto going forward and why everyone is so excited about the two?
I mean, so if you talk about AI specifically, AI agents that helps us. Ultimately, crypto is the underlying and the easiest form of money that an agent would use, right? That's number one. Number two is when you use the AI, essentially, it can help users to do a lot of smart tradings where you previously cannot, right? For example, you can tell your AI to check the market inefficiency and then do some arbitrage where previously requires a lot of asset or a lot of infrastructure to do so. But now AI is very easy for any ordinary user. So, I think those market opportunities will gradually reduce as people use AI. But I think we only talk about the future. Maybe I think a few years down the road where AI actually starts to do the automated trading. Then like even buying things for the user or everything, then probably crypto will be the good underlying.
Yeah. And so, speaking of AI agents, is that something that you're particularly excited about? You know, there's a lot of executives that are starting to use them now in different ways. Is that something that you've been experimenting with personally?
Yeah, not only personally. For the company, we actually give every employee what we call an AI agent to help them. And then basically whatever the employee can get access to, the AI agent will have a capability of access to. So, when you ask the AI something, it will remember better than the employee. Our AI is automatically connected to the meeting minutes, the documents, the email, everything. So, you can ask your agent like what happened to that meeting? What was the summary? Give me a summary.
Oh, wow. Okay. Has that improved productivity a lot?
Oh, yeah. I mean, one of the biggest pain points is when you have an employee leaving. A new employee that comes, and that whole knowledge is gone. Right? But with AI, it will retain that knowledge. And the new employee can just ask, 'What was the deal with that partner?' It will tell you exactly what happened, how it happened. So, the AI agent stays with the position, with the job title. The people can change, but the AI agent will stay. It's like a butler that stays there. And when you come, you have a butler that's working for this company, this position for 10 years. It has all the knowledge. Right. So, that's what we see. And also, when you start to have that, the AI can help you to do a lot of the manual stuff you previously do. I don't know, key in your client information, look for this, search for that. So, I think that's really dramatically helping internal efficiency.
Yeah. Yeah. And just moving on to, I guess, the trends that you've been noticing now in the crypto market. I mean, from Bybit's perspective, what are you really noticing over the past 12 months in the shift of behavior among retail traders?
I think the biggest shift everyone is talking about, not the crypto where we had in the sense that 2, 3 years ago it's like these projects or Ethereum or Solana. Last conference, everything is about RWA. Everything is about can I tokenize gold? Can I tokenize T-bill? I'm here in Paris. I talked to the banks here. They're like, 'Okay, we have these great fixed income products. If we tokenize it, can you distribute it for us?' So, people look at even the exchange not like a crypto exchange anymore. They look at us as a global distribution channels to whatever they can tokenize. So, that's one. Another interesting story I encountered is I was talking to a family office here. They want to use Bybit not getting involved in crypto. They say, 'Look, we want to de-risk. We want to have in our portfolio things from Hong Kong, Singapore, and UK. Can you do that? Because we have RWAs from these regions. And we can help them.' So, this is how we use Bybit not because we want to buy crypto. We want to de-risk. So, that's something that's interesting.
But is that That's interesting as well that I guess there's a section of crypto that they're interested in, but not the whole part. They're just sort of starting. And do you see that happening more and more now as I guess the market matures, but also certain areas become more popular than others?
I mean, although we want Bitcoin to become digital gold, but still Bitcoin is volatile, right? I mean, even with the recent down, it went to 60K and then now it's back to 70. So, it's still a bit too volatile for very traditional players to consider as a store of value. Which I think eventually we'll get there, but not today. But crypto is already or blockchain technology is already been utilized in other ways that it's good that adoption is happening and they are using it. But the moment I think the bull run happens, they will all start to have some distribution of portfolio into Bitcoin and things like that.
