When Ben Zhou based Bybit in 2018, he first needed to persuade his workforce that Bitcoin wasn’t a rip-off.
Eight years later, digital belongings at the moment are mainstream. Governments and conventional finance establishments are warming to cryptocurrencies, maybe most dramatically proven by the U.S.’s passage of the GENIUS Act final 12 months.
“The standard world is embracing crypto,” Zhou, who leads the world’s second-largest crypto trade by buying and selling quantity, tells Fortune. “In the event that they don’t embrace it, they are going to be out of date, particularly with crypto pockets adoption rising 20 to 30% every year.”
Currencies like stablecoins have gotten more and more regulated, and may now be used for issues like remittances and funds, Zhou provides. In 2025, over $18 trillion in transactions was settled in stablecoins, eclipsing complete transactions on conventional fee platforms like Visa and Mastercard, based on crypto analysis agency Delphi Digital.
Cryptocurrency transactions are “quicker and cheaper” than conventional financial institution transfers, Zhou argues. “If you happen to depend on the present infrastructure and switch by way of SWIFT, it’s simply too gradual.”
Funding banks like Goldman Sachs are working to combine tokenized belongings of their buying and selling and advisory operations, whereas fee suppliers like Visa and Mastercard are constructing partnerships with crypto exchanges like Bybit to difficulty fee playing cards which allow customers to spend crypto holdings as fiat in real-time.
Crypto goes to be the “predominant driving pressure” behind conventional monetary devices like shares and credit-default swaps inside the subsequent decade, Zhou argues. “Accessibility, connectivity and unification is admittedly the fantastic thing about this expertise.”
Constructing Bybit
Earlier than getting into the crypto {industry}, Zhou labored as a Foreign exchange dealer at monetary brokerage XM, the place he spent seven years as its China common supervisor. Again then, crypto was nonetheless area of interest. Many buyers seen it as a “pump and dump” rip-off, he recollects.
Zhou had an early curiosity in crypto, however discovered that platforms on the time have been usually overloaded at any time when Bitcoin moved. He began Bybit in Shanghai, recruiting a workforce of about 15 software program engineers from main Chinese language tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba.
After China banned crypto mining and buying and selling in 2021, Zhou relocated his workforce to Singapore; a 12 months later, he moved once more to Dubai, drawn by the UAE’s crypto-friendly laws, together with no taxation on crypto earnings or capital good points, and a transparent regulatory framework for digital belongings.
As we speak, Bybit operates globally in over 180 nations, although the platform doesn’t provide providers in a number of others, together with the U.S., Canada, China and Singapore.
But, security challenges stay
Regardless of the finance {industry}’s total optimism on cryptocurrency, challenges in making certain protected transactions stay.
On Feb. 21, 2025, North Korean hackers stole $1.4 billion value of Ethereum from Bybit within the largest crypto theft in historical past. The hack spooked Bybit’s clients, resulting in “huge withdrawals,” Zhou stated on the time.
The trade launched an industry-first “Restoration Bounty Program,” which known as on the worldwide cybersecurity neighborhood to assist hint and get well the stolen foreign money, providing 10% of the stolen funds as a reward. Bybit wasn’t in a position to get well the stolen funds, but it surely was in a position to safe financing to successfully restore its reserves.
Zhou says that, for the reason that hack, Bybit has tightened its safety measures, together with utilizing {hardware} safety modules (HSMs), tamper-resistant bodily gadgets that securely generate, shops, and manages cryptographic keys. “Until there’s a bodily break-in, nobody will have the ability to contact tokens,” Zhou explains.
Nonetheless, the Bybit CEO admits that the quick tempo of cryptocurrency transactions signifies that it’s onerous to cease scams and thefts from taking place. “If you happen to lose cash or get scammed, and are a buyer of a financial institution, you possibly can name the financial institution and they’re going to have the ability to hint it,” he explains. Tracing stolen funds remains to be attainable in crypto, however “the whole lot strikes so quick that by the point you get to it, the cash is already gone.”
He stays upbeat, nevertheless, about the way forward for security within the crypto {industry}. “Crypto infrastructure and expertise are solely rising in abundance, and plenty of extra cybersecurity corporations are becoming a member of the area.”
Extra nations have laid out regulatory frameworks for crypto corporations like Bybit. For instance, the EU rolled out the Markets in Crypto-Property (MiCA) license in late 2024, which permits licensed crypto suppliers to function legally throughout the entire continent, as a substitute of forcing corporations to hunt separate licenses from every particular person nation.
Zhou believes that enhanced regulation will pave the best way for mainstream crypto adoption. He’s targeted on European markets this 12 months, in addition to creating markets like Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey and India, the place demand for crypto is booming resulting from weak native currencies.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
