Bit.com and Toya Zhang - Building in a Bear Market

Toya Zhang hails from a traditional communications background in Finance, but in 2015, part of her job involved investigating Bitcoin for a client. She went down the rabbit hole and never looked back.

“The whole industry is evolving – from ICOs, IDOs to Web3 and NFTs – I am really fascinated by the evolution, and now as CMO at Bit.com, a cryptocurrency exchange specializing in options trading, I am evolving with everyone else.”

Zhang joined Bit.com in January 2022 and is very committed and connected to the growth of the exchange. Bit.com was founded in 2020 as a spinoff from Matrixport, a crypto bank established in 2019. Matrixport was valued at $1 billion in 2021, while Bit.com is ranked in the top 3 crypto options exchanges in terms of trading volume.

Bit.com is registered in Seychelles with offices in Singapore and Hong Kong.

“Bit.com has a solid team. They began at the hard end, if you will – by launching a sophisticated crypto options exchange. It took eight months to go live, but it propelled them into the top of the space.”

Two years on, Bit.com has fleshed out its offering from just options trading to adding futures, perpetual futures, spot markets, and several savings products.

“We are consolidating this growth and looking to expand further in Europe. Beginning life as we did an options exchange, we also have a lot of institutional traders, many of which are registered with offshore companies.”

It is evident from our conversation that Zhang aligns her personal values with that of Bit.com and the care it extends to its customers – from building solid products to ensuring client money is genuinely theirs. And the good news is that Bit.com is hiring despite this bear market. When asked why now, the answer is uncomplicated.

“We weren’t aggressive until we were ready. We began with options, futures, and the spot market. Today we have about 50 tokens listed and added yield products. But they are only added once everything was fully bedded in and our UI was fine.”

Not that Zhang likes the bear market, but as she says, it’s possible to breathe and take time to think in a bear market.

“It’s exciting to have this time to consider what might be coming down the track next. Web 3 – however it is defined – is the next big thing, along with GameFi and the metaverse. We are all building now.

“As an exchange, we are at the heart of the cryptocurrency movement. We are deeply rooted in this space, the engine of the industry, if you will. We need to keep on offering the best services, provide liquidity, and continue to manage risk.

“It’ll take time, but bear markets provide great building opportunities. I’d say within five years; these innovations will be here.”

And where does Bit.com fit into all this?

“We are simply a centralized service provider on top of the decentralized digital world.”