When Ben Zhou founded Bybit in 2018, he first had to convince his team that Bitcoin was not a scam.
Eight years later, digital assets are now commonplace. Governments and traditional financial institutions are turning to cryptocurrencies, perhaps most dramatically demonstrated by the United States’ passage of the GENIUS Act last year.
“The traditional world is embracing crypto,” said Zhou, who runs the world’s second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume. Fortune. “If they don’t adopt it, they will become obsolete, especially with crypto wallet adoption growing 20-30% every year.”
Currencies like stablecoins are increasingly regulated and can now be used for things like remittances and payments, Zhou adds. In 2025, over $18 trillion in transactions settled in stablecoinseclipsing the total transactions on traditional payment platforms like Visa And MasterCardaccording to cryptography research firm Delphi Digital.
Cryptocurrency transactions are “faster and cheaper” than traditional bank transfers, says Zhou. “If you rely on existing infrastructure and transfer via SWIFT, it’s just too slow. »
Investment banks like Goldman Sachs are working to integrate tokenized assets into their trading and advisory operations, while payment providers like Visa and Mastercard are partnering with crypto exchanges like Bybit to issue payment cards that allow users to spend their crypto holdings as fiat currency in real time.
Crypto is going to be the “main driving force” of traditional financial instruments like stocks and credit default swaps over the next decade, says Zhou. “The accessibility, connectivity and unification is really the beauty of this technology.”
Creation of Bybit
Before entering the crypto industry, Zhou worked as a Forex trader at financial broker XM, where he spent seven years as general manager for China. At the time, crypto was still niche. Many investors saw it as a “pump and dump” scam, he recalls.
Zhou became interested in crypto early on, but found that at the time, platforms were often overloaded every time Bitcoin moved. He launched Bybit in Shanghai, recruiting a team of about 15 software engineers from major Chinese tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba.
After China banned cryptocurrency mining and trading in 2021, Zhou moved his team to Singapore; a year later, he moved again to Dubai, attracted by the UAE’s crypto-friendly regulations, including no tax on crypto income or capital gains and a clear regulatory framework for digital assets.
Today, Bybit operates globally in over 180 countries, although the platform does not offer services in several others, including the United States, Canada, China and Singapore.
Yet security challenges remain
Despite the financial industry’s general optimism towards cryptocurrencies, there remain challenges to ensuring secure transactions.
On February 21, 2025, North Korean hackers stole $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum from Bybit in the biggest crypto theft in history. The hack scared away Bybit customers, leading to “mass withdrawals,” Zhou said at the time.
The exchange launched an industry first “Recovery Bonus Program“, which called on the global cybersecurity community to help trace and recover the stolen currency, offering 10% of the stolen funds as a reward. Bybit was not able to recover the stolen funds, but it was able to obtain financing effectively replenish your reserves.
Zhou says that since the hack, Bybit has strengthened its security measures, including using hardware security modules (HSMs), tamper-proof physical devices that securely generate, store and manage cryptographic keys. “Unless there is a physical break-in, no one will be able to touch the tokens,” says Zhou.
Nevertheless, the Bybit CEO admits that the rapid pace of cryptocurrency transactions means it is difficult to prevent scams and thefts from occurring. “If you lose money or get scammed and you’re a bank customer, you can call the bank and they can track it down,” he explains. It’s still possible to trace stolen funds in crypto, but “everything moves so fast that by the time you get there, the money is already gone.”
However, he remains optimistic about the future of security in the crypto industry. “Crypto infrastructure and technology is only growing in abundance, and many more cybersecurity companies are joining the space.”
More and more countries have implemented regulatory frameworks for crypto companies like Bybit. For example, the EU rolled out the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) license at the end of 2024, which allows certified crypto providers to operate legally across the continent, instead of requiring companies to apply for separate licenses from each country.
Zhou believes that increased regulation will pave the way for mainstream crypto adoption. It is focusing on European markets this year, as well as developing markets like Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey and India, where demand for crypto is booming due to weak local currencies.
