Now, our next conversation is going to dive into the three T's: trust, transformation, and technology. Because what happens when markets start to emulate crypto markets? They become 24/7. And without trust, we have nothing. Next up, please welcome to the stage, Ben Zhou for a fireside chat.
Okay, good morning and thank you very much for the introduction. Now, it's a pleasure actually to sit here and have this fireside chat with Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit. Now today we're going to be discussing, well Ben, obviously for years the industry has debated when crypto would finally integrate with global finance and it's exciting times at the moment, feels like a new paradigm shift creating the bedrock obviously for the finance of the future with agentic payments, tokenization and a plethora of other things. Now in 2026, we're no longer waiting, we're building. Ben, can you describe this year and the years ahead? Do you think it's a transition into new financial platforms? Now, for the audience here in Paris, what does that actually mean in practice? Let's kind of start and paint the picture here. What separates that vision from what crypto exchanges have always claimed to be? What's changing now?
Yeah, I think if you look at crypto exchanges since back in, I don't know, from 2014 to I would say 2018-19, that's really the wild age and where all the exchanges, there's no KYC. And I would say the first part of those landscape is very exchange focused, trading focused. So exchange, the predominant goal is a venue for people to trade tokens, meme coins, you know, all of that. And I think since the last three years ago, compliance has become the main kind of focus even for Bybit. I think when you compete in the first stage, you're really competing on how much you can ship, how fast and how efficient you can ship out your product and you can gain users immediately. But I think for the last three years is how compliant, how fast can you get license. Now the reason we, you know, you start to see even not only Bybit, a lot of the players, exchanges, just even Revolut or eToro just now, it's becoming kind of the one-stop shop, right? Is because I think people start to see crypto as this technology. What it means, it means it's going to break a lot of barriers, it's going to connect all of these inefficiency and geopolitical reasons where finance used to be segregated. But now with this magic internet money, everything can be connected. With this new trend, there will be a platform that becomes, or a few that becomes, the next JP Morgan that kind of connects everything. And for example, I'm here in Paris, I just meet the regulators and I go around the world meet a lot of regulators. The one thing they see crypto exchange now today, especially Bybit, it's our global distribution power. We have licensed almost every continent, many countries in the world from Turkey to Brazil to Indonesia to Thailand and to EU. We're licensed here. So when you have a good asset such as a really good private banking product in France, in Paris, you really want to distribute it globally, then crypto becomes that magic sauce because previously you're really just facing maybe local or regional customers. Where if people from Brazil wants to buy a good asset in France but they couldn't get access to, then crypto and tokenization can really help that. So that's the new concept of the new financial platform is with the underlying technology everything becomes 24/7 available. And even recently we talk about pre-IPO from the US. I think people are getting crazy about that as well. So I think that's the connectivity, is the global, is the no barrier, is 24/7, is right.
Yeah. Well you put it very eloquently. So that kind of lays the table for a few things that actually you said a lot of different things there. I'd like you to expand upon. Now, there seems to be a fierce competition. You know, you mentioned there that there's probably only going to be a number of different of these all-in-one platforms. Do you feel like the legacy systems that have developed over centuries, actually, you know, sometimes they're moving on weeks rather than the seconds that happen in the crypto space. Do you feel like they're equipped to handle these new innovations like stable coins, agentic payments, tokenization of all different types of real world assets? Or do you think that the incumbents of traditional finance, the big banks, the big institutions, are they looking at this now and thinking, hell, hang on, we are not equipped for this. We need to borrow or work with the innovators from the crypto space. Is that what you're feeling now?
The trend now is, I think a lot of the TradFi players are trying to work with global international exchanges like Bybit. I think the recent news was IC invest into OKX. We've been approached by a few partners. There's really a handful of global exchanges that again they see as global distribution channel. You have players that are very regionally strong. But I think even for NASDAQ, for New York Stock Exchange, in their head is they're thinking how do I compete with EU for example. So if you take example of tokenized stock and the most compliant way we've seen so far is probably xStock, whereas the model is they take the asset from the US and they use the local EU framework to tokenize it and then they find distribution partners like Binance and Bybit to distribute this stock. So the US regulator and the exchanges are scratching their head. They're like well because EU is a step ahead on stock tokenization, RWAs, that's why people are using this route to distribute the US asset and they want to do it themselves. And the most recent news is even NASDAQ is considering 24/7 now and also launching their own tokenized trading venues to compete. So you see not only exchanges are competing but regulators and even countries are competing on that level. To go back to your question, I think it's a matter of time. I think everyone needs to evolve towards this new technology because in comparison it's just faster, more efficient and better.
Yeah. Yeah, I suppose if you're using sort of agentic payments these days via smart contracts deployed on blockchain rails, it looks like say in the 1990s a company that still says I don't want to use email. I think we're better off just sending normal parcels and normal letters through the post. So you mentioned there very important distribution, right? Distribution is like everyone's eager to get in there. Can you unpack that a little bit? Do you think the legacy incumbents of traditional finance are looking at the crypto-native companies and saying well they've got the demographic of the future? They're as you said have distribution setups across the globe. How are they working with the crypto innovators like Bybit? What's happening? Just explain the process and the relationships that you're building there with the incumbents from traditional finance.
So when we talk to them, I think the key word is infrastructure. So for exchange like Bybit, we have close to more than 2,000 local banks connected. So if you go to Indonesia, we have local liquidity, local banks. You go to Brazil, you go to Nigeria, you go to Korea, it's the same. So that becomes very powerful because we have license in all these countries. When you have a good asset like you want RWA, let's say gold token or a T-bill token whatever, and you want to distribute that into Brazil and these kind of channels, that's when they talk to us. And interesting enough, you said when they look into crypto, a lot of times the partner we talk to they don't want to get into crypto but they want to use crypto to derisk their portfolio management. I give you a very classic example. We are in Brazil. We're very big. I talked to a family office in Brazil and they want to use Bybit to buy RWA. We help to sponsor with Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong. And I'm like, okay, why you want to do that? They said, well, with our current infrastructure, I can only buy gold, physical gold in Brazil. But I want to be able to buy gold in Hong Kong, so I can derisk my portfolio. At the same time, with RWA that we offer, they can earn a yield. So, why not give 5% allocation to this new thing, not even new for them, it's just gold. So, they're using crypto, but they're not getting into crypto. So that's what crypto has become. It's no longer just Bitcoin, Ethereum, and these tokens. A lot of it is real world asset. And this technology is already here. And actually EU is quite advanced in that. Hong Kong is very advanced and what we've seen, of course the US with Clarity Act coming in. So I think that's what's interesting. We don't need to sell crypto. We are selling real world stuff by doing this connectivity.
Yeah. Yeah. I suppose you're not selling crypto specifically, specific digital assets. You're selling the infrastructure, the architecture that's been developed. So do you think crypto is still a toxic word amongst these TradFi incumbents like you mentioned there they don't like the word crypto, they don't like the fact that they're getting involved in crypto but they sure as hell like using the innovations from the crypto space. So is that kind of what you're saying?
I mean when we talk to TradFi guys, when you say crypto they do think it's massively volatile. They do think it's... and a lot of their focus is stable coins, is how compliant we are, what are our licenses, how can we work with them. Since last year we've been talking to so many of them and I think the reason is because the regulatory framework has really become matured over the last two years. So EU is now fully regulating it, all these new parts of the world. So when presented with them that will pass their compliance and once it's pass compliance then they want to explore, right? So even bitcoin is something they will consider as well.
Yeah, to diversify and derisk their portfolios. Let's talk about compliance. Let's talk about the different jurisdictions comparatively. Where would you rank them? Like MiCA has kind of developed and been quite progressive, the UAE is very progressive when it comes to its regulatory framework. We're still waiting to hear the outcome from the US. Where do you see like the strengths and weaknesses in the different regulatory jurisdictions around the globe?
