TradFi firms are increasingly warming to cryptocurrencies, says Bybit CEO Ben Zhou

Eight years later, digital assets are now mainstream. Governments and traditional financial institutions are turning to cryptocurrencies, perhaps most excitingly the US passing of the GENIUS Act last year.

“The traditional world is embracing cryptocurrencies,” says Zhou, who leads the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume. luck. “If they don’t adopt them, they will become obsolete, especially with adoption of cryptocurrency wallets growing by 20-30% every year.”

Chu adds that currencies like stablecoins are becoming increasingly regulated, and can now be used for things like money transfers and payments. In 2025, more than $18 trillion in transactions were settled in stablecoins, outpacing the total transactions on traditional payment platforms like Visa and Mastercard, according to cryptocurrency research firm Delphi Digital.

Cryptocurrency transactions are “faster and cheaper” than traditional bank transfers, says Zhou. “If you rely on existing infrastructure and transfer via SWIFT, it will be very slow.”

Investment banks like Goldman Sachs are integrating token assets into their trading and advisory operations, while payment providers like Visa and Mastercard are building partnerships with cryptocurrency exchanges like Bybit to issue payment cards that enable users to spend cryptocurrency holdings as fiat currencies in real time.

Cryptocurrencies will be the “major driving force” behind traditional financial instruments such as stocks and credit default swaps over the next decade, says Zhou. “The accessibility, connectivity and standardization is really the beauty of this technology.”

Build Bybit

Before entering the cryptocurrency space, Zhu worked as a forex trader at financial brokerage firm XM, where he spent seven years as its general manager in China. At that time, cryptocurrencies were still niche. Many investors viewed it as a “pump and dump” scam, he recalls.

Chu had an early interest in cryptocurrencies, but found that exchanges at the time were often overloaded whenever bitcoin moved. He started Bybit in Shanghai, recruiting a team of about 15 software engineers from major Chinese tech companies such as Tencent and Alibaba.

After China banned cryptocurrency mining and trading in 2021, Zhou moved his team to Singapore; A year later, he moved again to Dubai, impressed by the UAE’s cryptocurrency-friendly regulations, including no taxes on cryptocurrency income or capital gains, and a clear regulatory framework for digital assets.

Today, Bybit operates globally in more than 150 countries, although the platform does offer services in many other countries, including the United States, Canada, China and Singapore.

However, safety challenges remain

Despite the finance industry’s general optimism regarding cryptocurrencies, challenges remain in ensuring secure transactions.

On February 21, 2025, North Korean hackers stole $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum from Bybit in the largest cryptocurrency heist in history. The hack spooked Paybit customers, leading to “huge withdrawals,” Zhu said at the time.

The exchange launched an industry-first “Recovery Bounty Program,” which invited the global cybersecurity community to help track and recover the stolen currency, offering 10% of the stolen funds as a reward. PayBit ​​was unable to recover the stolen funds, but was able to secure financing to effectively restore its reserves.

Since the hack, Bybut has tightened its security measures, including the use of hardware security modules (HSMs), tamper-resistant physical devices that securely generate, store and manage encryption keys, Zhou says. “Unless there is a physical intrusion, no one will be able to touch the tokens,” Chu explains.

However, Bybit’s CEO admits that the fast pace of cryptocurrency transactions means it is difficult to stop fraud and theft from happening. “If you lose money or get scammed, and you’re a customer of a bank, you can contact the bank and they will be able to trace it,” he explains. Tracking stolen funds is still possible in cryptocurrencies, but “everything moves so quickly that by the time you get there, the money is already gone.”

However, he remains optimistic about the future of safety in the cryptocurrency industry. “Infrastructure and encryption technology are growing in popularity, and many cybersecurity companies are joining this space.”

More countries have put in place regulatory frameworks for cryptocurrency companies like Bybit. For example, the European Union introduced a Markets in Cryptoassets (MiCA) license in late 2024, which allows approved cryptocurrency providers to operate legally across the entire continent, rather than forcing companies to seek separate licenses from each individual country.

Chu believes that enhanced regulation will pave the way for mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies. He has focused on European markets this year, as well as developing markets such as Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey and India, where demand for cryptocurrencies is booming due to weakness in local currencies.