Good morning and thank you very much for the introduction. It's a pleasure to sit here and have this fireside chat with Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit. Today we're going to be discussing how crypto is finally integrating with global finance. It feels like a new paradigm shift, creating the bedrock for the finance of the future with agentic payments, tokenization, and a plethora of other things. 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? For the audience here in Paris, what does that actually mean in practice? What separates that vision from what crypto exchanges have always claimed to be? What's changing now?
I think if you look at crypto exchanges back from 2014 to 2018-19, that's really the wild age where all the exchanges are here, there's no KYC. The first part of that landscape is very exchange-focused, trading-focused. The predominant goal is a venue for people to trade tokens, meme coins, all of that. Since the last 3 years, compliance has become the main focus. Even for Bybit, in the first stage, you're competing on how much you can ship, how fast, and how efficient you can ship out your product to gain users immediately. But for the last 3 years, it's how compliant, how fast can you get licensed. The reason you start to see not only Bybit, but a lot of players, exchanges, even Revolut or eToro, is becoming a one-stop shop. People start to see crypto as this technology and what it means. It's going to break a lot of barriers. It's going to connect all of these inefficiencies or geopolitical reasons where finance used to be segregated. But now, with this internet money, everything can be connected. With this new trend, there will be a platform that becomes the next JP Morgan that connects everything. For example, I'm here in Paris, I just met the regulators, and I go around the world meeting a lot of regulators. The one thing they see in crypto exchanges now, especially Bybit, is our global distribution power. We are licensed in almost every continent, many countries in the world from Turkey to Brazil to Indonesia to Thailand to the EU where 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 has become that magic sauce. Because previously, you're really just facing local or regional customers. If people from Brazil want 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. With the underlying technology, everything becomes 24/7 available. 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, the global, the no barriers, 24/7.
Yeah, you put it very eloquently. That lays the table for a few things. You said a lot of different things there I'd like you to expand upon. There seems to be a fierce competition. You mentioned there's probably only going to be a number of these all-in-one platforms. Do you feel like the legacy systems that have developed over centuries, sometimes moving on weeks rather than the seconds that happen in the crypto space, are they equipped to handle these new innovations like stablecoins, agentic payments, tokenization of all different types of real-world assets? Or do you think the incumbents of traditional finance, the big banks, the big institutions, are they looking at this now and thinking, 'Hang on, we're 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 ICE invested into OKX. We've been approached by a few partners. There's really a handful of global exchanges that they see as a 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 they are thinking, 'How do I compete with the EU, for example?' So, if you take the example of tokenized stock, the most compliant way we've seen so far is probably xStock. 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 the 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, I suppose if you're using agentic payments these days via smart contracts deployed on blockchain rails, it's a little bit like 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 letters through the post.' So, you mentioned there very importantly distribution. 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 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 keyword is infrastructure. For an 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. That becomes very powerful because we are licensed in all these countries. When you have a good asset like you want to RWA, let's say a gold token or a T-bill token, whatever, and you want to distribute that into Brazil and these channels, that's when they talk to us. And interestingly enough, 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 de-risk their portfolio management. I'll 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 an RWA we help to sponsor with Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong. And I'm like, 'Okay, why do you want to do that?' He said, 'Well, with our current infrastructure, I can only buy physical gold in Brazil, but I want to be able to buy gold in Hong Kong so I can de-risk 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? You're 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 is no longer just Bitcoin, Ethereum, and these tokens. A lot of it is real-world assets, and this technology is already here. Actually, the EU is quite advanced in that. Hong Kong is very advanced. What we've seen, of course, the US with the Clarity Act coming in. So, I think that's what's interesting. We don't need to sell crypto. We're selling real-world stuff by doing this connectivity.
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 the focus is stablecoins, how compliant we are with what our licenses are, 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 mature over the last 2 years. So, the EU is now fully regulating it. All these new parts of the world... So, when presented with them, that will pass their compliance. Once it's past compliance, then they want to explore, right? So, even Bitcoin is something they will consider as well.
Yeah, to diversify and de-risk their portfolios. Let's talk about compliance. Let's talk about the different jurisdictions. Comparatively, where would you rank them? Like MiCA was 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 the strengths and weaknesses in the different regulatory jurisdictions around the globe?
