As the crypto space matures and traditional institutions show growing interest in digital assets, Bitget is moving fast to meet that demand.
Speaking with TheStreet Roundtable’s Malak Albaw and Mehab Qureshi, Bitget CEO Gracy Chen laid out the exchange’s 2025 roadmap — and it’s heavily focused on institutions.
“Institutional and the VIP clients is a big sector that we're developing this year,” Chen said. “We're also doing some new product offering for this group of people… unified trading account and more borrow lending credit line for institutional clients.”
Bitcoin ETFs recorded a $117 million net inflow on Thursday, continuing their strong momentum with no outflows reported, per data from Farside Investors. BlackRock’s IBIT led with $69 million, followed by Fidelity’s FBTC and ARK’s ARKB. Total assets across spot bitcoin ETFs have now climbed to $118.66 billion.
Chen explained Bitget is building custom dashboards and tailored services to help institutions better manage holdings. Another major focus is cross-border payments and efficiency. “If today I want to transfer some money from my US account to my Hong Kong account, it takes me about three, four days… sometimes longer,” Chen said. “About 5% of the fees can be wasted along the way.”
Chen believes institutions are beginning to see the benefits of crypto trading beyond ETFs. “There are some institutions already, although not from the US… they said they use ETF previously, but there are also higher fees… and they are interested in buying and selling or trading, not just Bitcoin but some altcoins.”
Trust-building has also been a top priority for Bitget. “We have a $650 million protection fund. It's called Bitget Protection Fund,” Chen noted. “It's the second largest protection fund in our industry.”
On the compliance side, Chen said regulation is far more stringent for institutional accounts. “We call it KYC and KYB — Know Your Customer and Know Your Business… KYB is a much longer and tedious process than KYC,” she said, explaining that onboarding institutional clients often involves a deep look into company structure, funding sources, and beneficiaries.
“For example, they have US customers or US beneficiary owner… it’s probably a company we can’t onboard,” she said. “So it's very tedious work that involves both KYC and KYB.”
Founded in 2018, Bitget is a Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange known for its strong focus on derivatives and copy trading services. The platform quickly gained popularity among retail traders by offering advanced trading tools and a user-friendly interface. Today, Bitget serves over 100 million users.