27th October 2020

Behind the scenes of an award-winning trading platform

Q. Tell us a bit about Bybit - what makes it different to other trading organisations?

Established in March 2018, Bybit is one of the fastest growing cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges, with more than a million registered users. The products traded on our platform are mainly perpetual contracts, an innovative cryptocurrency futures market product. Built on customer-centric values, we endeavour to provide a professional, smart, intuitive and innovative trading experience to better serve our customers in a timely manner. We are committed to creating a fair, transparent and efficient trading environment, and offer 24/7 multilingual support as part of our service.

Q. Congratulations on your award - what do you think makes Bybit the best trading platform provider?

At Bybit, we constantly listen, care, and improve. We aim to continue revolutionising the industry by fusing the best of cryptocurrency and traditional finance. Our innovative, highly advanced, user-friendly platform has been designed from the ground-up using best-in-class infrastructure to provide our users with the industry's safest, fastest, fairest and most transparent trading experience.

We believe transparency is key, especially in the crypto space where there is a whole host of uncertainty and potential risks. To us, putting the customers at the centre also means keeping them in the loop. We strive to help them stay informed with relevant information and make educated trading decisions. Trust goes both ways, and is built through transparency.

Going hand-in-hand with our dedication to transparency is our commitment to security. We believe investing in security should be one of the highest priorities on an exchange platforms agenda, especially if it operates online. The extent of security investment reflects the overall security commitment and capabilities of a company. On average, most of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges spend around 15% of their budget on security, while we allocate between 20% and 25% to security and have plans to raise the level to 30%. In addition, we also make an express effort to adopt and adhere to best practices in cybersecurity and risk management.

Q. Youre a relatively new company - how have you established yourself as a global contender in such a short time?

Though it may at first sound counterintuitive, we actually attribute our fast growth to the fact that we have taken a patient approach and been shoring up our fundamentals and building for the long haul. Since day one, we have been determined to deliver the best trading experience and most reliable service possible: Our smart trading system leaves room for finesse and rewards strategy; our best-in-class market depth minimises price slippage; our state-of-the-art dual-pricing system makes the trading experience fair and transparent by preempting market manipulation with external price data; we store crypto assets in our industry-leading, multi-signature, hierarchically deterministic cold wallet to ensure their safety; our lightning fast matching engine precludes overloads, while our powerful API refreshes market updates every 20 milliseconds to provision for high-frequency trading. All these are combined with a 99.99% system functionality all year long and round-the-clock, multilingual customer support.

Q. Its been a challenging economic climate this year with the coronavirus pandemic - how has Bybit weathered the storm?

COVID-19 has compelled many to re-examine their assumptions of risk and diversification. At the same time, major cryptocurrencies have not only stood the test of time but passed it with flying colours. As the gap between Wall Street and Main Street widens, more and more people are turning towards crypto for answers such as Schrödinger's cat-esque prospects of inflation (in the case of continual stimulus packages) and stock market crash (in the case of a halt in stimulus packages) loom.

We have witnessed a number of astounding stats this year: Daily active Bitcoin addresses saw a 1671% growth between January and September; MicroStrategys (MSTR), a leading U.S.-listed business intelligence company, allocated $400+ million in Bitcoin as its reserve holdings; the market cap for Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a hot crypto trend that took off since June, has reached $16 billion; cryptocurrency spot trading volume in September eclipsed $676.6 billion, while cryptocurrency derivatives volume during the same period reached $634.9 billion.

Our own platform has also experienced tremendous growth in trading volumes as well as monthly active traders and posted record highs in open interest.

Q. Where do you see Bybit in five years’ time?

There are weeks where decades happen” — the value in cryptos relative insulation from the rest of the commodity markets has become exceedingly apparent in our strange time. It is becoming increasingly untenable to dismiss crypto as the realm of rogue mavericks or vilify it as a haven for scam and criminality. The future of mass adoption is inevitable. We need responsible actors, the proverbial adult in the room” to help guide its healthy growth. As a team of financial technologists and commodity traders, it is our hope that we can be a bridge between the old and the new and take what we learned from the finance world to help build the guardrails in the crypto world. If our efforts are successful, in five years crypto trading will be as easy as using TikTok for retail traders, and as reliable as trading other commodities in the eyes of institutional investors.