Gracy Chen on Social Trading, Crypto Exchanges and Bitget | Ep. 123

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Gracy Chen, Managing Director of Bitget, talks about partnering with Lionel Messi, the competitive landscape in crypto exchange and social trading. 

About Gracy Chen

Gracy Chen is the Managing Director of Bitget and oversees the growth and expansion of global markets, strategy, execution, business, and corporate development of Bitget. She started her journey to crypto world since 2014 and has been an investor since the early days of BitKeep, Asia’s leading decentralised wallet.

Before joining Bitget, Gracy held executive roles at XRSPACE, a VR technology company. During her time there, Gracy oversaw and led the marketing and business development functions, as well as government and public relations in the region. Formerly an anchor and producer at Phoenix TV’s technology and finance channel, one of the largest media conglomerates in China, Chen has reported on financial news and events extensively, including the World Economic Forum. During her time at Phoenix, she interviewed tech leaders, including Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired. Gracy was named a Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum in 2015. A graduate of the National University of Singapore, Chen will also be pursuing an MBA degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Gracy Chen gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com. 

Highlights Of The Interview

• Synergies between crypto and football – Partnering with Lionel Messi and Juventus
• How to win in the competitive landscape in crypto exchange
• Crypto winters – how to navigate bear markets
• Social trading – the phenomenon of one-click copy trading the it’s social impact 
• Current market trends from crypto trading

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab 
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We’re buzzin as always, and we have Gracy Chen on the show today she’s absolutely tearing it up her and the team at Bitget have made some crazy moves. Let’s get into the intro. Gracy is the Managing Director of Bitget and oversees the growth and expansion of global markets strategy execution, business and corporate development of Bitget. She started her journey to crypto in 2014 and has been investor in the early days of BitKeep. Asia’s leading decentralized wallet. Before joining Bitget, Gracy held executive roles at XRSPACE, a VR tech company. During her time there she oversaw and led pretty much everything marketing and business dev related and she’s also an anchor and producer at Phoenix TV’s technology and finance channel has a little bit of TV experience as well. Gracy was also named a Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum in 2015, and is a graduate of the National University of Singapore. She’s also pursuing an MBA degree at MIT. Wow, what a intro. Without further ado I’m very pleased to have Gracy Chen on the show. Gracy, welcome.

Gracy Chen
Hi, Matt. Glad to be here.

Matt Zahab 
Fired up to have you on that is quite the bio. I love how you got a bunch of experience and I’m in a bunch of weird, you know, unique avenues the crypto and TV anchored. It’s pretty rare nowadays.

Gracy Chen 
It is. Actually I studied applied mathematics back in Singapore. And then I had a lot of interest in like TV or doing marketing PR things. So though I started something very different, just like straight went to the TV station or to the industry. Right after my graduation. I only did that for one year had a lot of fun. But I think I’m more in the manager or the technology industry rather than media. I mean, I love media. It’s just like, I love tech more.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Let’s get into Bitget. You and the team have made some crazy moves here as a sports fan. Let’s talk about the news that actually came out today. We’re recording on Friday, October 21. This episode will air in three days on Monday, the 24th. You and the team security partnership. Drumroll please. With the one and only Lionel Messi the GOAT- the greatest of all time. 700 or 800 Talk something crazy like that seven battle awards. And this kicks off perfectly crazy partnership with you and Messi and wow, what a treat congrats to you and the team. What was the purpose behind this? Walk me through some stories? How hard was it to get the big dog himself?

Gracy Chen 
Oh, well, obviously Messi is one of the most popular and widely recognized sports stars. And like you’re introduced, He is the recipient of so many, like six European gold issues. And then this year, he will join the Argentinian national team as the as the captain for his Fifth World Cup. And I read somewhere that he actually said this very likely could be his last workup. So we’re like super excited about being able to partner with him. So it’s been a long process like a few months. We’ve talked to himself to his company or his agency and, and everyone involved to cook this whole sponsorship. And the reason that we want to get into these sports sponsorship as well as some e-sporting, sponsorship and partnership is that we do think that there are a lot of similarities in terms of the users. And we want to broaden our influence not only influence of Bitget but also influence of crypto industry as a whole so that we can reach out to this bigger audience and get them on board or at least like get them be aware that there is such an interesting asset class cryptocurrency and hopefully they can be interested in bigger and become more user whatever. But we don’t aim for just the growth or user wait, we just want to we really want to like broaden our user space. Broaden the awareness and get more people interested in the space. 

Matt Zahab 
Crazy just building on the football partnership point, it seems that a lot of exchanges and crypto companies as a whole are really keen on partnering with football organizations, whether it’s the league itself, or blue chip and very famous teams, it appears that it really gives a lot of credibility to exchanges like yourselves or just crypto companies as a whole. I read your article on NFTmag.io. And you spoke about the synergy between crypto and football and why it works so well. And the importance of crypto organizations partnering with football leagues and teams to really give that credibility. Can you sort of go more into detail on this point? And just talk a little bit more about why you guys partnered with Juventus? And why you’re so keen on partnering with the football industry?

Gracy Chen 
That’s a great question. I think if we look at everything from the sports industry, like no matter the football clubs, or like famous football players, they do enjoy a very large base of fans and followers, which would help crypto exchanges like us to build up a better brand image and gain like method of awareness. And then you switch the shoes and where the industry or the crypto exchanges hear that you probably know that at the same time, these corporations is actually a very good way win situation. And indeed, We are a big way in this very trendy thing. Crypto blockchain is a big trend embraced by many industries, and a lot of use cases, such as NFT, such as, like some special events held in Metaverse or are very interesting, technology based or technology powered events that is happening in the space. And I think a lot of fans will be are interested in knowing them or participating some of them as well. Yeah, so that’s why we have so many initiatives and sponsorship or partnership with them. And besides this, like more commercial way of doing looking at them. I think there’s another element that we as a company are very interested which is the CSR activation. So for example, earlier this year in I think it’s in August, late, late July, early August when I was in Los Angeles and we had a CSR activation with Juventus stars moist skin and Schinsky during their Juventus summer tour, and that’s where we had the football players to participate in the charity led basketball game. And we donated like about I think 9000 If I remember correctly, to a LA based nonprofit organization with a mission to increase girls interest and success in technology. And I myself coming from a math and technology background while being in this a more male dominated industry. And we’re obviously interested in the in the topic as well. But basically are all these like initiatives that we did with the footballers, or with the football clubs, help branding our brand to flourish and also help them to get into the space into the crypto space.

Matt Zahab 
I love that it truly is such an important part. Let’s keep buzzing on sort of the crypto exchange topic. You guys have had some absolutely bananas growth over the last year and couple years. A crazy stat that I read was that you guys actually surpassed FTX’s derivatives trading volume in Q1 2022, which is an absolutely huge milestone. Congrats on that.

Gracy Chen
Thank you.

Matt Zahab
How do you compete in such a competitive landscape? Crypto exchanges, literally our money printers, it is an incredible business to be in. It is incredibly difficult to be in. There is so much competition, you have behemoth like FTX, Coinbase, Binance, and then of course a bunch of the Asian-based exchanges that dominate in their own right. How do you find market share? How do you attack demographics? How do you compete in such a competitive landscape?

Gracy Chen 
Oh, well, I think exchanges offer more or less similar products and services, but each exchange has their own strengths. Well for us at Bitget we are very interested in this topic, which is social trading is probably one of our most important differentiation factor from other exchanges. So we started doing social trading and but before diving in, then just give you a brief introduction of what is social trading. So social trading is this good combination of social and trading where people can observe Have and observe and may make others action. And for example, copy trading, which we pretty much started very early as early as 2020. And there are a lot of other exchanges, following Bitget did the same thing. But we are also the largest crypto trading platform by the trading volume right now. So that’s something we started and we have been talking about and growing in terms of product and user space. So for, for crypto copy trading, which is we could one click Copy trade. That’s our flagship product. It has amazed over 55,000 Professional traders with approximately 1.1 million followers. And indeed, all these initiatives put us set us apart from some of our competitors. But I think there are something more important about the platform other than some product initiatives or product innovation. So we put a lot of efforts in thinking about what our users want. So right now, we have actually, they just came out within the past few…