The Pomp Podcast - 338: ByBit CEO Ben Zhou On Building A Leading Derivatives Exchange

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

Ben Zhou is the co-founder and CEO of Bybit, a global crypto derivatives exchange. He previously ran a retail forex brokerage for almost a decade. In this conversation, we discuss Bybit's founding story, how they used affiliate marketing to grow so fast, mobile trading trends, the World Series of Trading event, and what Ben thinks about the Chinese digital currency plans. =============================== Blockset by BRD is your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more: https://www.blockset.com =============================== The Helium Hotspot is a new product that enables the people, not the telcos, to own and operate a wireless network in their city for Internet of Things devices. You can literally earn crypto for helping to build the network and providing connectivity to Internet of Things devices sending small bits of data. Join the movement and get your Helium Hotspot today with $50 off using the code POMP at helium.com.  =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Ben Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Bybit, a global crypto derivatives exchange. He previously ran a retail Forex brokerage for almost a decade. In this conversation, we discuss Bybit's founding story, how they used affiliate marketing to grow so fast, the mobile trading trends that they're seeing, the World Series of Trading event, and what Ben thinks about the Chinese digital currency plans. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ben, and I hope you do as well.

Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is Blockset by BRD. You probably know BRD or Bread because they had one of the first Bitcoin wallets in the App Store back in 2014. They've now launched a new product called Blockset. It's a hosted blockchain infrastructure business. Exactly what AWS is for Amazon and the traditional internet, Blockset is for the blockchain world.

Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. If you're building in the blockchain world, you got to use Blockset. So go check them out at blockset.com. Again, blockset.com. Our second sponsor is Helium.

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by sending small bits of data from the device in your home. Join the movement and get your Helium hotspot today. I've got one, so join me. You can join today at Helium.com. And if you use the code POMP, P-O-M-P, POMP, you'll get $50 off. I promise, it is super cool, super easy to set up. It literally took me three minutes.

Helium.com, use code POMP, get 50 bucks off. Lastly, I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at POMPletter.com. Again, POMPletter.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Ben. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys.

Bang, bang. I've got Ben here with me. Super excited to talk with him. Thanks so much for doing this, man. thank you for having me it's a pleasure absolutely coming to us live from shanghai for those that don't know you let's just start with uh with your background kind of what did you do uh before you got into crypto so i was in the retail forex business um i sort of i was the starting member of a current retail fx broker called xm.com right now it's probably one of

the top five for sure uh retail forex uh platform uh have business all over the globe um so i was in there for eight years uh in the end when i left i was managing the sort of the greater china region uh was close to 100 staff uh i left in uh late uh 2017 um so i was in charge basically of overall operation, marketing, customer support, business development, just all aspects of the Forex business. So I guess it sort of gave me an edge on, you know, I was running a platform and now I'm running Bybit. So I believe I could use a lot of my previous knowledge, especially on how to handle retail clients, deliver a product that really built for the retail and collect feedback from the users and how to give them the best support

and the overall trading experience. So I guess I'm particularly lucky in that aspect, yeah. Yeah, what was some of your biggest takeaways from having run that kind of global Forex product, right? Because I think that's a pretty unique experience. Any takeaways you had from that? A takeaway, I guess, is one thing, which is one of the reasons I started Bybit,

is that, at least in Forrest, the whole business is very mature. It's very mature. And so the overall trading experience is actually very, very good if the platform is doing the right thing. There's all the different tools you can provide to a client, whether it's customer support, whether it's the trading product, whether it's an indicator or an education sort of platform and all of that. it was very established so there was nothing too much to worry about in terms of the product

but looking into crypto when I first got into it by end of 2017 it was it was just the overall experience I felt like it was a kind of very behind in the total overall kind of experience especially during volatility and that's one of the reasons I decided to build Bybit as I figured with the knowledge and the standard uh that i can take from uh forex i can build a product that's kind of matching the you know you know the trading standard i believe the trader can deserve so i i believe for me the biggest takeaway is i know what exchange uh could be and where the standard should be and and that's what i want to push the limits and sort of build the bybit platform to uh to the standard i'm used to and even even beyond yeah and when you say that the

crypto space was behind in terms of infrastructure and technology like what were they lacking or where did you see the opportunity in terms of things that existed in the global forex market that didn't exist in crypto um it was uh it was overall trading experience um so um when when when i looked into it there was only bitmax and okex at the time uh so i was also checking out majorly on BitMEX and first of all, the UI, UE, it was hard for me. Coming from retail, I know that this platform, the whole user experience could be improved, more user sort of friendly,

the whole layout and all that. And I was doing a little bit trading, especially during volatility, there was a lot of these type of issues with either overload or servers not available or it was just hard during the time. And I figured the industry is too small. What if really we're talking about mass adoption

and if the mass adoption happens, no exchange can handle the type of volume. And so I figured the opportunities for sure there, even just from the underground sort of infrastructure perspective, but also from customer support, it was no live support and also just here and there, detail the small parts i feel uncomfortable and i figured there was a lot of room to improve

and even now i start to see the whole industry is getting more mature for example we start to see a lot more algo platform or a more sort of copy trading platform which is vastly available in fx in traditional i guess industry but now it is getting more popular people start to see them as a new thing but it's actually really not copy trading this type of stuff has been happening a lot in fx for a long time but you start to see in crypto so i i guess as the industry grow and as we get more mature different sectors will get more professional and different product will come out uh in the form of uh in traditional space yeah yeah and so i guess why start a company versus just go join one of the existing ones that helped them improve

what was the impetus to actually want to start a brand new company uh well hello can you hear me yep oh sorry i thought it got cut out yeah uh yeah this is a very good question uh to be honest number one is i didn't know anyone i was completely fresh off the boat in the industry uh and really speak realistically speaking if i didn't know let's see any of the major guys in the crypto now i i don't know you know that the whole bible story might change so i didn't know anyone and number two is um uh you know there's a huge advantage being a latecomer especially in uh 2018 i'm not looking back i think a major part of bible success attribute to the to the fact that we were not the ones eating the crab the first person or the first

guy who invented the wheel so we were able to take a model of say bit max or okay yeah it's a concept of perpetual contract and sort of built on it so from the infrastructure level we can actually bear in mind that solving the overload or the service stability issues is what we're running for so from the very bottom we can actually build something more solid so that give us a huge edge well thanks to the you know the first guys that designed this whole thing but the way we were able to take it and sort of build on it so that gives us the edge as a latecomer and and now we can do more with it you know so I think this is

one of the things and also at the time I found a few very good partners that can helped me to to achieve this uh this by bit uh project and that's how we decided to go with it yeah got it and so when you got started like what was the idea in terms of what did you guys set out to build uh the very first version was we want to build a uh platform that offers uh derivatives starting with perpetual contract and then gradually moving into all different products as we are doing now still uh we're working on our exploration contract and giving options um and also just to refine it uh we want to sort of copy the model uh if you say someone who invented the the the car but the japanese took it and really sort of refined it and that's our model is to really

build the product and more design for retail uh we our pure focus is on retail so the bible product whenever you see we have a new product launching it's already sort of everything out of the box we want we want to give to our customer the feeling that it's like getting a new iPhone we opened it is everything is ready everything is already packed inside it's already been polished and a very retail friendly so this was idea it was a purely retail focused the derivative change built for the retail and even now we have been pushing out our mobile app for half a year and putting a bunch of new features into our mobile app and we start to see

that a lot of our users uh you know are turning and changing their trading behavior into the mobile app so the original assumption that you cannot do professional trading on mobile app we believe it's the whole reason is because there wasn't a mobile app available for people to do so so all most of the exchange offer the mobile app as a supplement or an easy way to trade but we want to focus on mobile app as we see the trend and really more make make it a weapon sort of because crypto is 24 7. and uh and it goes perfectly well with a mobile trading uh equipment so um we want to take advantage of that and really devote our energy into this type of retail focused uh apps and products yeah so for the couple of people who are listening who don't know what a derivatives

exchanges maybe just explain what that is yeah it's a you know kind of a margin leverage trading using margin to trade Bitcoin or Ethereum or Ripple we currently offer four different peers both linear contract and inverse contract linear meaning you can use USDT USDT to trade and it's settled in USDT you can go up to 100 leverage so that if you have i don't know if you want to trade uh ten thousand dollars you can use literally one thousand uh dollars of usdt to trade and so you can you can limit sort of the counterparty risk by not putting too much coins on an exchange by using leverage i heard a lot of people using that yeah so yeah got it and so you guys go and

you launch and you kind of took the world by storm right in terms of you really hit marketing and the affiliate programs and all of that um in a kind of a big way maybe talk through a little bit once you guys had built the product what were those things that you did to kind of get the word out and really start driving adoption uh very good question actually is one of the questions i haven't talked about so much uh uh it's uh i think what we very original stage that early stage that we did sort of something that changed the industry is how affiliation system works so when we built the launch the uh bitcoin perpetual contract in december 2018 after about three months there wasn't so much volume and interest coming in we realized we need to focus on really getting people

to know our product so this is again based on my previous effects knowledge which is very developed in the affiliation system and program we looked at the competition across board uh there was bitmax okay x and even binance uh the affiliation is more of a referral program it's a very simple page with your link and that's it so and then we sort of talked to all of the kols at the time youtubers twitter guys and you know across all over the globe and their feedback was that their main source of income was mainly from a shout out where i give you a shout out i charge you you know 200 bucks and this type of deal i realized well they could be making so much money and utilizing their their conversion and their traffic by simply working on the affiliation

deal but they couldn't do so because the data was not there the data was not transparent they could not analyze their action so what we did is we basically built a affiliate CRM for them to be able to at least see they can create different campaigns so they for you pump you can create a YouTube campaign a Twitter campaign with different campaign you can use different links with different links we give you all the chartings all the clicks how many clicks how many conversions how much how much traffic was coming in so in a way you cannot you can you can start to see the testing their behavior so they could be staying by a bit

checkout by a bit it's no overload and then they leave it for a week and the next one they could say check out by a bit there is no kyc for example so whichever link has more traffic they will be pushing that link more and then sort of really develop their whole energy into into promoting a change so after we launched that and along with that there was a also a spike in price movement in April 2019 that really gave us a huge a lot of a client position and you can start to see that what we changed is that from being charging shoutouts affiliates are now fully being a baby promoter and actually can earn

the income so the so this is a way we originally started the how people get to know them but obviously once you get people to know them retention is the key is to actually have a solid product so that client try you and they like you they stay so we actually have one of the highest retention in the industry we have I think almost a 60% so every 10 people who register by a bit would end up making deposit at least 60% of them so this is because our product is It's user-friendly. It's built for retail, and they can find us 24-7 for customer support, all of that whole package.

So in the end, it is the whole package, but in the beginning, this is what we did to get the initial ball rolling. And I think one of the other things that I've heard people talk about with Bybit is not only was it really built for an analytics standpoint around the affiliate program, but also the way that you compensated people in that affiliate program was kind of unique. And so I've heard a lot of people come to me and say, hey, look, I make more money with Bybit than any other exchange that I work with. Maybe talk a little bit just about that compensation structure and how you guys thought about that and built it. The compensation is rather simple. But people, I guess once you give them full data transparency, we don't give them the client information, of course. but they can actually see that if a UID is registered,

because the UID is an internal Bybit number, so there is nothing conflict about that. They can see a UID registered, how much has been traded, either it's taker volume or maker volume, and then how much commission they've been made from that client. And if they create a different campaign, they can actually target, let's say if I'm in the signal group, I can see the ROI on my signal group versus on my Discord group, let's say.

So with the data transparency, it gives a lot of affiliates ideas that they can make more and all that. But I believe it's true. They probably could make more because of the product, the retention, all of that. In terms of payment, we just give them a cut on the fees we collected. So we charge our clients a taker fee of 7.5 bibs, which is the same as the industry standard. And we also give a rebate on whoever providing us liquidity by giving a 2.5 bibs rebate on the maker volume. And the affiliates would share that taker volume fees. Another reason is because the platform is overall built for retail.

a lot of retail clients tends to use a taker strategy. So that is why if they compare with, let's say Bmax or FTX, maybe FTX has a lot of quants or API traders, which can be a lot of maker volume. So I guess that whole thing we built for a retail and they have retail audience, that's what makes Bybit is very good for conversion.

So I don't think it's the actual payment structure, but the product is built for their clients so they have a better conversion. In the end, they get better paid for the commission, yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. And then you guys have been spending a lot of time on your mobile app. You said earlier that you saw kind of some trends

where people wanted to use the app. Maybe talk a little bit about those trends and kind of what drove you to put so much time and effort into building up the mobile app. So originally, we built the mobile app purely for our Asian users because there were so many requests from Japanese, Korean, and the Chinese users of Bybit asking for a mobile app.

Before the mobile app, we had a mobile website. So when you visit from a mobile phone, it will show a web.bybit.com, sort of a new layout and structure for the mobile. But they want a mobile app. So what we did is, okay, let's build this product, and we can use some of the real cool function of a mobile app, that is the notification features. So what's the best thing of a mobile app

is that you can find the user anytime when they are, you know, I don't know, go to the toilet or people take their phone with them. So that's the only thing you can find your client anytime pretty much. And push notification, you can utilize that. So in the original version one of the mobile app, we we already had a very simple price alert function where if they can set with bitcoin

price rich certain level we push we give you a notification but recently we push out a strategy alert that is one much more step ahead uh on top of the the simple price alert you can actually set different indicators uh meaning if you have moving average you can set two moving average with different period and once when they cross each other we will send you a notification uh let you know that movement is happening or a lot of people let's say they care about the exchange funding fees or the funding rate especially the predicted funding rate meaning that how many uh people are overselling or over so uh in our order book uh so we can give them a notification based on that factor and also we plan to put in much more indicators such as fibonacci macd and all

that useful ones um so that people can uh rely on these things to tell them when the market is moving and and as far as for the trend is going uh yeah sorry i got distracted a little bit um in the beginning it was built for the asian users but uh right now for example 80 percent of our japanese users are on our mobile app uh i would say 70 percent of our korean users are mobile app but our mean English European markets are now slowly gaining market share on the mobile app from originally 30% now to about 50% so you can see a big trend of everyone started using it as we give more capability onto the mobile app and they like it and that's one of the most feedback we get a lot of people choose

by this simply because our mobile app so I really intend to invest much more onto the development of that 50 to 80 percent of users in certain countries using the mobile app is insane like i would not have expected it to be that high japan is insanely high i would never expected that uh but japan it was before we offered the mobile app everyone was using the web version but once uh we have the mobile everyone switched so it was it was it was very surprising and surprising to me as well why do you think that they are using the mobile app is it literally just because they're on the move cryptos 24 7 and this is an easy way to do it and the app has enough functionality to kind of do what they need to do or is it something else

i think that's that's exactly probably what it is especially during the weekends i guess people cannot be staring on the in front of the pc all the time yeah and that sort of gives you the habit once you start using the mobile app because maybe you're using to pc version quite often but at one weekend you have to go away you start using them but when you realize oh it got all the tools i need they got everything then he start to rely on it it's like how you start to use tiktok you know it's uh before you install it you never knew you liked it and then you start to give you the hook you know yeah are you on tiktok you know what i recently just deleted because i i found it it's such a addictive thing i actually deleted it last week because uh it's costing me too much time

I love that. So one of the other things that I know you guys have built into the mobile app is almost this like predictive type functionality, right? Where I can basically say, hey, tell me when a certain asset hits a certain price or tell me when some event happens, send me a push notification. That's kind of like an alert system, but it sounds like you're kind of moving towards maybe in the future, you'll be able to actually kind of know what the user would want to know, even if they didn't set the alert and kind of set a push notification? Is that accurate or is that a little bit farther out? Yeah, in that system, we want to advance into more even automated trading for our mobile users.

For example, if you start to use different indicators and you want us to let you know that when this indicator is happening or a certain price hits the trigger point, the next step is to connect the conditional order or limit order system into the notification so once let's say your fibonacci hits certain resistance you want to do a conditional ordering we can set it out for you and of course the the amount on all that you can set yourself so this is one more step towards the the mobile app and that's sort of where eventually we want to take this whole thing is that people can really don't need to monitor the phone anymore it becomes completely automated and you can do it all these you can we can empower our user to become sort of a quantum trader in a way that um you don't have to know code to be able

to do this type of automated simple automated trading yeah yeah it makes a lot of sense and then um when uh when your team reached out to me to uh to uh do this uh they were reaching out because they wanted to talk about the world series of trading right and so uh we're um go ahead and promoting that on the podcast in terms of the sponsorship but i said hey i want to talk to ben right if we're gonna if we're gonna do this let's talk to ben get him on here so tell us a little bit about the the world series of trading um and kind of what you guys are trying to accomplish with uh with that initiative uh yeah so we started we were the first one that started a global competition in 2019 and that reached one a huge scale uh close to 8 000 people uh it was a team

based where we had i think 30 to 40 teams from china 20 teams from korea uh 10 15 teams from japan and then the rest 50 different teams from you know uh our main markets which is english european markets uh youtubers twitter guys leading different teams so it was a battle and it was sort of a hype at the moment where people was talking about it and discussing strategies and that and this time we want to make it sort of even bigger and make it into a a regular occurring event so we change the name from a simple btc competition to wsot uh this is a reference to poker star wsop you know that kind of idea and we want to make the big price so this time the maximum price price pool is 200 ptc and this time is still similar uh concept with different teams

different country will join we want to make it a truly global event and also let our clients see that we actually have global huge presence all over the place different countries about this time not only crypto we actually got some poker people joining us leaving some teams we thought that Paul gonna be leading the team Mike McDonald's gonna be leading the team and of course your regular poker uh your regular twitter guys um on youtubers um so with that being said we want to sort of use this event to make a social event so everyone can you know communicate and discuss and have a little bit of fun so we're going to be also launching a chat room uh function that our

clients be asking a lot so people can actually chat among each other and uh even trash talk if They want to show off their profit and ROIs and all that. Yeah, that's awesome. When you're thinking about kind of where we are in the lifecycle of crypto, you guys have been working on the business now for kind of three years, give or take. You've grown into one of the larger exchanges in the industry. How do you think about kind of the last three years of price movement, of kind of the building out of infrastructure of seeing some of the larger financial organizations

come in like how do you think we're doing and how do you just think about like where we are in crypto today um i i think definitely there has been a lot more product focused team and product orientated people coming into the space so it's a good thing i think after the whole 2017 uh ICO it got a lot of hype and a lot of people are interested and now from 2018 they're joining into the industry and you start to see different teams build a different product a lot of teams are very team product focused so I would say instead of only focusing on the white paper and concept stage we're actually moving into a very solid people are building product and delivering product at that type of a stage and like you said um we also made some investment recently into different

projects one is being a paradigm which is a sort of uh rfq otc type of uh software uh we were very impressed with the team and the product so we think there's some synergy going on there and that's why we we made some investment and hopefully we will be integrating to them very soon And just from an exchange perspective, there are a lot more institutions coming in now, even talking to Bybit, trying to connect to us, give us liquidity and trade with our API. So I think it's definitely that we see some good progress in crypto. And to be honest, for myself and for my team, even through this whole epidemic, is almost like a belief top-up.

I tell my team that through this epidemic, the whole team's belief in blockchain and crypto just rises through the ceiling. The reason being that you start to see that governments are shamelessly printing money. Before, you think they are still hiding, but now they're just printing. You start to see that because of that,

The consequences are the rich are getting bailed out. But the poor, the inequality is so bad. And you see that stock and everything is going up. But if you're living on, if you have no access to capital or you're just working on minimum wages, that $14, $15 per hour is being diluted like hell. So you start to see there's a huge river in between people who have access to capital and people

who are just basic labor. And there has to be a revolution. So a lot of people say the first part of the internet age is the revolution of information, decentralized whatever of information. I believe the second age is the revolution of capital, of money, and of the whole financial system. So we think we want to make sure that we stay in the game

and we stay solid. We built a product that's ready for mass adoption. So we're ready for when that comes and contribute to this. And on the other hand, crypto is something completely the whole the whole about about the whole society, about the whole, you know, everyone gets benefited. So this is why we believe in so much. Yeah. Yeah. And what about in China and kind of greater Asia? Right. So a lot of people listening are in the United States and about 50 percent of people listening are going to be outside of the United States right now. But you've got kind of this unique seat where you sit in Asia, but you've got clients are kind of across the world. So how do you look at the development and adoption of crypto in Asia versus maybe other parts of the world?

I'm actually surprised in Asia is I would say is more more adopted. We were entering into Indonesia market was one of the market you would assume is not so developed in terms of crypto and all that. So we went in with this assumption of assuming we need to do a lot of things. And then you go and you start to see, wow, all these exchanges are extremely well-structured and they have their own Indo-Cether. They have their regulations completely legalized

and all these companies. I think the largest one is called Indodex. So people can actually go to Indodex, the counter, and actually buy crypto. And it's completely legal and the government accepted. So that's true comes by surprise and then you go to Philippines where we have actually our office in Philippines also crypto is legalized and you can get license there and for China, I guess everyone knows the There's a

Stable coin that's been releasing that DC DCP whatever it is called so I think China wants to take this advantage to sort of uh uh you know uh changed the current structure of usd usd uh and uh and put sort of uh the the chinese r b into the world stage by uh combining with crypto and blockchain so overall i think uh uh the hype in asia is bigger even and people have stronger beliefs and there was also recently a a blockchain wake happening in Shenzhen in China where there were a lot of people went there you can see the hype even you know you never thought you would see so many people after this epidemic but everyone is there and everyone's talking about you know DeFi and everything so I think

definitely Asia is where the action is happening actually yeah and what about like just people who are not in the crypto industry uh in china or other parts of asia like what do they think about the chinese uh digital currency that that the government there's planning to launch is there people talking about it do they know about it do they not care uh to be honest i i think the whole uh the chinese stable coin it's very murky right now nobody knows even the people in the industry talk to everyone's just guessing uh nobody knows what the central bank is doing or the bank of china is trying to test um i still think at this stage people in the crypto industry are still unclear but we definitely start to see that we're doing a lot of hiring right now and we see a lot

of good candidates and they sort of they they come into the interview uh being that oh i see that china is sort of bullish on their whole blockchain and crypto uh industry that's why i'm coming here for this interview and they always bring out this news at all the central bank is coming out with a stable point but if you ask them what do they know they don't know anything but they at least they take a signal that is positive the government is going to move ahead with it so they want to be the first in the industry to find out what so they want to join to find out what's gonna happen but they asked me and we were like well we still don't really know at the moment

But we also, I know as much as you do. So this is what's going on. Yeah, and it's pretty interesting too, because I think as you get like the rise of DeFi, right? And kind of these decentralized or automated products, do you think that whether it's the Chinese digital currency, Bitcoin or something else, do you think that the average user in Asia

is open to using those products for financial services over like the legacy institutions? Or do you feel like there's still some loyalty to the legacy financial institutions. And crypto is really only for trading and kind of investing, if you will, but not necessarily the more traditional financial services. Are you asking about China or?

China specifically. China specifically. To be honest, this is only my personal take. My personal take is I don't think the Chinese mainstream will be using DeFi to replace the current legacy services. One of the reasons being that the existing servers, let's say Alipay or Tencent, all these different financial tools, are so convenient. There are a lot of people, I know a lot of my friends that are either Americans or from the UK. When they move back to the US, they feel very uncomfortable because a lot of these things are not available anymore.

It's so convenient being in China. But obviously, you give up certain things. You give up your privacy. So in a way, it's a trade-off. You have no privacy. But given that being said, all these tools, what Chinese are currently using and used to, are so convenient.

There's no need. There's no concept of, why do I need to change? And you can sort of also this whole debate about privacy. If you never had something, you don't really know you know you know so if you never had privacy and you you never asked so you don't see people on weibo talking about different privacy issues but where you see a lot of that in Twitter on that which is I don't necessarily personally agree with but um but this is what the Chinese current state is so being that

if you're trying to push out a different sell people that hey if you use this thing at least you get your privacy people like well I'm perfectly happy with what i'm doing right now so this is the uh the dilemma we're facing right now but uh should it be changed uh definitely i i believe so i believe uh wisdom will change a lot of things and my belief is that maybe with that whole revolution of crypto and and that will push the things changing a bit in china as well yeah yeah and one of the last things i wanted to talk about was just uh building a team right so you've done a fantastic job of uh kind of gathering very smart people very quickly and have built a very profitable business have how have you found

hiring uh whether it's there in china or globally uh before we got started you were telling me how uh you guys kind of were very used to working remotely and kind of using all the different remote tools but obviously you're looking for the best people so talk a little bit about kind of building your team and how you found that hiring process uh we take hiring very seriously Actually, all the hirings, the final interviews is definitely one of the founders, even a reception person coming in that one of the founders would sit that last final round, simply because we want to make sure our people understand the company culture they're coming into by presenting a founder. And normally that gives them a little bit, a very positive feeling about the company that, oh, you really take care of, you really care about the hiring process. But, I mean, right now, as far as hiring is concerned, we actually find through this epidemic, a lot of good candidates is becoming available. So we actually have been expanding massively.

Right now, we have globally more than 250 people. So half of them, more than half of them are, you know, hired probably during this whole six months. So and we have one interesting round I can show you that normally the first round interview is the hiring manager. And the second round is what we call a cultural interview. you so all we're asking uh is is this person coming from completely different units so if you're hiring a marketing person this person is coming from either it background or our accounting department we select them as our uh cultural representative and they will be asking questions about uh what do you like to play and you know uh what uh what was your preference what kind of

people you hang out with like this and also they actually tell the candidate about uh what is working in in bybit like because a lot of times the candidate is feeling a little bit shy asking kind of direct question about the line manager so they ask the cultural interviewer and the coaching review their core responsibility is to find out whether this person have client first mentality whether it's being this person's sincere um whether it's uh it's a goal orientated person and a few criteria we want to find out and they gave a score and if our culture interview doesn't pass this person cannot be hired into the company we rotate our staff to do that so they take great ownership and honor in doing this because they feel you know I'm

actually the person in charge of character and to be extremely you know careful so it's I find that it's very interesting and um a lot of good positive feedbacks about that process yeah i love that i absolutely love that um before i get into the rapid fire questions to end it uh what's your number one priority for the second half of 2020 like what are you most focused on uh seeing by bit or or your team do we want to expand our current uh product lines uh like i said uh we are launching our expiration contract and also hopefully by q4 we want to launch our option product so we want to truly by this year expand our product line make sure whenever we release the product it has some innovation in it and that's why the past two products the mutual

insurance and the strategy alert they're both unique and the you know so this is our pure focus that we want to lead the industry by innovating product and give the clients what they they want yeah love that i finished each interview with uh the same two questions the first being what is the most important book that you've ever read uh most important book uh you know what um i recently i i recently uh took a vacation and my second son was just born two weeks ago so i was in the hospital and you know holding him and just on the shelf there was a book called tuesday with maurice and uh so i read that tuesday with maurice this is a very good book about this professor you know uh dying words and giving a last life lesson about uh his

vision how to treat life how to give back to society and all of that so it was it was very It was very refreshing, and for me, it was good to slow down, especially in the hospital with my kid just there. It's sort of awakening. I was like, okay, I need to slow down and focus more on life and all that. So this is one of the recent books I read. I find it very interesting, yeah. It sounds like a very strategically placed book, right,

is to put that in the room. Probably my wife put it there. i love that uh the second question is a little bit more fun aliens believer or non-believer oh 100 believer why uh especially after knowing that how small we are maybe before i didn't know uh but after we found out the whole galaxy and how small we are i'm sure there's you know maybe not in this galaxy but in different galaxies there's something a being like uh either like us or a civilization so for sure i definitely believe in that and uh yeah you never know yeah i think that is a great way to look at it it's just the world is so big

right how do we know what uh what could possibly be out there uh to end it you get to ask me one question so what is the one question that you have for me one question i have for you That's very good. What was the one most interesting question you asked? Even to this day you find it interesting. You kind of think back to any of the people you interviewed. Most interesting question. Awakening, that kind of change. Yeah, I'm going to give you two answers. So first of all, the reason why I asked the alien question is because I think it just gives you a pretty good, very quick view into like how people think, right? So some people will come on and they'll say, hey, I don't believe in aliens because I've never seen one, right?

Somebody else will come in and say, I believe because, you know, mathematic probability says that, you know, it's more probable than not. Other people will come in and say, I believe because here's, you know, three scientific equations and they're very kind of analytical about it. So I think that it's just like my favorite question because it can tell you so much about the way somebody thinks, what they believe. You know, people who want to believe aliens are real versus people who, you know, don't want to and stuff like that. I would say that's definitely one. uh in terms of um like my favorite question i don't think i have one i think what it ends up being is uh there are times when i do an interview and i'll ask a question and somebody is so brutally honest with their answer that it almost makes them uncomfortable and i think that like when you

see that happen it's just a really special moment like this person's so intellectually honest and And so just transparent that they didn't want to tell me what they just told me, but they didn't, right. And so to me, like, it's just this, this vulnerability that I think a lot of people, they will, you know, if you go on television, for example, everyone is trying to like, project some image, right? Hey, I'm the smart trader guy. I'm the smart this, I'm the smart this, you know, woman, whatever. podcasts are a little bit different that people are are more authentic and kind of just you know have a conversation uh so i think when you see people be like overly vulnerable especially when they say things that are true but don't make them look good you're just like man this is pretty cool experience to kind of have those types of conversations with people yeah well awesome awesome absolutely thank you where um where can we send people to uh to find you on the internet and find out more about Bybit

or the World Series of Trading? Well, I'm on Twitter. I'm always on Twitter. So people can find me at Ben Bybit, you know, at Ben Bybit. Or for WSOT, just go to Bybit.com and you'll be able to see some information. Yeah.

It's all over the homepage. Absolutely. Awesome, Ben. Listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I really enjoyed it. And congratulations with all your guys' success. And we'll have to do it again in the future. Thank you.

Thank you. looking forward to the next talk thank you