How are crypto businesses putting customers back at the center of their strategies?

During a bear market, businesses have the opportunity to shift their focus away from money-making to innovation. On this premise, the 2022 disasters that affected the crypto market severely — from Luna to Celsius and the FTX collapse — have emphasized one significant notion: Trust must be earned, and it’s not easy to attain. 

A healthy industry with a robust business structure will always constitute a winning model for vigorous competition and continued user-base growth. Some businesses managed to thrive in such challenging conditions in 2022 because they had the ability and intuition to apply the righteous principles that others had failed to offer to their customer base.

When larger exchanges such as Binance and OKX saw a drop in market share, Bitget, a leading crypto derivatives platform, saw the largest increase in its share of the derivatives market. Bitget's share increased from 3% to 11%, becoming the third-largest derivatives exchange by trading volume after the FTX crash.

Primarily, 2022 rewarded the companies focused on user protection and security. Trust in the crypto industry has to be rebuilt, and three simple lessons from its recent collapses can help enterprises thrive in the future:

1. Assuring customers that their funds are always available for withdrawal can go a long way to providing a healthy and successful business model. Users must feel protected to store their assets with a platform and trust that their investment is safe and in their possession at all times.
2. Consumers’ viewpoints should always be the focus of every business decision because users will be loyal to the company that primarily has their interests at heart and can provide real use cases that are beneficial to them.
3. Companies that value retail users as much as institutional and VIP customers offer finer ethical standards, less based on the greedy schemes granted by the companies that failed in 2022. 

Withstanding the cold blows of crypto winter

Some companies have grown and thrived within this groundwork and overcome l the challenges that came with them, and Bitget is one of them. The crypto derivative exchange built its team, brand and business over the most brutal crypto winter the industry recalls and became one of the world’s fastest-growing crypto exchanges. 

By offering global Web3 services with DeFi elements for the first time in 2022, Bitget accelerated its expansion beyond expectations. To date, the company is serving 8 million users in 100+ countries. 

The World Cup Qatar 2022 marked the apex of a fruitful year for Bitget through a partnership with Lionel Messi as an exclusive crypto exchange partner. The collaboration granted fans of the Paris Saint-Germain and Argentinian star the opportunity to explore Web3 and the potential of trading cryptocurrencies.

Bitget managed to grow a user base of retail customers by designing and developing an efficient business model with users’ protection and security in mind.

Launching a $300 million protection fund allowed Bitget to safeguard customers’ withdrawals in case of emergency. Moreover, a transparent Merkle Tree Proof of Reserves tracking page with monthly updates ensures at least a one-to-one reserve ratio of customer funds. The latest Proof-of-Reserve snapshots showed as of Dec 31, 2022,  the major tokens to users assets ratio of BTC at 650%, USDT at 185%, and ETH at 237%.

In 2023, Bitget has shown no signs of slowing down. The exchange became the first CEX to launch a spot copy trading feature in the first month of the year and reached an all-time high with its native token (BGB) in Feburary.   

Despite a turbulent year, the crypto industry is far from vanished, with the number of active users, new wallet addresses, and DeFi lock-up volume and Total Value Locked expected to rise again considerably in 2023. Forward-thinking players and builders like Bitget are setting a solid foundation for the process of rebuilding trust within the crypto industry in the upcoming months.