The Death of Altcoins & Bitget’s New "Universal Exchange"

**Brian Crain** (0:00)
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crain and today I'm speaking with Gracy Chen, who is the CEO of Bitget.

**Gracy Chen** (0:11)
We want to grow the pie bigger rather than just cutting pie from each other. So one way to grow the pie bigger is to offer more products, especially valuable products that our users want to trade, and that's why we're working hard to build on our RWA. We see DEX and CEX more as integration, rather than pure competitor. Today, Binance and OKEx probably offer about 200 to 300 cryptocurrencies. We have 700 cryptocurrencies available on our CEX. I personally think there are about 70 percent possibility that there is still another bull market.

**Brian Crain** (0:54)
Thanks so much for joining us, Gracy. I'm curious, how did you get into crypto in the first place?

**Gracy Chen** (1:01)
Sure. I had a mathematics degree from my undergrad. So after I graduated from my bachelor's degree, I actually went to be a journalism about a decade ago. When I was a TV journalist, I had a friend from my TV circle who asked me, you should check out crypto and Bitcoin.
So I looked at the Bitcoin white paper in 2015, and was immediately intrigued by the mathematical beauty behind Bitcoin and those 13-page white paper, how that created the very ideal world of decentralized ledger. And I bought some Bitcoin at the price of about 300 each. So that went pretty well. But I haven't, I didn't really, I wasn't really working in this industry until 2022, when I joined Bitget as the first managing director. And of course, two years later, I was promoted to be the CEO of Bitget. But my crypto investment journey started pretty early in 2015, but my crypto working journey only started in 2022

**SPEAKER_3** (2:20)
This episode is brought to you by Gnosis, building the open internet one block at a time. Gnosis was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance. Gnosis is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others like Safe and CowSwap. At the center is Gnosis Chain.
It's a low-fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years, and is secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real-world financial applications like Gnosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Gnosis DAO, a community-run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in Web3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring gnosis.io.

**Brian Crain** (3:12)
What's the story of how you ended up joining Bitget?

**Gracy Chen** (3:16)
So when I was making investment in crypto industry earlier, those are mainly secondary market investment, but I did have some primary market investment. One of my investment was BigKeep, which today is called BigGet Wallet. So in 2022, BigKeep was already invested by BigGet. And then BigGet actually just randomly reached out to the investors asking if you have any recommendation for someone who has marketing background and are passionate about Web3. So the founder of BigGet reached out to me to force someone to recommend. And I said, it sounds like me.
Because for the past 10 years, I was actually doing Web2 startup, either journalism. Well, when I even was a journalist, I was reporting on finance and technology because of my mathematics and financial background. But just for one year in journalism, I started to work in Web2 startups as CMOs or CEOs, mainly building on FinTech and VR Metaverse. So even if I wasn't working in Web3, I was working in Web2, but very much on marketing and on something technology related. So I said, yeah, that sounds like me because I do have this many years of marketing background. And are you interested in having me as your menu director, whose role is very much like a CMO? Yeah, and we had, of course, we knew each other before and we had a good chat. I then subsequently talked to all the higher executives at Bitget, including the previous CEO, Sandra. And I noticed this team is quite strong, but they do lack marketing personality and someone like me who can kind of compliment with this team. So in 2024, sorry, 2022, as you can imagine, joining a centralized exchange is not an easy option because there are so many competitors and this industry is what we call a Red Sea means lots of competition, like very competitive market. So it definitely took some courage and wisdom, hopefully, that I chose to join Bigget in 2022 and subsequently saw the growth of the company from maybe a top 10 or 10, a 10 plus ish kind of ranking to where we are today, top five or even sometimes top three in terms of the global CEX ranking.