Ten years from now, when we look back, I believe that Bitget's footprints will be deeply imprinted on the path of industry development.

Dear Bitget team, partners, and user friends:

As we just concluded the year 2024, our adventure in the crypto jungle has experienced many significant moments together. We witnessed the eagerly anticipated Bitcoin spot ETF being approved by the U.S. SEC at the beginning of the year, providing more high-net-worth users, institutional users, and retail investors with the opportunity to purchase Bitcoin, marking the increasing influence of traditional finance on the small circle of crypto assets. On April 19, Bitcoin halved as expected, followed by Ethereum welcoming its ETF. By the end of the year, the U.S. elections brought crypto-friendly policies to the forefront, and the final election results further boosted market confidence. Bitcoin broke the $100,000 mark for the first time in early December, and the market capitalization of stablecoins exceeded $200 billion in the same month, ushering the crypto industry into a new peak.

This year has been full of ups and downs, with challenges and gains coexisting, making it unforgettable. The year 2024 is also significant for me personally, as I began serving as the CEO of Bitget in May, allowing me to lead an excellent team from a higher platform and make greater changes. For Bitget, this year has also been filled with challenges and achievements, with our user base exceeding 45 million, firmly securing our position as the fourth-largest crypto exchange globally. Our ability to maintain rapid growth is due to several key actions:

Team Upgrade

In 2024, our team has grown significantly, especially with the addition of several executives: Chief Legal Officer (CLO) Hon Ng has helped us build a more professional legal and compliance team; Chief Business Officer (CBO) Min Lin has accelerated our global business expansion; Vice President Lawrence, who is responsible for listing operations, graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE) and previously worked at two leading exchanges, joined Bitget in September this year to lead the team in searching for quality assets; additionally, we welcomed Xie Jiayin, who joined us last Christmas, to lead our Chinese-speaking business and serve as the best "customer service" for the Chinese-speaking region.

As the saying goes, "A good bird chooses its tree to perch on, and a wise minister chooses his master to serve." Top talents have many choices in the crypto jungle; they will select the place that best suits their abilities and the most promising companies to work for. I am delighted that those who have joined Bitget can leverage their strengths, focus on results, and share a vision of changing the world, embodying long-termism.

Listing Strategy

Since restarting spot trading in 2023 and making it a development focus while supporting more quality crypto projects, Bitget has been actively expanding the richness of spot assets. As of December 30, 2024, Bitget supports over 800 crypto assets.

Bitget's research and listing teams are highly attentive to industry dynamics. For instance, during the 2024 TON ecosystem explosion and the meme craze, we quickly screened and listed leading coins in related sectors. Over 70% of non-first listing spot assets like PNUT and ACT, which were launched by Binance in 2024, were first listed on Bitget. This year, we also selected 21 Launchpool projects to provide benefits to users, including star projects like ZK, ENA, CATS, and SWELL. The average annualized return for all Bitget Launchpool projects in 2024 was 89%, with the highest return reaching 329%.

BGB

This year, our platform token BGB performed outstandingly, increasing tenfold at its peak compared to the beginning of the year and rising over a hundred times since its issuance, making BGB a true hundredfold token. As the core of the entire Bitget exchange ecosystem, holding BGB allows users to enjoy benefits such as fee discounts, zero-fee withdrawals, participation in Launchpool new coin mining, and VIP upgrades. Moreover, we recently announced the merger of BWB and BGB, making BGB the sole ecological token for Bitget Exchange and Bitget Wallet. On December 27, Bitget released a new white paper, clarifying the buyback and burn plan, and subsequently executed the first burn, destroying 800 million tokens at once, accounting for 40% of the supply, laying a more solid foundation for 2025.

Product Iteration

This year, Bitget not only released multiple versions of product updates but also launched several eye-catching features for users. For example, pre-market trading provides users with a market to invest in quality assets "a step ahead," and LaunchX is a new coin subscription platform designed specifically for the Web3 community. In the future, we will also introduce unified account functionality, provide API upgrades and lending financial tools for institutional clients, and integrate AI more deeply, all aimed at the concept of "Trade Smarter," making trading more intelligent and efficient. Behind all this, we owe a lot to our dedicated technical product team, and I commend them.

2025 Outlook: Innovating and Riding the Waves of the Bull Market

In 2025, we plan to consolidate our existing products and services while focusing on developing three business areas: institutional and VIP business, BGB and PayFi business, and continuing to set industry standards in security and compliance.

Institutional and VIP Business: Moving Towards a More Diverse User Structure

Whether it’s market makers, brokers, asset management teams, or large financial institutions, we hope everyone can trade on Bitget. We will provide better compliance support (KYB/KYC certification) and offer institutional clients 24/7 dedicated services to ensure that any technical or trading issues they encounter are resolved promptly. In terms of trading rights, institutional clients will enjoy lower trading fees, faster trading speeds, and higher trading limits, helping them seize market opportunities and enhance profit margins. The API interface will also be upgraded to ensure smooth and stable trading.

Additionally, we will launch more comprehensive financial product support, including OTC services for large transactions to provide optimal quotes and low slippage, as well as low-interest lending products to support BTC and mainstream assets as collateral, helping institutional and VIP clients flexibly allocate funds. The unified account feature will be launched in Q1 for market testing, supporting a shared fund pool for spot and contract trading, significantly improving capital utilization efficiency, and providing a dedicated data backend to help institutional clients view real-time trading data and efficiently manage their portfolios.

We will also introduce more customized wealth management services and personalized asset allocation plans to assist users in wealth appreciation. Strengthening the VIP brand influence is also part of this plan; we hope to enhance the brand value and market recognition of VIP business through high-end events and targeted marketing. In 2023 and 2024, Bitget has conducted many internal sharing sessions for VIP clients, such as discussing quality projects in the ETH track before and after the ETH Cancun upgrade and capturing opportunities in some meme coins early on. We will continue this in 2025.

In early December last year, I met some of our VIP users from the European region in Prague. Many of them were former VIP users of other major exchanges with trading volumes exceeding hundreds of millions. I asked them why they chose Bitget, and one user told me, "Because only at Bitget do we feel cared for. At other exchanges, there are no account managers to communicate with me, and no one invites me to meet, share, and enjoy good food and scenery like you do, and I even get to meet the CEO. I feel your sincerity, and now I only use Bitget." I am always moved when users recognize and appreciate us, and I am very proud of my team.

BGB and PayFi Business: BGB as the Core Currency, PayFi as its Payment Medium

2025 will be the year of explosive growth for the BGB ecosystem, empowering the crypto industry and the Bitget community even more. We not only want to give BGB more rights on the Bitget exchange and wallet platform but also bring it into more on-chain ecosystems and off-chain payment scenarios. On-chain, we will collaborate with more leading ecosystems and DeFi applications, allowing users to stake BGB for earnings and use BGB as collateral for lending.

Off-chain, through the Bitget credit card, users can use BGB to pay for dining, travel, fuel, shopping, and other expenses globally, while enjoying discounts. Those holding BGB can also unlock more premium benefits, such as cashback, low rates, and high-end services. The everyday use of crypto assets is the future we believe in.

Security and Compliance: This is the Foundation for Encouraging the Public to Embrace Crypto Assets

Security has always been Bitget's top priority: In 2022, Bitget launched the Bitget Protection Fund to ensure that user assets are protected even in extreme situations. As of November 2024, this fund holds 6,500 BTC, valued at over $600 million, making it the second-largest user protection fund among centralized exchanges. We also introduced proof of reserves for the first time in December 2022, with data updated monthly to ensure that our clients' funds have at least a 1:1 reserve ratio. As of November 2024, Bitget's reserve ratio is 137%, with the BTC reserve ratio approaching 200%.

In 2024, we continued to strengthen our compliance system. Under the leadership of our new Chief Legal Officer Hon Ng, the Bitget compliance team now has over 70 professionals, doubling in size over the past year. As of November 2024, Bitget has become the third exchange in the UK to comply with the UK's FinProm standards and has obtained relevant licenses or completed registrations in Australia, Italy, Poland, and Lithuania. Our goal is to obtain important regulatory licenses and approvals in multiple markets, including Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, to ensure our business can continue to thrive in these regions. We believe that regulation is a powerful force driving crypto assets into the mainstream, and we will continue to invest resources and energy in this area.

Looking back from our establishment in 2018 to now, the Bitget team and the crypto industry we are part of have undergone exciting changes. In 2018, Bitget was just a startup team of a few dozen people, and the company experienced many failed attempts, at one point facing a cash flow crisis. The external perception of the crypto industry was mostly skepticism or even resistance. JP Morgan's CEO Jamie Dimon and BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink have publicly criticized Bitcoin and crypto assets multiple times, expressing strong negative views. For example, in 2017, Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a "fraud" during an investor meeting and stated that he would fire any employee who invested company funds in Bitcoin. Larry Fink also publicly stated in October 2017 that Bitcoin was merely an "index of money laundering."

By 2021, both JP Morgan and BlackRock had changed their views on Bitcoin. Jamie Dimon stated in 2021 that although he personally still does not favor Bitcoin, he does not intend to prohibit JP Morgan's clients from trading Bitcoin. In fact, since then, JP Morgan has begun offering crypto asset investment products for institutional investors and launched its own digital currency, JPM Coin.

As we enter 2024, the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF issued by Larry Fink and BlackRock can be considered one of the two most important events of the bull market alongside the U.S. elections. This shift reflects the crypto market's transition from the margins to the mainstream and indicates the acceptance of Bitcoin by mainstream institutions.

From skepticism to misunderstanding, and now to acceptance, Bitcoin and the crypto industry have taken over a decade to achieve this.

Bitget has also undergone a similar journey, evolving from a startup team of a few dozen people to a global and diversified company with 1,753 employees, and from a grassroots project that faced failures to a large ecosystem with a market value exceeding $10 billion. Our journey has indeed been challenging. Today, as the CEO of the company, I take pride not just in numerical growth but in the growth and transformation of our team and the industry.

In the past two years, we have recruited many top international talents. We hold a two-hour meeting with the heads of various regions every two weeks, with over ten regional managers reporting each time, each with a different English accent, which I find very interesting. Reflecting on when I first joined two and a half years ago, most participants spoke Chinese. Now, in our meetings, English accents from various countries come together, and as I stand in this team, I recall the hundreds of billions in valuation of the financial companies and internet giants I have encountered. Today, Bitget is increasingly resembling them—we have international and systematic management, efficient processes, and importantly, everyone is striving for the same goal.

But I also know that while we have achieved some results, we cannot be complacent. "Acceptance" is not the end but the beginning. The next step is how the crypto industry evolves to gain recognition and even respect.

I believe that more genuine technological innovation is needed moving forward. Aside from stablecoins and exchanges, the crypto industry still lacks killer applications with over a hundred million users. I once discussed SocialFi with TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi and asked if there were any SocialFi products that interested him; his answer was "no." Even though there are well-known SocialFi products like Farcaster and Friend.tech in the blockchain industry, they still fail to attract attention from the internet sector. When can the blockchain industry produce more SocialFi, DEPIN, and GameFi products with tens of millions of users? Only then can we truly demonstrate how blockchain empowers traditional social media, mapping software, hardware, and gaming. We need "killer applications" to make the value of blockchain as evident as that of AI.

If you had asked me two years ago when the moment of universal recognition would arrive, I might not have been able to answer, filled with uncertainty. But today, I have never been more resolute: that day is destined to be near. I firmly believe that the key lies in earning the trust of the public, regulatory agencies, traditional financial systems, and mainstream markets, as well as creating truly universal applications with users and scenarios. For example, we have already seen the real demand that blockchain addresses in the payment sector, which has numerous advantages over the existing SWIFT system that combines information flow with capital flow in cross-border payments—real-time, low-cost, and more transparent.

As members of the Bitget team, each of us is part of this historical process. Long-lasting progress is not about speed but about consistent steps. We have all heard the story of the tortoise and the hare since childhood; the clever ones often become the hare easily, but I now want to be the tortoise—persisting in long-termism and doing what is right from a macro perspective rather than just focusing on the local. Regardless of our speed, as long as we persevere, one day, more people will look back and see our efforts, witness how the crypto industry has evolved from nothing to something, how it has changed the world step by step, and how it has transformed from disdain and misunderstanding to acceptance and respect.

Every step we take is a cornerstone of the crypto industry. Today’s Bitget, while not yet leading all innovation trends, is paving the way for that future day with every product iteration and strategic layout. Our team, our partners, and every one of our users take pride in our efforts.

Thank you to every builder who has ever, is currently, and will continue to contribute to this industry. It is your persistence and hard work that give us the courage to face challenges and embrace the future. You are not only laying the foundation for today but also writing the future chapters of the crypto industry.

Ten years from now, when we look back, I believe that Bitget's footprints will be deeply imprinted on the path of industry development. Even amidst rugged obstacles, every footprint is clear and firm. This is a journey of continuous exploration and courageous change, and it is the glory of every builder.

Gracy Chen
Written on New Year's 2025

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