PANews spoke with Xie Jiayin, Bitget’s head of Greater China, at TOKEN2049 in 2026. They talked about the exchange’s security incident in late September, how its UEX strategy is moving along, what user service looks like in practice, and where Bitget wants to go as it hits its eighth anniversary.
Response to the late-September security incident
When asked about the incident at the end of September, Xie said it was the only security event in Bitget’s eight-year history. He also said the company reacted fairly quickly.
He said he stated clearly at the time that Bitget would take responsibility, and users did not need to panic. The platform kept withdrawals open. According to Xie, most withdrawals happened on the first day, and by day two, many assets were already flowing back.
Trust, he said, never just appears on its own. You earn it. Then earn it again. If users decide to trust Bitget, the platform has to match that trust with action. In his view, the episode was not purely negative for the company: "A crisis does not end a platform; responsibility can redefine one."
Xie likened it to a ship at sea. Only rough water tells you whether the ship can really hold up. And he said he has been open for a long time about both his own ambition and Bitget’s. This year, he added, is both his eighth year in crypto and Bitget’s eighth anniversary.
Eight years in crypto: from operator to manager
PANews asked how eight years in the industry had changed the way he thinks. Xie said one of the biggest changes was going from executor to manager.
When he first came into crypto eight years ago, he said he was basically a newcomer in the workplace. Eight years of pressure. Eight years of repetition. Now, he said, he can absorb stress and keep a team moving forward. In his eyes, both he and Bitget have shifted from trying to prove themselves to simply showing who they are. To him, that means the brand is stronger now and recognized by more users.
Speaking about his relationship with the company, Xie said the platform made his own growth possible. Without Bitget, he said, he would not be where he is today. But he added a blunt point: people should not mistake the platform’s strength for an individual’s personal ability. He described himself as the person standing at the front for more than 2,100 Bitget employees. If people think he is capable, he said, that starts with the platform itself being strong.
User service and fast response
PANews also asked whether his background — something he has talked about before on social media, including growing up in an ordinary rural family — shapes the way he sees users. Xie said yes, it does.
He said he came from ordinary people, and now he has come back to serve ordinary people. Even as a Bitget executive, he still wants the company’s service to reach regular users.
So he expects his team to serve every kind of client — VIPs, ordinary users, channel partners, and other partners — with quick responses and quick fixes. Trust is built in lots of small moments, not through some one-time gesture. Simple as that. What matters, he said, is whether the platform can actually solve the user’s problem.
Xie said his own life experience makes it easier for him to understand how hard it can be for ordinary people to chase goals or sort out problems. He put it this way: "Because I have been caught in the rain myself, I want to hold an umbrella for others."
When PANews mentioned cases where users send the wrong token or choose the wrong network, Xie said that happens a lot. And over the past eight years, Bitget has never charged users for helping recover assets, he said.
He gave an example from the day before. A customer had sent a gold-related asset worth about $160,000 to another chain that Bitget had not enabled. The company pulled together an eight-person coordination group and fixed the problem in about 30 minutes. Xie used the case as a reminder: check the network carefully before making a deposit.
UEX: from crypto to U.S. stocks, gold, FX and silver
Asked whether crypto’s pace of change makes him anxious, Xie said anxiety comes in waves. Sometimes the team feels pressure when rivals roll out new features or products. Other times, he said, Bitget is the one making competitors uneasy.
He pointed to the launch of UEX in September last year and said he could clearly feel that competitors were getting anxious too. In a market that moves this fast, he said, that is just unavoidable. Products need constant reworking and rebuilding because users change, and the market changes with them. If a platform does not adjust, it gets left behind. He said Bitget has kept throwing out parts of its old playbook because what worked before may no longer work now — or later.
As for why Bitget started preparing for UEX so early, Xie said plenty of people doubted the idea when the exchange announced its "unified exchange" plan in September last year. Some thought a crypto exchange should stay focused on crypto and not branch into U.S. stocks, gold, foreign exchange, or silver.
Xie said Bitget wants its strategy to stay at least half a year ahead of competitors. As an exchange, he said, the company has to keep creating trading opportunities for users.
According to Xie, Bitget launched U.S. stock trading in September last year, with the service initially offered through Ondo. But after users pointed out problems with the trading experience, the company started building the tokenized U.S. stock protocol Reality in late December of that same year.
He said the system connects directly to liquidity from Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, boosts execution efficiency, and supports direct dividend distribution. Because of that liquidity arrangement, Bitget’s rToken is highly competitive on liquidity, he said. After the new system went live, the U.S. stock business hit a peak single-day trading volume of $10 billion. But, he added, activity still follows market conditions. When U.S. equities are weak, volumes drop.
Xie said Bitget launched gold, foreign exchange, and silver products through MT5 on Jan. 5 this year. He said the exchange’s contracts for difference, or CFD, business in gold and FX has already reached meaningful scale, and now sits in the upper-middle tier of the industry even against traditional forex trading platforms.
On U.S. equities, he said Bitget’s U.S. stock derivatives segment now makes up 19.5%, which puts it second globally in the U.S. stock derivatives market, behind Binance.
New user mix and the role of C2C
PANews asked whether Bitget is mostly seeing existing crypto users move toward traditional financial assets, or whether those products are bringing in new users. Xie said it is both.
He said internal statistics compiled about two months ago showed that among users who registered this year, one out of every four had traded U.S. stocks or foreign exchange. Bitget has definitely attracted some users from traditional forex and U.S. stock markets, he said, though the scale is still below what he had hoped for.
Xie also said Bitget did not have a C2C business in its earlier years. Later, to push into more markets, the exchange launched C2C functions as a user entry point.
From challenger exchange to top-tier platform
As Bitget reaches its eighth anniversary, PANews asked what powered its fast rise from dark horse exchange to top-tier trading platform. Xie’s first answer: product.
He said Bitget has been ahead of the market in product development and was the first platform in the world to launch copy trading. In his telling, the company has been good at spotting user demand and seeing what users may want next.
He also said Bitget wants users to be able to find Bitget staff wherever they are, so they feel the company is there and reachable when they need it.
Another thing he stressed was transparency, including asset transparency and proof of reserves. Bitget publishes reserve data every month, he said, and its proof of reserves figure at the end of September was 131%.
Xie said long-term thinking matters even more when running an exchange. In his view, the company needs to keep respect for products, the market, and users, while continuing to study its own products and make them better so it can stay competitive.
Goal: become one of the top three choices for Chinese-speaking users
Looking forward, Xie said his personal goal is to make Bitget one of the top three choices for Chinese-speaking users, and to win real recognition from that group.
As for his own job, he said he wants to help the team perform better and keep growing. He hopes everyone on the team can do better than he does, because the platform can only keep developing if the people inside it keep getting better.
At the end of the interview, PANews asked how he would describe Bitget to someone completely new to the sector. Xie said he would call Bitget a one-stop financial operating platform where users can trade U.S. stocks, Hong Kong stocks, gold, and crypto, while carrying out global asset allocation. In his words, "this is a very good choice."