When Ben Zhou founded Bybit in 2018, he first had to convince his team that Bitcoin wasn’t a scam.
Eight years later, digital assets are now mainstream. Governments and traditional finance institutions are warming to cryptocurrencies, perhaps most dramatically shown by the U.S.’s passage of the GENIUS Act last year.
“The traditional world is embracing crypto,” Zhou, who leads the world’s second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, tells Fortune. “If they don’t embrace it, they will be obsolete, especially with crypto wallet adoption growing 20 to 30% each year.”
Cryptocurrency transactions are “faster and cheaper” than traditional bank transfers, Zhou argues. “If you rely on the existing infrastructure and transfer via SWIFT, it’s just too slow.”
Investment banks like Goldman Sachs are working to integrate tokenized assets in their trading and advisory operations, while payment providers like Visa and Mastercard are building partnerships with crypto exchanges like Bybit to issue payment cards which enable users to spend crypto holdings as fiat in real-time.
Crypto is going to be the “main driving force” behind traditional financial instruments like stocks and credit-default swaps within the next decade, Zhou argues. “Accessibility, connectivity and unification is really the beauty of this technology.”
Building Bybit
Before entering the crypto industry, Zhou worked as a Forex trader at financial brokerage XM, where he spent seven years as its China general manager. Back then, crypto was still niche. Many investors viewed it as a “pump and dump” scam, he recalls.
Zhou had an early interest in crypto, but found that platforms 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 firms like Tencent and Alibaba.
After China banned crypto mining and trading in 2021, Zhou relocated his team to Singapore; a year later, he moved again to Dubai, drawn by the UAE’s crypto-friendly regulations, including no taxation on crypto income or capital gains, and a clear regulatory framework for digital assets.
Yet, safety challenges remain
Despite the finance industry’s overall optimism on cryptocurrency, challenges in ensuring safe transactions remain.
Zhou says that, since the hack, Bybit has tightened its security measures, including using hardware security modules (HSMs), tamper-resistant physical devices that securely generate, stores, and manages cryptographic keys. “Unless there’s a physical break-in, no one will be able to touch tokens,” Zhou explains.
Still, the Bybit CEO admits that the fast pace of cryptocurrency transactions means that it’s hard to stop scams and thefts from happening. “If you lose money or get scammed, and are a customer of a bank, you can call the bank and they will be able to trace it,” he explains. Tracing stolen funds is still possible in crypto, but “everything moves so fast that by the time you get to it, the money is already gone.”
He remains upbeat, however, about the future of safety in the crypto industry. “Crypto infrastructure and technology are only increasing in abundance, and many more cybersecurity companies are joining the space.”
More countries have laid out regulatory frameworks for crypto companies like Bybit. For example, the EU rolled out the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) license in late 2024, which allows certified crypto providers to operate legally across the whole continent, instead of forcing companies to seek separate licenses from each individual country.
Zhou believes that enhanced regulation will pave the way for mainstream crypto adoption. He’s focused on European markets this year, as well as developing markets like Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey and India, where demand for crypto is booming due to weak local currencies.
