Messi partnership and 25m users: a review of the Bitget exchange

In the first quarter of 2024, trading volumes on Bitget’s spot and futures markets rose by 100% and 146%, respectively. Over the same period, the platform’s token gained 80%, and its user base surpassed 25m.

This review outlines the exchange’s main services and competitive advantages.

Bitget’s ecosystem

Bitget was founded in 2018 by Sandra Lou, who currently serves as CEO. In June 2022 the exchange appointed Gracy Chen as managing director.

Two core products underpin Bitget’s ecosystem: a CEX and a Web3 wallet. The centralized exchange offers:

• spot, futures and P2P trading;
• the Bitget Earn platform for passive income;
• a copy-trading service;
• an interface for configuring trading bots;
• the Bitget Academy section with guides, expert advice and industry news.

The Bitget Wallet supports:

• a decentralised exchange;
• an NFT marketplace;
• a dapp browser to interact with DeFi applications.

Bitget Token (BGB) is the platform’s utility token with a 2bn supply. It can be used to pay trading fees at a discount, for staking, to earn passive income and for other activities.

The exchange places strong emphasis on partnerships: it has worked for more than two years with Argentine footballer Lionel Messi, as well as the football clubs Juventus and Galatasaray.

“Such collaborations not only increase trust in the exchange, but also help to explain cryptocurrencies to a wider audience in a more accessible way,” said Bitget’s chief operating officer Vugar Usi Zade in an interview with ForkLog.

In addition, the platform promotes the Blockchain4Her initiative to achieve gender equality in the Web3 industry and trains students under the Blockchain4Youth programme.

Registration and trading

You can register on Bitget on the exchange’s website or in the app for Android and iOS.

Since August 2023 the platform has required verification: clients must provide a passport/driver’s licence and confirm the document’s authenticity. The process takes no more than 60 minutes.

After completing KYC, users gain access to deposits, spot markets for 500+ assets and futures products, with withdrawal limits of 2m USDT.

Bitget offers:

• USD-M — perpetual futures settled in USDT or USDC;
• Coin-M — perpetual futures settled in cryptocurrencies and tokens;
• quarterly Coin-M futures — deliverable futures that can be held until expiry.

The exchange develops products for token launches and distribution:

• Launchpad — a platform for IEOs;
• Launchpool — pools for farming tokens of new projects;
• PoolX — an airdrop platform for stakers of bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT) and other assets;
• Pre-market — an OTC service for trading cryptocurrencies before listing.

In addition, Bitget clients can configure bots for strategies such as DCA, martingale and grid trading on spot and futures markets.

Passive income and copy-trading

Bitget Earn is a platform for users who want to generate additional income from their investments. Its products include:

• Savings — deposits for a fixed or flexible term with daily interest accrual;
• Staking — staking any amount of PoS cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Solana without additional costs;
• BGB staking — staking the exchange token with an APY of 2% and fee-free withdrawals;
• Dual Investment, Shark Fin, Smart Trend, Range Sniper — structured products with an APR from 1% to 20%;
• Wealth management — transferring funds to Bitget partners for management;
• Secured loan — loans of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies collateralised by other assets.

In May 2020 Bitget was the first on the market to add copy-trading — a strategy in which users (copy traders) replicate the trades of leading traders (lead traders). At the time of publication, the exchange is one of the leading platforms in this segment.

“Social trading is particularly popular among members of Generation Z (clients under 25), who tend to trust more experienced traders. They account for 44% of all copy traders on Bitget. In second place is the 25–35 age group with a share of 32%,” the platform’s report for 2023 says.

Bitget users can subscribe to lead traders on the spot and futures markets, or copy a trading-bot strategy.

Traders accredited by the exchange share trading ideas and research on the Insights social platform.

Web3 wallet

Bitget Wallet is a non-custodial multichain wallet, previously known as BitKeep. In 2023 Bitget became its controlling shareholder, after which it rebranded the service and integrated it into its ecosystem.

The wallet supports more than 80 networks, the L2 solution Lightning Network, and BRC-20 and ARC-20 tokens on Bitcoin. It is integrated with an NFT marketplace, the Bitget Swap decentralised exchange and other projects such as the DEX aggregator Jupiter.

Bitget Wallet is available as a Chrome extension and a mobile app for iOS and Android. It uses MPC technology, which splits private keys into several parts and stores them on different servers. Two of the three keys are required to sign transactions.

Conclusions

Over five years, Bitget has built one of the industry’s most recognisable brands. Partnerships with Lionel Messi and Juventus, active community engagement and campaigns such as TraderPro have contributed to this.

“Two years ago Bitget was among the top 20 crypto exchanges in CoinMarketCap’s ranking for futures trading. But already in 2024 the platform recorded a record volume among derivatives venues and secured a place in the top five by this metric, which I consider a great success,” said Vugar Usi Zade in an interview with ForkLog.

The exchange is expanding social trading and Web3 services, and lists cryptocurrencies not available on other centralized platforms. Since the start of the year Bitget has listed 186 assets and distributed the tokens of seven projects through Launchpool.