Join Jason Fernandes, Co-Founder of AdLunam Inc., as he chats with Vugar Usi Vade, COO of Bitget. Get the lowdown on crypto exchange strategies, market trends, and blockchain predictions. They cover key trends, security hacks, and how exchanges fit into Web3. Dive into the future of crypto and Web3! 🚀✨

DIVIC goes live every Thursday on the AdLunam Twitter page.

SPEAKERS

• Jason Fernandes (Co - Founder of AdLunam Inc.)

• Vugar Usi Zade (Chief Operating Officer of Bitget)

Hey, Welcome everybody to diving into crypto. This is your host, Jason Fernandes, co-founder at AdLunam. Let's jump right in. This program is about sharing insights, strategies and journeys of leaders, movers, shakers and candlestick watchers. This program is brought to you by AdLunam, the all in one web3 investment ecosystem, empowering early stage startups. So we have a very special guest for you today. But before we begin, here's a few announcements. Feel free to use the reaction buttons as you hear gems from our speaker. The views of this program on that of the speaker and thoughts shared are meant for educational purposes. At the end of the program, we'll open the room for Q and A's. Your questions can be sent across to our Twitter account at AdLunam Inc, if you get cut off from the show, come back to AdLunam Inc on Twitter, and you'll find a new link, and that should lead you back to the podcast. So okay, let's go. I'll just very briefly introduce our exciting guest. Today we have Vugar Usi Zade, the Chief Operating Officer at Bitget. Vugar is an award-winning senior manager and a communications expert with 15 years of progressive hands on experience spanning fortune pioneer giants to dynamic startups currently serving as the COO at Bitget. Vugar, would you want to give a brief introduction about yourself and maybe say hello to everybody?

Sure, thank you for the invite, and I'm super, super excited to have this talk today. Definitely, as you already did, a great introduction, and like I'm trying to be much humble over here, I am Vugar. I am the COO of the Bitget, one of the largest crypto exchanges. Currently, we serve 25 million customers globally. We facilitate ten billion worth transactions every day. And I'm proud that I have a team over 1500 team members across the globe, and that's how we achieve, like a true 24/7 customer satisfaction across the time zones. We have team members who wake up early in Japan and then we have team members across the world, in Asia, Europe, Africa, North and South America. And sometimes I also lost a track of time myself, you know, because someone reaches out from Chile, the other person from Korea, and you have to be all time in there. Therefore, I'm very excited to be here today, and also I'm really excited how crypto and blockchain technologies are shaping our lives, and that fast moving things are really exciting. Me all the time.

Thank you so much for that intro Vugar. I mean, We have been following Bitget very closely. I used to be at an exchange myself, and so been watched sort of the very early days. And it's just amazing, you know, how fast a big head has grown, and it's just become a force of nature at this point. So very very big fans of what you guys have sort of put together, but to sort of kick this off. I'd love to kind of learn about, you know, what your web3 journey has been like. What sort of got you passionate about it? Can you maybe tell this?

Sure, I always say it tells this story like, usually people come to crypto to get rich. And mainly the narrative for years was that, you know, get rich quick. And I see it with the meme coin rush, also of this pool cycle. And it was NFTs last cycle when the narrative was that, Oh, someone, somewhere bought something for $100, $200 and they became millionaires overnight. But luckily or unluckily, I don't have the that kind of a fascinating story where I became millionaire overnight, but back in 2017 I've been already building a startup with my dear friends on web3 in adtech, and at that point we had a chance to exercise some exit, while my colleagues choose to stay in the company, and they're still running it, I decided to exercise my exit, and at that point, we already got some funding from CVS capital. It was around like $2.7 billion and I was really young, and I wanted just, you know, to see that whatever shares are actually turning into the money. And once I did my exit, and at some point, my bank called me that, Oh, you got this much money in your account. What you want to do with it? At that point, I wasn't like a To be honest, financial savvy. Even though I did my degree in economics, I never had like that much money to think about. I will be losing so much for the inflation. And bank was starting offering me all like a traditional assets where I can hedge, you will get, like, a 10% return on investment. With 10%,15% inflation, you'll be losing this much, or you're not losing that. And I realized that actually, like all these traditional investment vehicles, they're not any good in a long run, and I'll be losing the hard earned money. And I decided to do something different, because I was also young. I was not planning to retire. I decided to join a VC in Dubai and start investing, and that's how I end up working with the authorities and the IFC and Dubai government, setting up Launchpad and getting to know web3 ecosystem, and I literally joined it in like 2017 it was like that, ICO, boom. It was still like a crypto was hot, but no one knew it as much as it is today. And I started investing. And to be honest, I can't, you know, say that it was the best investment of my life, even though it was a great learning, and since then, I am here and back in times. In 2018 It was a time that Bitget was founded, even though it took me another, like a four or five years until I full time joined Bitget. I was from the beginning, like a very enthusiastic about the exchange and the roles of the exchanges and today, like the how the vision is reshaping the entire industry, because we also invested in bit keep wallet and really branded to Bitget and all this, like a bridging decentralized world with decentralized exchanges, and still trying to do more and more things to bring people from web2 to Web3. Therefore, I believe I have very exciting journey of myself like which started in a very traditional places, fortune 500 companies. I experienced that startup world, but again, I ended up in crypto because I didn't want to lose what I have. I wanted also to have an upside. Therefore I had little bit risk appetite, and I ended up investing in crypto, and I'm still around.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's interesting. You mentioned Dubai. Dubai is doing amazing things. It almost feels like the entire crypto industry is over there. We spend, my co-founder, and I spend quite a bit of time over there. it really seems like. I'm like, it's a sort of place to be for growing sort of crypto companies these days. Just out of curiosity, you mentioned meme coins, right? What? Just sort of curious when your overall thoughts on that blowing up recently. And, you know, I mean, they've been stories of people setting themselves up on fire just to sort of drive their mean coin price up, people like somebody hired a stripper or something like that. It's just been completely crazy. So I'm curious what your thoughts of that are.

Okay, honestly I had, like, different perspective until this summer. Now I have a different perspective. But like to begin with, in the beginning, I never was interested about meme coins, because, for me, meme coins, they don't have utility, they don't have any action, they don't bring any value or any tangible value. Therefore, I never understood it, and my all time approach, even because, like, I run a crypto exchange, and a lot of friends and family call me. They were like, Oh, someone invested in XY debt. They got this much money. What is the next thing? Or we list as an exchange, meme coins. And people always like, Oh, you listed this meme coin. Is it going up and down? Therefore, I never gave a financial advice, but I always said meme coins are kind of a lottery tickets on the chain. When you buy a lottery ticket, you already say buy to the money you bought the ticket with. If that ticket is a winning ticket, you are happy. But if it's not, you are not sad. And therefore, for me, investing in meme coins always was about that you know, you kind of buy and forget. There's no hard feelings, and you only invest the money that you are happy to lose, and you are there for fun. But then this summer, I went to Paris. I've been to Paris many, many times, and I actually like, and I love arts a lot. I've been to louver museum a lot of times, but I never visited, you know, it to see the esteemed Mona Lisa. But this time, I had my friends with me, and they booked a tour. And tour guide was really fun guy, and he was like, Oh, actually, the Mona Lisa is one of the oldest meme of the times, because it is not that Da Vinci is the best word. It is not the biggest word, but it became famous because of the stories that it was stolen by Italian Mafia. It was briefly displayed in Italy, and during that three years that Mona Lisa was lost, more people visited louver to see its empty spot. And it has a cultural significance. It has art significance. And today, almost 80 to 90% of all the visitors to who come to louver, day rush to see Mona Lisa, and it makes a lot of money to the louver Museum. While on the way to Mona Lisa, you pass by at least 10 other Da Vinci's and Caravaggio's and all the other like a big, big artist. And that it was kind of like a light bulb moment for me. I was like, oh my goodness, this is really fascinating. Basically, like as like whatever Mona Lisa is for the louver Museum, like the cash cow or that tool that brings more footfall. I believe the same applies for the meme coins. In my opinion, almost all large chains out there today, especially in this market, they rely on meme coins to bring more footfall, or more users or more wallet holders, a lot of transactions. Meme coins also drive a lot of transactions for the, let's say, exchanges and almost all the participants of the industry, from business perspective and from user perspective, meme coins are really fun. I know that people sometimes they love holding, like, I don't know, 1000s of Shiba or hundreds of something like, they're very cheap to buy, they're very easy to hold, and you don't, it's not like a you can't today, go buy, like, 100 Bitcoins, right? And also it's again, a cultural moment and a cultural aspect. And we saw also institutions trading meme coins. Therefore, I believe, especially this bull run, meme coins became a good traffic generator for the project, and especially layer zeros, layer ones, layer twos. And also for the users, it became a chance to invest and to actually, you know, to catch that crypto train. Because last runs, there were so many like altcoins that performed. But today we don't expect a Bitcoin or Ethereum do 10x or 100x but still, there are meme coins that can do it. Therefore, I believe it's kind of a win win for everyone. I personally, I'm not, like a huge fan, even though I have some tokens and also fun things. But formula like a pure like a fun aspect. I bought it because. Know, someone joked about it I bought or someone just dropped them to my wallet because they wanted my support, or just grabbed my attention. They were like, they're like, they really don't act as an investment vehicle for me, and I don't recommend anyone. But if you have another like, I don't know, 10, $20 to make fun of it, get it. I have some meme coins on my wallet because I did you know lounge pool X lounge pool, where you stake your USDT and you get free tokens, and your USDT comes back after seven days or 10 days for liquidity, like a farming, different aid drops. Therefore, I believe it's really fun to have that. And they're pretty substantial, but like actually going and putting all my money on meme coins. I definitely do not recommend it's like going to Vegas for me.

Yeah, actually, I've heard it said that sort of meme coins are the newest NFT, the NFT of this season. It actually we were supposed we were doing an event, and we would have already met, actually, at an event. We were hosting it in Dubai for our Future of NFTs show. I guess you were going to be speaking there, but because of the floods during the whole took in Token you know, 2049 event, we were not able to meet. But, yeah, I mean, what do you think of the sort of idea that NFTs are the sort of the mean points of the other new NFTs? Do you think that there's that one could has more of a future? Because I know, I've said this to, you know, quite a few times to people that you know NFT, it's about the it's a technology. I mean, the utility you can really come from anything, you know, tickets, any number of sort of things. Whereas when it comes to meme coins, you know, there's really no utility. And that's almost by design. I mean, in this case, what your thoughts on that?

You know, I always say, like, kind of a separating message from the messenger. And in crypto, I think we need to separate technology from the utility, from the project, and from the product. For example, Blockchain as a technology, it is amazing, and I know a lot of traditional companies like I am very good friends with the VP of logistics at Unilever, and Unilever uses blockchain technology to track all their logistics, especially in the palm oil production, to make sure that it is deforestation free. And there are Procter and Gamble other companies who use blockchain technologies to make sure their production is slavery and child labor free. Therefore, this is a different application. They don't issue coins, they don't even go loud about it, because it's efficient, it is cheap, it's transparent. And they take that technology and they use it, and now attention, like biggest bump, almost everyone, at some point, bought some concert tickets or event tickets from Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster, 90% of their backend runs on NFTs, and that's how they use it. They use blockchain technology without actually going public about it, without issuing a token, making it complicated. Keep it in your mind, NFTs are not dead, or technology isn't dead. It is there, but depends how we use it. Second part about why, in last Bull Run, NFTs went up and went down? Because definitely there was a hype, and industry is running by narrative. But now imagine like I was at school as a kid, and we all were at school as a kid. We did so many drawings and paintings, and I don't know different mother's days and father's days card, none of them became museum worthy art, and all that NFTs were minted. They were the similar even today, like all these professional artists out there, not all of them are celebrated. Not all of them are in the galleries. Not all of them are doing Venice Biennale or any other things. Therefore, it is normal for in the art scene only, like a 1%, 2% of the artists actually become worthy. Therefore I still believe there are NFTs, and there will be NFTs that are really worthy of attention, worth of investment, worth of holding in the long term, because digital art is here to stay. There are so many great artists. If you go today to largest galleries globally, from, I don't know, Tate Modern to wherever, you will see so much, so many digital arts there that you could just buy and purchase and hold on. I think NFTs are there. And we've seen so many applications of NFTs, from fashion industry to music where they do different rights, copyrights, matters and so on. Therefore, I believe technology is an amazing and it's there to stay. But again, the entire narrative, entire hype last cycle, was that every NFT we're going to buy will become 10 times expensive. But it is same thing if we Believe that if it will rain money today, everyone gonna be rich, then it won't. Therefore, expecting everything to gain value impossible. Therefore, I believe in this run meme tokens. Yes, there will be some that will reimagine themselves. They will have strong community. They will do things like, imagine like, if you remember, like, a year ago, two years ago, when you were talking about, like a Pepe, everyone was like, oh, it's hype. It's dying, and Pepe is still around, and there are people still believe in it, holding it, buying it, and trade, transacting with it. Similar things the dollars, you know, like US dollars, it's another meme token, just because we all believe it has some sort of a value or any other currency. If you all decide it has some sort of a value, then it has back in Roman times, they used to pay salaries with the salt. That's where the word salary comes from, right? Because these people believe that salt is valuable. There is a certain value attached to that salt today, if you tell me I'm gonna pay you sound in salt, I'll definitely not take it. Therefore, I believe it's all about like a kind of a consensus mechanism. And I believe there will be meme tokens that cannot survive longer, but there are also meme tokens that cannot die. It's similar if I today decide to print money and Monopoly money and play with my friends, but no one else needs it. And therefore, I believe whenever we invest, we have to understand how things can go right and left, up and down, and work on this, but believing that everything gonna gain value, it means, if everything gains value, nothing gains value at the same time.

Yeah, I think it's hilarious that you refer to the US dollars as essentially a meme token, which is, it's really funny because I think one of the, I mean, like any token, right? You gain value from the utility. And for the longest time, the US has sort of had the monopoly of essentially oil from Saudi Arabia having to be bought in US dollars. And just, I think today that agreement ended, and no new agreement is in place. So basically, they can sell oil in any in any currency, which basically changes the whole Petrodollar recycling argument and makes it, makes it a lot less guaranteed than it was, you know, a little while ago. I mean, yeah, sure, it's guaranteed by the full faith in the US government, but then that's backed by the utility it's able to offer. And if you have, if you take out a massive amount of utility, you know, it makes it less valuable over time. But I'm curious, you know, you, you've been in the crypto market for quite a while. So from the beginning, from when you first started jumped in, to now, how would you, how have you seen this sort of crypto market evolve, you know, over these years?

Okay, I always say I, in my opinion, crypto market has like a two audience one audience is like a builders and believers, these people who are here for no matter what's happening in a good day in a bad day. This is our people who gonna buy dollar cost average, and buy bitcoin when FTX going down, they still gonna buy bitcoin when something goes down, something goes up. These people gonna continuously build and try build startups to innovation. These are builders and believers. And then there are all the like a hype money makers, which are available in any industry, and they will come only when it's like a good day. They will go around, they promote, they collect money, and they have that short term interest. And it's not only about, you know this, like a small individual players, I talk about, like a really large companies. There are so many exchanges, there so many, like a big labs and layer 0s, layer 1s that you'll see, they will be hiring dozens and dozens of employees when it is the bull run and when it's a bear market, they're just like a cut to your team members. And I love, I believe, like they're having a great example for an industry. For example, binance, last Bull Run, they were around 7500 people. Bear market came. They went down to 4000 people. They hired and fired with no mercy, because I don't know they had a strategy, something went up and something went down. But in my opinion, for sustainable growth, even though market is very cyclic. We have to focus on in a longer run and be here for a long run. And that was one of the ethos when we invested in Bitkub wallet, as bit get like around, like a 20, $30 million in the middle of the bear market. And almost every conference I went, all my colleagues, from the competitors, competition, especially from the exchange side. I met, everyone was like, oh, you made this much investment. It is crazy. And literally, Bull Run came and every exchange introduced a rep three wallet, because they are, like most of the players, they're, like, very cyclic. They are here for, like, a short term gains. And it became a culture, and in my opinion, that's like one of the things. And it's not only about the developers, like big corporations. Look at the venture capital firms like investors. Yes, retail investors, it's normal that they will have, like a short term gain approach, but in a traditional web two industries, VCs will invest, and they will hold for like a years and years and years, even decades. Look all the investors, sequoias that invested in YouTube, they invested in, I don't know, all the big ventures out there, from Ubers that never made money. But in crypto, it is not like that. In crypto, everyone thinks cyclic, and this cycle, I saw so many VCs, they would only invest with the cliff of, I don't know, eight months, 10 months, 12 months, because they want to get in and out before the cycle ends. Therefore, I believe the biggest problem currently is that cyclic thinking, and cyclic like everyone thinking, how we can get in and out quickly cash out while, instead of, like investing in the long run and holding but I believe it is the problem that gonna be solved in next cycle or two, when more and more investors will be here for a longer and more stable investments, where they will be investing to an actual product, rather than buying and selling tokens.

Yeah, you know, you touched on a really good point, especially when, when you look at investors these days, they have a very, very short timeframe, in which case, in which they want to see, you know, massive results. And oftentimes the market maybe doesn't cooperate. So, for example, you might plan to launch on a particular date, but the market might be so, so poor that you might need to delete and then, you know, sometimes you have these investors, but very short term thinking in terms of, hey, let's launch this token. Let's get as much as possible during the ideal however many, however many X multiple, and then cash out, and then, essentially, they really don't care what happens to the token in the long run. They made that money in the initial IDO. So it's very short term thinking, but I'm curious, in terms of, like, your interaction with investors, are they still sort of deploying capital these days, or has this sort of cool down, I know, for a long time, and it cooled down, but it seemed like, as Bitcoin was starting to pick up, that it was picking up a bit. But then now, with the with the Federal Reserve being very reticent about raising rates. Sorry, lowering rates, it seems like the market is cool, but I'm just curious what, what you've seen, and what your experiences sort of from being in the market.

From the Bitget’s perspective. We have Empower X fund. It's like $100 million fund we've been actively investing, but also including us. I think biggest trend I see either more and more investors want to go for a really, like an infrastructure investment, because this is the only place where we can invest for a longer run. And you will see, like a large firms that are not interested about, like, a short term coin pump and dumps, but like they are here for a longer perspective and solution and all these things that really would drive the industry forward when it comes to general, like a Bitcoin influence. I believe, until last cycle, Bitcoin played a huge role. But since ETF approval, Bitcoin is having kind of a different ecosystem, because we don't see the money that flows to Bitcoin, it outflows to all altcoins. Because in last cycle, if you remember when the Bitcoin went up, people would cash out from Bitcoin. They will go to altcoins to do more gains from altcoins. They'll go to memes and so on and so on and so on. And it will cascade down. But today, because of the institutional money, it doesn't happen like whatever comes to Bitcoin, it kind of stays in the Bitcoin. And also demand for Bitcoin increased and supply did not increase, therefore we will see the gradual price increase, but it will just like a money changing hands, and really it will be invested down. But I think for this cycle forward, Azure people will be like for a really short term gains. That's why meme coin Rush is happening. Because meme coins is the very easy process. It is pump and dump, and it is also form the investment perspective. Like even retail investors, no one holds a meme token for a longer run while for Bitcoin, for top 10, you will do like $1 cost averaging you're buying. You'll wait for really long meme coins. Usually we see that people buy and hold it for a week, up to three weeks, and they sell and it changes hands. Therefore, it's a different kind of a two narratives like institutions try to do either super long term investments for like an infrastructure, like a huge project, or something super quick. And there is. The unfortunately, there is this, like a missing part, which is that mid class or mid tier startups that would become, let's say, layer three, or they will have some utility, but they will also need money for a long run. And also look from the like, let's say that the biggest problem between like a crypto and like a web2 is in web2, let's say we have Uber that never made money. We have Figma. Figma, they invested maybe $20 billion for eight years, then Adobe was about to buy them. Adobe never bought them. They are now back to their own and cedar investors pouring money into this company, and they some sort of survive one in crypto. We never saw a company with that never made money for 10 years, and anyone ever invested in them and continued investing today with crypto companies, either you do something in a year or six months, or you just disappear completely and no one even thinks about you, but also it's like a very small industry, and even like a builders and founders, they're not as experienced as web2. There's investors as not mature as web2. But I believe there's like, a huge opportunity to invest. And I believe like more and more we will see like a web two or traditional investing investment mindset that will help the industry to kind of a breeze little bit and do longer run. If you today look at all the like a service aid or seed rounds raised all these companies in web2 they will have like two year runway to figure things out. Two years runway in crypto I never saw. All I see is like a six months, eight months, or 12 months, Cliff, people already ready to sell, and if you can't make anything substantial within that time, it means your tokens will be dumped and you are destined to die.

Yeah, so it sounds like what you're saying is that the money in that is coming to Bitcoin when it starts to stagnate, it actually doesn't go out of Bitcoin. It sort of stays in Bitcoin. And then the retail investors are more drawn, drawn to sort of these, these short term meme stocks. And so what, what the middle layer you refer into is basically, you know, these, these sort of layer three utility based companies that that might launch it have perfectly good business plans, but they're not infrastructure players that seem good to institutional investors, and at the same time, they're not, you know, massively gambling type bets that would be interesting to retail investors currently used to meme stock, so they kind of fall in that, in that middle area, and then that those sort of people are not getting investment.

It's not like just not getting investment. It's also about how the entire structure is built and how fast things we expect. For example, if today someone comes to a traditional VC and pitches a new I don't know app idea, let's say I don't know new soup delivery app investments will invest in them and would not expect them to make money in first four or five years. They would also invest enough money that they can keep building that product for two years. It means, as a founder, if you raise sea grant or service for two years now, you have peace of mind. You have enough money to go and think what you want to do while in crypto. Yes, there are more money. Maybe it's easier to raise, maybe, but people want you to not only figure things out, but actually build the product market. It have a community and make sure that after six months, when first comers First lock tokens will be unlocked and people will start selling your tokens, whether it is in decentralized exchange, like a pancake swipe, or any centralized exchange, it's end of your game. Either you are already able to create that demand or utility for your token, or you adjust that people will dump it. The token price will go to zero, and then no one will do anything. You basically will end up with bunch of users tokens. Therefore, it is kind of a very harsh situation for anyone with an idea or any founder.

Now that sort of brings me to a really good question in terms of, what criteria do you guys use when you're listing new digital assets on your platform? How do you assess the sort of market demand and viability from your tokens?

I always say that centralized exchange are kind of a last resort, even though we always try to find that projects that are first time listing, they're still jammed. They can still do like a 10x but to be on a fair side, before listing any project, we first look at your own chain transactions to understand especially if they're already on chain, to understand. How many wallet holders are there? What people are doing with this token in decentralized, different kind of exchanges, or peer to peer exchange networks. To understand, is there even any interest? Then we do look at their community, whether we like or not. Crypto is about the community. Crypto is about the hype. Crypto is about bringing like minded people all together. If people truly believe in your project and they support you on across social media, they're ready to buy, they're ready to invest, they're ready to invite dear friends to buy and invest. Therefore, community is also important for us. Definitely having a product, especially if it is about the utility, if it's meme con there is not a product, then it's more about the community and strengthen of community. But if it is a utility project, we look at the product and how good they are, how many people use them, what is what are they about? And of course, for me personally, what I try always to zoom in and understand is the founders, what kind of people they are, where they come from, are they legit? Are they able to put your face behind that product or project, or did they do anything good before? Did they do anything bad before? Because I believe people who run the show, they're really, really important. Because if you don't have alleged founders behind the project. Probably it won't end well. Therefore, we try to look at founders community, all the transaction they have, how much money they raised, and there are so many, it's around like 75-80 criteria. We look at them. Some of them are more important than the others. To make sure that we list leisure tokens, because as bit get, we list around 650 token tokens in our platform. And we want to bring like a quality project, so our users make sure that they have, still, you know, a chance to find a jam and do that 10x or 20x but also, we don't want our users to have a bad experience at the end of the day, projects that are listed on our platform, they're not our clients. Our clients are the people who come and transact and dear interest is more important to us. Therefore, I believe centralized exchanges are becoming a safer place to invest, especially for the new beginners or people who don't understand the industry or how the narrative is run, and how things can go drastically up and down compared to the, let's say, decentralized exchanges, different swapping platforms and so on.

Yeah, I think you touched on a great point. I mean, the reason people go to centralized exchanges because they assume that those centralized exchanges do a certain degree of due diligence and projects that they list. And one of the, as you pointed out, one of the best sort of things to look at is this team I've had, you know, sort of experience when I've invested in companies where, you know, it looks like a great company. They're building a great product. They've raised a bunch of money from great investors, but, but the particular founder, you know, has, has, has issues with, let's say, with spending. And then you and then you realize, kind of how important it is, especially when you're investing on a like, when on a token basis, as opposed to equity, and you don't have, let's say, you know, a board seat, for example, and so you're massively dependent on the founder to develop, deliver both what he said, within the budget, that he said, and, or he or she, for that matter, and ensuring that they, you know, that they don't, that they don't pull the rug, pull right? So that's, that's a that's a big issue. So just in terms of, in terms of sort of security. Just curious what, what measures you guys feel critical when you wait to ensure the security of digital transactions on crypto exchanges. I mean, do you guys look at, like, wallet intelligence to try to figure out sort of where the source of funds are, stuff like that. Like, how do you how do you guys, you know, ensure that there's the security of these transactions on crypto on your exchange?

Okay, when it comes to all the transaction that happens on Bitget’s platform, ourselves, we have two very big mechanisms, and this is, like, actually, mechanism that, like, I always like, was a big advocate, and I was in love with them. One of them is our proof of reserves every two months or three months. We continuously. We've been doing it for like last two, three years. We establish our proof of reserves report, basically, say, report about all the wallets, all the assets we hold, and we pledge that at any given moment we will have at least 150% of all the funds. It means at any point, all Bitget users decide to withdraw all their funds, we will still have more money left in an exchange, because we all know what happened in FTX case, and we want to assure our users that we are not touching any user fund at any given point at any time. And all these are a. Available on public they can go and see where their assets are. And most of the assets we hold, we have this, like 30 different mechanisms. We have third parties who help us to hold the assets. Basically, if you are even like a high level team member at Bitget, as myself, I don't have access to any of these wallets. Definitely, some of the assets we store in cold wallets, even like bank saves to make sure that assets are there, they're unreachable, and most of them are kind of an offline like they're prone not to be hacked. And why I'm mentioning this because Bitget is the only large exchange that never had a security breach or hacking incident tank Scott today, but we also have a protection fund that consists of only Bitcoin and USDT. We have 6500 Bitcoins, and rest amount is in USDT. The lock amount is at least $300 million but today, because the Bitcoin prices are really, really high, we are reaching almost half a billion dollars. It's around like a $450 million Protection Fund. It means, if anything happens, and user fund are lost because of our mistake, we have enough funds to replace them. But again, as I mentioned, like so far, nothing happened, and I hope it will never happen, because we work with really a great third party partners who can help us to secure all the like from a technology and processing and also, we are trying to educate our users, like this month, actually, that was one of my initiatives. We do like anti scam month, we are trying to educate all our users about different types of the scams and phishings and how they can prevent it. Even on bit gets app every transaction, it is delayed for one minute. It means you can cancel that transaction within that one minute, especially if you are being scammed or in any like a kind of something, if you are not doing. And what we are doing, we are also limiting withdrawals from the new profiles around two hours, because that was the one of the famous techniques when the scammers will force people to open an account and use credit card or different transfer method to purchase a crypto, and then they will take the crypto away. Therefore, like we have so many, also like different ways to educate our audience with notifications and in app warnings to make sure that they're not being victims of the scam. Therefore, again, we are trying to do like this, all 360 measures to make sure that end user is educated they're not losing funds, we are doing all the security measures that we don't cause any harm to the larger audience and to our business. Of course, therefore, like Protection Fund and proof of reserves are two key metrics, and when it comes to Production Fund, bit get has the second largest in the industry and first largest is binance. But binance has around 200 million users, while we have only 25 million, we are almost like eight times smaller than them, but we still have the second largest in the industry, which technically, if we take the protection fund ratio to the user ratio, we are having the largest one?

No, that's amazing. I think it's really important to protect end users, because, like, crypto is one of the number one ways people get scammed. I mean, it used to be cash, because cash is unfazable. And then after crypto became, you know, more accessible to people, you know, a lot of scams end up the payment method ends up being crypto, and then you sort of have a bad name. Like, crypto gets a bad name because people think, Oh, well, this is a quote, unquote crypto scam. And in fact, it would have been a cash scam. If it was, you know, if it was 20 years ago, it would have just been a cash scam. I mean, the scam would have still happened. So that's super important to, like, sort of educate users and let them know kind of how best to use the platform and to ensure that they're not, you know, being scammed in real time. And you mentioned sort of proof of reserves. That's, if there's one thing I think that FTX, the whole FTX debacle, one thing that good. It's good that came out of it. It's, you know, a lot of exchanges started publishing this information. And I'm actually separate, like, I'm actually really, supposedly surprised that you guys have so much more. You know, 150% is significantly more than then, then, then, then the user deposits. So that's, that's pretty that's pretty impressive. So just out of curiosity, when you guys are going global and, you know, working on new markets, what are sort of approaches that you use it. I find that you find effective in terms of expanding to different markets. Do you find that the regulatory challenges are extensive? I know that when I was heading an exchange in India, I found that the regular the regulatory challenges was so enormous. Said it was just too much of a headache, at least for me personally. But I'm just curious what your thoughts are.

Honestly, when I took over as COO last year, my one of the three key pills I wanted to address is compliance. Today, Bitget compliance team is around, like, 100 team members when I took over was like, I don't know, 15, and every month, we are hiring another 10,12, because I always say compliance is not only like a kind of a tick box matter, it is a very complicated matter where you need to have enough team members. And I will give an example, for example, as a Bitget, we operate in almost virtually in every country, let's say 190 countries. And if we had at least two or three team members, it makes almost like a 600 people we need to hire, educate and manage. And now tell me how many crypto native lawyers and people in the field of legislation we have and how many exchanges are there? How many crypto companies are there? Therefore, I think all that legislative pressure is very unfair to such a young education, young industry that lacks education. I don't know any law faculty in the world that does crypto education and so on. Therefore, one of the biggest problems that legislators do, they just kind of a copy paste legislation from each other without actually thinking how they're gonna work. And last year, I've met around like a 10-15, head heads of central banks, heads of or like delegations at different legislative bodies and parliament. And that was always my question, do you guys have enough manpower as a government who makes a legislation to process the applications for licensing? Do you have enough let's say judges and enough court people, baristas and so on, to do the ruling on that kind of cases, because two more people gonna take different cases to the court. And do we have enough education? Therefore, I think education is more important than just having a license a compliance matter. Therefore, what we did, we already introduced a program called blockchain for youth, where we partner with almost all leading universities globally, and we add more and more universities to this list, where we pledge to invest at least 10 million to educate young people, whether they are interested in legislation, entrepreneurship, I don't know, becoming an crypto accountant, and we want to educate young, next generation of the young professionals on a crypto and knowledge that they know what you know, how to come to this industry and how to perform, and what kind of value they can add. But again, I believe, especially in some regions, we see that legislation becomes a roadblock and innovation killers, not only for exchanges, for like entire crypto ecosystem, but on the other end, we see places like a Hong Kong or Middle East where it is very embracing and open arms kind of a policy. Therefore, I hope more and more places would have this like a open arms policy, where they would motivate the industry at the end of the day. First of all, crypto is a very small industry. Even though it is about finance, it's about money. Like Blackrock can buy all the crypto industry over several times, and entire crypto ecosystem is as valuable as one or two Fortune 500 company. Therefore, I think there's nothing to be afraid in terms of industry, and there should be more liberation that industry can innovate and build itself. Because if today we start doing so much blogs and licensing all this like a small startups, they won't be able to survive.

Yeah. I mean, you're right. It's got a much it seems like it has a much harder burden to fulfill, as in crypto, as an industry, when it comes to regulation, it's always a sort of balance to maintain. On one end, you want to protect investors, but you don't want to stifle innovation in, you know, very nascent industry. So to that end, I'm curious what you think you make of the future landscape of crypto exchange I mean, what do you see on the on the horizon for the crypto exchange industry? Specifically, I know that you know when centralized exchanges were the only option, until decentralized exchanges came about, and then, now, you know, they both have their own use case, as in, you know one is there if you, if you don't care about a due diligence and you just want to throw your money into a DEX, you can do that. But then, if you want a company that you want a company that's done some research and due diligence has done some due diligence on the project that you're investing, then you go into centralized exchange. Much. I'm just curious if you see, if you see the space evolving in the future…

Honestly, more than evolution, I see it as a user journey. In my opinion, almost everyone first comes to the industry through centralized exchanges, because it's easy to log in. You don't need to remember, I don't know keywords. You don't know what wallet, what chain, it is very easy. You register with your email and mobile number the same way you register to social media, you set up and you if something goes wrong, if you are, let's say, try to send a USDT on ERC to TRC, it will just not let you until that wallet. Oh, this is not correct, and so on. And even if something goes wrong, there's a 24 customers, 24/7 customer service. You can call, you can get guidance, you can get educated. It's like a full service, kind of a traditional start to this non traditional industry. Therefore, centralized exchanges play a great role to educate and to explain people what's happening. Next step, once you are in a centralized exchange, you already have your bitcoins, you become from the no coiner to a crypto head. Now, of course, you become interested. You are okay. What's next? Where I can invest? What can I do? Oh, I heard about this token, but it's not available in this exchange. Let me go to that exchange, that mixture, where it is. Shall I go to decentralized wallet? Then probably you'll go and get, I don't know, bit gets wallet, I don't know. Maybe binance is wallet, trust wallet, or any of these wallets that are kind of already well known in between that, you know, exchange and a gateway to the decentralized world, but still some sort of interesting but at that point you have your own risk. You know what you're getting into. You need to, I don't know, write keywords on a paper. Your secret faces. You know you should understand what chain words and so on. And once you kind of pass by that level, then you get super curious. You just don't want to, like, buy things on USDT, you want to do swaps, and you end up in random DEXs, doing different stuff. And I believe every journey has its meaning, and it's very important. For example, if a project we see that's super great on that Texas. It means they will also have enough interest on the centralized exchanges, and it is very important to have that traction in there, like the early adopters, people who really want to early invest and early discover and so on and so forth. Therefore, I believe, like it's kind of a user evolution journey. Therefore centralized exchanges will always be here. And let's not forget, centralized exchanges are not only for the retail users, but there's also, like a huge application for institutions, for corporations, for B2B's. And imagine tomorrow you'll be going to arrest them and paying with crypto, and tomorrow you go into hotel paying with crypto. Tomorrow you're gonna go to buy an apartment with crypto. And it's not like a tomorrow, actually, today, for example, in Dubai, you can go to a restaurant and pay your bill with crypto. And all these big institutions, they because of the legal procedures, because of the legal limits, they wouldn't be able to go to the decks to trade, they have to come to centralized exchange to do that transaction and to convert back to fiat or to, I don't exchange their Ethereum to USDT or USDT to Ethereum and so on and so forth, which will not be able to happen In decentralized places without, I don't know accounting without customer care and so on. Therefore, I believe, or like more, the industry will evolve. I don't, I'm not one of these people, even though I'm like a very DJ in the heart, I don't think that. You know, crypto exchange is gonna become very obsolete at some point in near future, or everything will be super, super decentralized. Unfortunately, it will not. And both worlds have their own place to stay. It is the same. For example, if any of you recently traveled to Argentina or turkey, or any of these countries where you don't have access to foreign exchange rate, or they have two exchange rate, an official one at the bank and then one at the streets and both kind of survive at the same time, because this is kind of a demand and supply market. Therefore, I believe, like to summarize all everything I told I believe centralized exchange has an important role, especially when we get towards mass adoption and more and more businesses will come on board.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's super important. I know that binance, Philippines recently closed down, and we have team members in the Philippines who we who we used to send payments to, and we have to essentially find alternate ways to do that. So it's really important for centralized exchanges. By that sort of off ramping for a lot of, a lot of individuals, basically. But we have one audience question that's regarding narratives. So what do you what would you say is sort of the prevailing narrative over the next, you know, over this bull run? I know, I've heard it said a lot about, you know, AI, but I'm curious, what do you think about, you know, socialFi. I know that. You know, Twitter has been a lot of people are unhappy with Twitter. A lot of people unhappy with YouTube, counseling, band and so on, without there being a lot of recourse. And do you think that there is sort of room for web3 to sort of tackle socialFi, and in a way, that's useful, or where do you sort of think there's a prevailing narrative, you know, the next, this bull run, rather when it comes this bull run narrative.

definitely, meme coins are leading. Second important is decentralized infrastructure, deep in projects, I saw more and more deep ins coming and actually adding value. And they have a huge utility. SocialFi been here in a last Bull Run and this bull run Honestly, my personal opinion, especially after we saw what a meta did with threads, they could onboard 100 million people in a week. But how many are using thread today? Almost no one. Therefore I believe, also, we saw clubhouses Royce and death during the pandemic. Therefore I believe social phi can only become the next big thing, if, instead of trying to move all people from Twitter or Facebook to another platform, how to bring crypto to these people, and I think a greatest example was how tone and telegram work together, and telegram already had like 700 million users, and just by adding that crypto feature, it changes the narrative. It changes the adoption. Therefore, I believe next social five boom can only happen if we find a way to build something on an existing user journey or existing audience. And again, another Yes. Tell me, Jason,

hello, please go ahead, yeah,

and that was my point regarding that narrative. Therefore, looking at deep in and looking at meme tokens are important. I think that's like a two leading narratives of this pool, one, and lastly, you mentioned AI, I believe, like, especially like, since, like, a yesterday or day before, when, like, we saw iOS 18 updates from the apple and how they integrated AI. They killed, almost, like, hundreds of apps that were doing little bit AI thing here and there in their app store. They just took all of them and implemented easily and natively. Therefore, I believe AI is a really, really important tool, but I don't believe that AI narrative will be longer for crypto projects to benefit from them. AI here is here to stay, but it I'm afraid, to not benefit in terms of the projects or token or as a narrative anymore? Yes, briefly, there was a lot of money. But it is not about an AI is very, very expensive to do anything. If today you just want to do like a simple AI module, you'll require at least, like a 200 $300 million while I haven't seen that kind of a market capping or investment to any crypto project yet. Therefore, I believe AI is in March and social file only if you are able to build something on the existing social media platforms.

Yeah. So I think you're right when it comes to AI, for sure. Because, you know, just trying to compete with some of these other models you need, super computers, vast amount of computing. It just be prohibitively expensive. But, yeah, I mean, and as far as social fire is concerned, you know, I think that's a good point in terms of there would have to be some sort of bridge between existing social media networks, where these conversations are happening, and sort of wherever they're going, and sort of starting trying to have, like a disconnected thing, like clubhouse or big cloud, for example, like those things probably not going to work. We are actually towards the end of the show. So we have a sort of one last question, and that's sort of, what is your personal philosophy? So what, what sort of drives you and keeps you going? And, you know, what's, what's the thing that really motivates you. And you know, in dark days of crypto, for example,

in dark days of crypto, honestly, like I love money, and in my culture, we say when you count money, some sticks in your hands. And I really believe that it is very important to have that financial gain. But the core reason that brought me here, and like I'm keen about crypto, at some point, I was attending World Economic Forum at Davos, and I, first time, got to know that almost quarter of the world's able population are left behind financial. System. They don't have bank accounts. They're unbanked. They have no access whatsoever, and around seven to 870, to 80% of them are women. Therefore, I the biggest driver for me is not about doing next 10x, 20x it's not about crazy technology. For me, it is about how we can bring and give access to more and more people to financial system that they can gain their financial independence. They can have their own wallets. They can hold their own holdings. They can do it safely, whether they are in a very remote village in Himalayas or someone is a housewife in the Middle East, everyone, I believe should have an access, and it shouldn't be a privilege, but should be a human right to be able to participate in the economy freely and themselves and have that opportunities.

Well, that's really well said. Thank you so much for your time. I mean, it's just been an amazing, amazing discussion. I really, really enjoyed it. And I guess that brings us to the end of the show. We have a few announcements. AdLunam co-founder, Nadja Bester and I both gonna be at the DeGameFi web3 conference in Tbilisi, Georgia on the 15th and 16th of June 2024. other co-founder and CTO Lawrence Hutson, will be at the Nordic blockchain Conference in Copenhagen in Denmark on the 19th and 20th of June. Thank you so much for attending. Everybody, all the listeners, and most especially you, Vugar, it's been just amazing chatting with you. It's super fun, and I hope to speak with you again sometime soon.

Thanks for having me, and thanks for organizing this. I'm really excited for everyone and see you around in different conferences.

Speak soon. Thank you. Bye, bye, bye,