Bitget Transparency Report: Q1 2023

Being a fair player since the very beginning means that Bitget assigns the highest priority to the ennobling of transparency, user-centred principles and sustainable development. The Bitget Transparency Report reaffirms our commitment to transparency - all Bitget stakeholders should always have the right to access the essential information about our operations, be it the great or the not-so-good pieces.

Below is a recap of what Bitget has accomplished in the first quarter of 2023 as well as insights into the upcoming releases: Your trust motivates us to keep providing the digital space with even more spectacular products and services!

TL;DR

• The crypto market had its shine back in Q1 2023 with the global market cap surpassing US$1.2 trillion

• Bitget made it to the Top 4 CEXs by TokenInsight, seeing growth in all aspects

• BGB locked in a 120% gain, surpassing all other exchange tokens

• Bitget Proof-Of-Reserves increased from 223% on December 20, 2022 to 246% on April 03, 2023

• The recovery of Bitcoin prices made the US$300 million Bitget Protection Fund’s book value skyrocketing to over US$380 million

• 105 new coins came to Bitget Spot Trading; Composite Index added to Bitget Futures products; the introduction of Bitget Spot Copy Trading and Fund Custody Service

• Bitget took part in industry events as well as social activities such as donations for earthquake victims in Turkey and the partnership with Juventus Women Football Team

Bitget Monthly Report can be found here: February - March.

The Market Has Been Picking Up Speed

After a gloomy year with several black swan events, the public didn’t have a fond expectation of the crypto market. But data is indeed showing the opposite: the global crypto market cap recorded a surge of 48.9% at the end of March compared to Q4 2022, showing a return to the US$1 trillion mark. Thirteen days into the new year and Bloomberg says: ‘Crushed crypto funds are suddenly beating every other ETFs’; Blur brought the NFT market back to life with its novel model and the first round of super airdrops; the liquid staking derivatives (LSDs) demonstrates the highest growth in DeFi with 210.9% to a market cap of US$4.20 billion. These signalled the end of the crypto winter; and Bitcoin back to US$28,000, Ethereum to US$1,700 for the first time since June are just the cherry on top. As the saying goes, ‘we are so back’.

Bitget In Numbers

We are proud to announce that we are growing real fast in every single aspect. From DeFi to CeFi, earning services to copy trading, we've been giving our 1,000% effort in making Bitget finer than ever.

Our Q1 achievements can be summarised as follows:

Traffic

The dawn of a new bullish cycle brought about a new level of market anticipation. Our website and mobile traffic likewise experienced a steady increase of 35% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) to 33.1 million at the end of Q1.

Source: Similarweb

Trading Volume

We are constantly bringing more liquidity to the market and our users. The total volume of our spot and futures market reached 59 billion and 658 billion respectively, showing an 8% QoQ growth for Bitget Spot Trading and 27% for Bitget USDT-Ⓜ Futures, Bitget USDC-Ⓜ Futures and Bitget Coin-Ⓜ Futures. According to TokenInsight, Bitget is 4th largest CEX by total trading volume in Q1 2023.

It’s worth noting that although our spot market is experiencing tremendous growth this quarter, it only accounts for about 10% of our total volume. Given the percentage at other leading exchanges can be 20% - 25%, we’ve seen lots of growth potential in our spot market as we continue to bring crypto gems to our users.

Source: CoinGecko

New Listings

There are currently 500+ trading pairs on Bitget Spot Trading, including 105 new coins this quarter. The top five coins with the highest daily gain rate are BLUR, CORE, HALO, ARB, and ID, with respective gains of 119,900%, 23,350%, 14,843%, 11,900%, and 7,900%. Bitget Spot users can now enjoy Copy Trading privileges as well.

Bitget new listings never came alone. They either followed a supercharged IEO on Bitget Launchpad and/or accompanied by at least one farming pool on Bitget Launchpool. In the first 90 days of 2023, Bitget Launchpad, after going through an upgrade, hosted two fundraising events for PandaFarm (BBO) and Haloworld (HALO). BBO early investors benefitted from a return of 5,820% from the token’s all-time high, and OpenSea is showing a floor price of 0.399 ETH for HALO NFTs.

A total of 14 projects listed on Bitget Launchpool were made available throughout the period from January to March. The amount of rewards distributed at the end of each month (estimated using tokens' closing prices from CoinGecko on the last day every month) is 19,214 USDT for January, 77,212 USDT for February and 171,458 USDT for March, which translates to a monthly average of nearly 90,000 USDT.

Bitget Token (BGB)

BGB was one of the rare tokens to have recorded its all-time high in Q4 2022 at US$0.238136 on October 21. Fast forward to February 2023 and it constantly accomplished new, amazing achievements: four consecutive weeks of new highs from US$0.221995 (January 23 - January 29), US$0.223903 (January 30 - February 05), US$0.391977 (February 06 - February 12) and US$0.515241 (February 13 - February 19).

According to TokenInsight, BGB locked in a 120% gain in the first three months of 2023, thereby surpassing not only Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB (the Top 3 biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap) but also all other exchange tokens.

Source: TokenInsight

The upsurge of BGB price since the start of this year obviously has a positive impact on the token volume. Interest cooled down in November, December and January but skyrocketed in February to US$315.6 million, equivalent to an increase of 225% from January.

Source: Coingecko

Demand for BGB rose proportionately to the surging price. The number of BGB holders by March’s end is 229,732, which implies a growth of 146% in just three months.

Source: Bitget

It is believed that the outstanding performance of BGB is driven by our continuous efforts to bring more utilities to the coin. In late Q1, an update of the roadmap for BGB is provided in the official BGB White Paper. Also, a list of new features around BGB including BGB Lotto, BGB Staking for 0 withdrawal fee, and new VIP system associated with BGB are introduced.

Copy Trading

As the first crypto exchange to launch copy trading, and the largest copy trading platform, we feel obliged to introduce this beginner-friendly feature to a wider range of audience. In the first three months, we have onboarded 20,669 new elite traders and 84,552 new followers. The total profits generated through our copy trading feature reached 41 million USD in Q1 2023.

Social Presence

As we value the voice of our community, we are building our social media on almost all platforms that our customers may use. Our followers on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok and Youtube grew 181% in Q1, from 561K to 1 million. Specifically, our official Tiktok channel gained nearly 200k followers in just two months!

Global Team

All these achievements won't be possible without an energetic and committed team. We continued to expand our talent pool and grew the Bitget global team from 1,000 to 1,300 members from over 60 countries and regions. We keep a close eye on the crypto market to make sure we have a compact but productive team, and presently we still have 300 openings in RD, compliance, BD, operations and customer support.

Better Protection, Firmer Assurance

Bitget has been recognised as one of the first CEX to take the user-centric approach with the launch of our US$200 million Bitget Protection Fund in August 2022. However, the fall of FTX calls for transparency about crypto exchanges’ operational activities, especially when it comes to users’ funds. Bitget quickly responded with the publishment of Bitget Proof-Of-Reserves, which shows a constant increment in the total reserve ratio: from 223% on December 30, 2022, to 227% on January 31, 2023, 231% on March 06, 2023, and 246% on April 03, 2023. It is important to note that we have added the USDC reserve in Q1 2023 for more transparency.

Source: Bitget

Now coming back to the Bitget Protection Fund, we have raised the fund’s value to over US$300 million (6,500 BTC plus 160,000,000 USDT and 40,000,000 USDC) and committed to maintain this value by transferring more assets to the fund if the price of Bitcoin is to plummet. Our daily tracking of the Bitget Protection Fund shows that its value remained beyond US$300 million in the first quarter, and the recovery of Bitcoin prices near the end of March made the fund’s book value skyrocketing to over US$380 million.

Source: Coingecko

Expansion Of Products

Bear market couldn't stop us from bringing new products to the masses, so it is basically just a matter-of-fact when we delivered even more for the bulls.

Protecting your assets is, and always will be our top priority. In January, Bitget launched Fund Custody Service, providing the highest level of protection for users' funds. We also introduced Bitget Spot Copy Trading following the spectacular success of our Bitget One-Click Copy Trade, where followers can get the expert's insights effortlessly from copying their profitable trading strategies.

Bitget has launched a variety of new investment products to meet the needs of different types of investors. With Bitget Launchpool, users can earn trendy tokens by farming BGB and other crypto staples at hand. But if you are not a risk lover, simply turn to Bitget SharkFin, where principal is guaranteed, or Bitget Dual Investment, where you can farm and choose to sell high/buy low at the end of the subscription, or Bitget Smart Trend, where you can earn big by guessing the market's next move.

Win-Win Partnerships

Being the first exchange to partner with Space and Time (SxT), a leader in decentralised data warehousing, to provide a verifiably tamperproof audit of our reserves. This meaningful partnership allows us to step up the game and restore trust in centralised crypto institutions.

In the second month of the first quarter, the integration between Bitget and six major data platforms, such as coin360, Nansen, Aggrtrade, THE KINGFISHER, LAEVITAS, and Hoptrail, turned Bitget into an extremely data-driven platform. On top of that, the integration of TradingView into our futures products further simplifies the derivatives trading process for Bitgetters.

Driving Industry Growth

Bitget’s ultimate goal is to promote crypto adoption on a global scale by spreading high-quality industry knowledge alongside the constant rollout of innovative products. It is of equal importance, though, to take advantage of our position in the industry to make a positive community impact.

We keep engaging

Bitget remained a welcome guest speaker at several blockchain events, where we explained the undeniable integration of blockchain and cryptocurrencies into the global economy. The biggest events in Q1 2023 are the Dubai Blockchain Life 2023 and the Blockchain Economy London Summit, both took place on February 27-28.

Bitget Managing Director Gracy Chen at the Dubai Blockchain Life 2023.

Bitget UK Marketing Manager at the Blockchain Economy London Summit

Showing crypto’s true colours

Bitget is one of the first exchanges to respond to the news of the Pazarcik and Kahramanmaras earthquakes in Southern Turkey on February 06 by sending 1 million Turkish Lira to impacted victims and actively seeking local assistance.

Besides, Bitget takes the role of being an inspiration for women worldwide via our partnership with Juventus Women Football Team. Women represent 40% of the managerial positions at Bitget, and we hope to encourage women in all fields to become their best version with this decision to sponsor Juventus women team.

Editor's Choice

We believe in the power of crypto education. In this quarter, we released over 200 educational articles in 20 different languages on Bitget Academy, covering everything from in-depth guides and practical tips to market updates.

Looking for the best ones to read? Here are some suggestions:

Bitget Annual Briefing 2022-23: The Rational Path Ahead

Banking Crisis and Why Crypto Markets Should Care

What is Stagflation and How Does It Affect the Crypto Market?

The Crypto Burrito: The Never-Ending Saga of FTX

A Compendium of Crypto Important Milestones

Closing Thoughts

Bitget was launched ten years after the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published his thesis paper on a ‘peer-to-peer cash system', which is usually known as the Bitcoin White Paper. The name Bitget is a combination of ‘Bit' in ‘Bitcoin' and ‘get'; that is, our mission since the very beginning has always been to adhere to Nakamoto's ideology of creating a fairer and more democratic financial system, i.e., inspiring individuals to embrace crypto with simple yet powerful tools.

That being said, we will never stop leading the epic journey of merging crypto and TradFi in the company of our loyal Bitgetters and all crypto advocates out there. Your job is to expect only the best from us, because the bottom line is that we are an ever-evolving ecosystem of innovation.