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

During a bear market, companies have the opportunity to shift their focus away from making money and toward innovation. On this premise, the 2022 disasters that severely affected the crypto market – from Luna to Celsius and the FTX collapse – have underlined an important notion: trust must be earned, and it is not easily achieved.

A healthy industry with a robust business structure will always be a winning model for strong 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 fair principles that others had failed to offer to their customer base.

As major exchanges such as Binance and OKX saw a decline 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 with a focus on user protection and security. Confidence in the crypto industry needs to be rebuilt, and three simple lessons from its recent collapse can help businesses thrive in the future:

1. Reassuring customers that their funds are always available for withdrawal can go a long way in providing a healthy and successful business model. Users need to 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’ views should always be the focus of any business decision because users will be loyal to the company that has their best interests at heart first 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 provided by the companies that failed in 2022.

Withstands the cold blows of the crypto winter

Some companies have grown and thrived within this ground work and have overcome the challenges that came with them, and Bitget is one of them. The crypto derivatives exchange built its team, brand and business during the most brutal crypto winter the industry remembers 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 serves 8 million users in over 100 countries.

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

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

Launching a $300 million protection fund allowed Bitget to secure its customers’ withdrawals in case of emergency. Also, a transparent Merkle Tree Proof of Reserves tracking page with monthly updates ensures at least a one-to-one reserve ratio of client funds. The latest Proof-of-Reserve snapshots showed as of December 31, 2022, the main 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 trading feature in the first month of the year and reached a record high with its native token (BGB) in February.

Despite a turbulent year, the crypto industry is far from gone, with the number of active users, new wallet addresses and DeFi lock volume and Total Value Locked expected to rise significantly again in 2023. Forward-thinking players and developers like Bitget are laying a solid foundation for the process of rebuild confidence in the crypto industry in the coming months.