Five crypto industry participants were asked to revisit the same question: if they could go back to 2018, what would they change, and what do eight more years of market cycles say about the choices they made then?
In a feature published by TechFlowPost, Bitget’s eighth anniversary serves as the organizing thread. The report speaks with five people who lived through the industry from different vantage points and uses their stories to trace a broader shift in centralized exchanges, institutional adoption, user expectations, content credibility, and platform strategy.
In the piece, 2018 is treated as a hinge year. The ICO boom had faded and the market fell into a deep freeze. At the same time, crypto was beginning to move onto institutional radar, DeFi’s later expansion was taking shape, and the exchange arena was no longer defined only by Binance, Huobi, and OKEx. Later entrants, including Bybit and Bitget, were starting to carve out space.
Hangzong: could an exchange born in a bear market survive long enough to see spring?
Looking back at 2018, Hangzong said the line he most wants to send to his earlier self is simple: buy more, then hold.
He was an early seed user of Bitget. At the time, he was still a small-scale retail participant, and his memory of 2018 is less about fear than about a kind of novelty that he says is hard to reproduce today. In his view, few industries produced new technologies and new projects as continuously as crypto did.
That curiosity made him notice early signs of divergence in the CEX sector. Huobi was the first centralized exchange he used, but the similarity across large platforms left him cold, so he became more interested in newer entrants and especially in product innovation.
At that stage, though, watching new platforms was still just an experiment. In a bear market, nobody knew whether an exchange launched in that environment could last until the next upcycle.
The turning point, in his account, came when Bitget launched copy trading. He said most CEX platforms at the time were still centered on spot and perpetual contracts, with very little serious experimentation in product design. Copy trading stood out because it allowed new users to follow professional traders with one click. For him, that was a dividing line. Bitget stopped being just one more newcomer and became a platform worth following over time.
After multiple cycles, his framework for judging exchanges changed as well. In 2018, when everything still felt early, he thinks exchanges competed first on product innovation. By 2026, in a market where every platform is pushing to differentiate, the battleground has shifted to user service.
His point is direct: product innovation can bring a user in for the first time, but service is what persuades them to stay. That, he said, is one reason he is still with Bitget today.
Seen from this angle, the big reshuffle that began in 2018 almost feels inevitable to him. Bear markets keep eliminating short-term speculators, while builders become easier to recognize. For exchanges, surviving eight years is itself evidence of trust. Many names disappeared in the meantime. The ones still standing have to keep giving users a reason to remember them.
Dylan: when he first deposited funds, safety came before everything else
Asked what he would tell his 2018 self, Dylan’s answer has barely changed by 2026: keep doing your own research, manage risk, manage emotion, and as long as you still have capital left, you still have a way to survive in crypto.
Dylan entered the space in 2017 and became a VIP user across several major CEX platforms. That gave him a broad comparative view. In his reading, the current push by exchanges to build out VIP programs is fundamentally a fight for retention. For ordinary traders, a platform may be no more than a trading venue. For VIP users, it functions more like a long-term financial partner.
He breaks the standards for that partner into three layers: safety, trading quality, and service experience.
Safety comes first. After FTX, he said, Merkle trees, proof of reserves, and fund transparency are no longer bonuses. They are baseline requirements. He also places weight on how an exchange responds when unexpected events hit.
The second layer is trading itself: liquidity, depth, breadth of listed instruments, and execution speed. For larger pools of capital, those basics determine whether funds can move efficiently at all.
The third is experience. That includes execution speed, trading tools, and smooth day-to-day operation. In his view, these details shape comfort in daily use and reveal the strength of a product’s underlying design.
Beyond hard metrics, Dylan also watches what he called softer capabilities. Some platforms, he said, focus almost entirely on top-tier whales while offering rough, generic service to lower-level VIP clients. He values more refined account management, and that was one reason he became a Bitget VIP user.
He said his first deposit on Bitget was only a small test. Over time, trust built gradually as he saw secure fund storage, product coverage that matched his needs, and high asset management efficiency, along with a growing set of functions including token launches, wealth management, dual-currency products, and U.S. equities.
What left the strongest impression, though, was the service setup. According to Dylan, Bitget assigns a dedicated account manager to every VIP client. When issues come up, responses arrive quickly. If there is an event or even branded merchandise, users hear about it right away. He described that as a feeling of being genuinely remembered.
He turned that trust into a concrete figure: at the peak, he had roughly half of his funds parked on Bitget.
As for what he wants next from VIP systems, he is still focused on service that shows attention rather than just fee discounts. He gave one example: if a large client holds a lot of U, the platform could prioritize suitable wealth products for that user. For him, those are the touches that make a client feel the platform actually understands them.
Jessie: institutions choose platforms by safety, standardization, and capacity
Jessie, who comes from an institutional background, gave her 2018 self a restrained answer: do not try to pick the perfect entry timing or the bottom.
Her own stereotype about crypto changed in 2019. Before that, she said, she saw the sector in a very blunt way: a place associated with overnight riches. Once she became a strategy researcher at a quantitative institution, she quickly found that this picture missed the point. For quant firms, strategy stability matters more.
In her telling, institutions started changing their posture toward crypto in 2020. She said that after firms including Grayscale obtained compliant licenses and began trying to issue ETFs, the route for traditional investors to enter crypto widened materially.
Once capital is willing to come in, the next question is where it should go. For Jessie, that is a basic infrastructure decision. She draws a sharp contrast between institutions and retail traders: retail money can be pulled in quickly by hot narratives and leave just as quickly, while institutions usually spend more time on diligence and, once connected successfully, do not exit easily. Slow in, slow out.
She compresses institutional due diligence into three questions:
- Are funds sufficiently safe?
- Can returns and strategies be standardized and scaled?
- Can the platform carry enough capital volume?
Under that framework, she said, CEX platforms are often the first choice for institutions.
The team’s first interaction with Bitget, however, did not begin with conviction. It began with a broad screening exercise and a “let’s take a look first” mindset. Jessie recalled that her team had just completed an upgrade to its trading system and wanted to expand strategy capacity by adding more exchanges, so every platform in CoinMarketCap’s top 10 went onto the list.
As live capital testing began, Bitget started to stand out. She said the platform offered attractive trading opportunities and return potential, but what mattered just as much was that during sharp market swings, system stability and fund security held up well. When risk-control incidents appeared, Bitget also responded quickly and offered fallback options.
She used an unusual word for that working relationship: fresh. More specifically, she meant no airs, no delays, no buck-passing.
Jessie shared one example. Market attention, she said, has shifted toward TradFi, RWA, and U.S. equities, and nearly every platform now promotes the idea of “one entry point for global trading.” Richer asset menus often create back-end disorder, which she sees as a common platform problem. After her team sent feedback, Bitget completed an adjustment within two weeks.
To her, there is a real difference between surface-level construction and back-end implementation in this “one entry point” idea. Many exchanges build an all-in-one front end for users. Institutions care more about the “one system” underneath, because that determines whether strategies can run in a standardized, stable, and accurate way. She said Bitget TradFi not only supports fast execution, but also provides more standardized information formats and fields through its back-end API feed, which makes the setup much clearer for institutional users.
Even so, Jessie said Bitget is not yet the perfect answer in her eyes. The next important step, she argued, is a higher degree of unified and standardized back-end implementation between RWA and crypto, and Bitget is already pushing optimization in that direction.
Link: speaking up for a smaller platform only makes sense if it is worth staking your reputation on it
Link sold 2,000 ETH and 90 BTC in 2018 to buy a home. When he looks back at that version of himself, he does not frame it as regret. Instead, he asks why he was selling while others were rushing in, and whether his own understanding was lagging behind.
Many people know him from an article that drew more than 1 million views. In that piece, using a Patek Philippe watch as an anchor, he described a ten-year journey of financial mobility through crypto.
Yet he remains cautious about influence and says he would rather be called a blogger than a KOL.
As an early participant, he understands why the KOL label became controversial. In the rougher days of 2018, regulation and credibility systems were both weak, while traffic and wealth were tied together more openly. In that setting, he said, some figures did help stigmatize the role.
But there was another camp too, one that believed influence should not be used to extract value but to carry responsibility. For Link, that bottom line marks the real difference between a KOL and a blogger. One operates around traffic; the other tries to create useful content.
That is why his first reaction to a partnership is always the same question: is this worth putting my reputation behind?
Over time, he developed a basic screening method:
- Does the team take the work seriously, and has the product been polished enough to stand testing?
- Does the platform have a positive brand temperament?
- Is the project still moving with the times instead of living off old achievements?
Using those standards, he said he did not hesitate much when Bitget first sent merchandise and an interview invitation, even though the platform was not that large at the time and was also dealing with some public-opinion pressure.
His reason was plain. Some people may say Bitget likes to create buzz, he said, but few could deny the effort it put into being seen. That effort showed up not only in marketing, but in the product itself. When the industry began turning toward U.S. equities, Bitget moved very quickly to build related functions, which he considered difficult.
He also stressed that there was no financial tie behind his own content at the time. He said he had mocked Bitget before, praised it when it did well, and offered suggestions when it did not. To him, that was normal. He was only sharing content he thought deserved to be shared.
Link added one broader observation: Chinese participants have an unusually strong voice in the CEX sector. He went as far as saying that in global finance, this may be the only area where Chinese players hold a leading position. Each exchange, in his view, has its own strengths and reason to exist.
On today’s creator ecosystem, his conclusion was that becoming a KOL is easier now than it was in 2018, but becoming a blogger is harder. The ways to attract traffic have multiplied, market rhythms have accelerated, and the bar for producing long-term value content has kept rising.
Traffic can inflate, he said, but responsibility does not shrink.
Xie Jiayin: from “top three in Chinese-speaking markets” to UEX, the target is bigger than rank
Looking back over eight years in crypto, Xie Jiayin said the one sentence he would give his earlier self is this: if you feel lonely right now, it is because you are standing at the entrance to the future.
He is now one of the best-known executives in the sector. Eight years ago, when he first entered crypto, his strongest feeling was loneliness. Coming from a major internet company, he looked through his WeChat contacts and struggled to find old friends who truly shared the same path.
He did consider returning to the traditional internet track. During the deep bear market in 2019, he interviewed with a company and was told, “Everything about you is good, but you carry a blockchain stain.” That was when he realized going back would not be as easy as he had imagined.
His view of the difference is concise: traditional industries ask people to find a place on a map that is already drawn, while blockchain gives them a chance to help draw the map.
On Jan. 2, 2024, after multiple rounds of observation, communication, and effort, he joined Bitget as head of Chinese-language operations, which he described as the most important career turning point he had had.
At that point he was openly ambitious. “I have ambition, and Bitget has ambition,” was how he put it, and “top three in Chinese-speaking markets” was a line he repeated often.
The first strategic thread he described was the effort to build what he called the warmest exchange. In his explanation, that slogan translates into operating rules: every user who arrives is treated like a VIP; when problems happen, someone answers, someone solves, someone takes responsibility, and someone provides fallback support; and more than 20 “angels” are active across more than 1,000 WeChat groups as feedback bridges between the brand and users.
His logic is blunt. Product decides whether a user comes. Service decides whether that user stays. Warmth decides whether the user recommends the platform to friends. He said Bitget’s service capability has now become a model that other platforms study.
The second strategic thread is UEX. In September 2025, Bitget unveiled the UEX panoramic exchange strategy with a clear goal: let users trade a wide set of global assets through a single account, including crypto, U.S. stocks, gold, ETFs, and foreign exchange.
The reaction at first was not kind. Some mocked it as a distraction; others said it was just a new label. Xie said he understood that response. Early ridicule was expected. Strategy, in his words, is not meant to be explained. It is meant to be delivered.
He then pointed to official figures cited in the report:
- rToken recorded 1.2 million cumulative trades in August 2026, with AUM above $200 million;
- Bitget TradFi contracts logged more than 250 million cumulative trades in August;
- monthly trading volume stayed above $100 billion for two consecutive months;
- at peak, non-crypto assets made up 40% of total platform trading volume;
- 52% of users already held both cryptocurrencies and U.S. stocks in their portfolios.
He added that after UEX was announced, nearly every trading platform began moving into related directions such as U.S. equities and TradFi.
Still, when asked whether those results were enough to answer earlier mockery, Xie did not frame it that way. The market does not pay because a concept sounds good, he said. Users stay because the product is genuinely useful.
His answer on the old “top three” goal has also become looser than it was two years ago. Top three is just a number, he said. More than appearing on a ranking, he wants Bitget to become a user’s default choice.
On the next area of focus, he highlighted the “Archimedes Plan,” a program built for institutional services. According to the article, the plan will provide $300 million in dedicated funding for quantitative trading firms, asset management institutions, and market makers. Of that total, $100 million will be used to support emerging and growth-stage quant institutions using market-neutral strategies, while $200 million will provide interest-free funding to institutions with mature strategies and a certain level of trading scale. The plan is expected to support more than 50 projects over the next six months.
Along with improving institutional service capacity and inviting more market makers and quant teams onto the platform, Bitget will continue refining products, functions, and user experience, according to the report.
The next eight years: the questions are shared, but not the same
At the end of the feature, TechFlowPost pushes the timeline forward and asks each interviewee what they most want to verify over the next eight years.
The answers diverge.
- Hangzong wants to see what his own effort ultimately leads to.
- Dylan is more focused on macro conditions and wonders whether crypto can one day shake off the Federal Reserve’s influence.
- Jessie wants to track the direction of the industry through bitcoin dominance.
- Link is watching for bitcoin’s next narrative, the real-world rollout of stablecoins, and whether retail opportunity will narrow as crypto moves deeper into compliance.
- Xie Jiayin’s question is the most direct: as the UEX strategy advances and global assets converge into one unified entry point, can a more equal and broadly accessible era of finance really arrive?
The article does not force a final verdict. In the interviews, uncertainty remains one of the sector’s defining attractions, whether in 2018 when people first entered crypto or in 2024 when Xie joined Bitget without knowing whether the “top three” ambition would be fulfilled.
Over the past eight years, the report suggests, Bitget and the people who approached the industry with a “let’s try it” mindset have all been testing answers inside successive cycles: how to survive a bear market, how to keep users, how to expand the platform’s boundaries. What the next eight years will prove is left open.
