Bitget Wallet: Scaling a Self-Custody Wallet to 100M Users

GM GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they've built. And today, I'm really excited to welcome Shen Chen, who is the Head of Partnerships at Bitget Wallet. So if you're not familiar, Bitget Wallet is a crypto wallet built for everyday finance, trusted by 100 million plus users to save, send, and spend digital dollars and access global markets. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Shen, learn about Bitget Wallet, and how you can get started using it today. All right, let me get into it.

GM GM. Welcome to the show, Shen. I'm really excited to have you on today, man.

Hey Narb, happy Friday. Thank you for having me.

Happy Friday!

Indeed, my pleasure. Happy Friday indeed.

Yeah, I always look forward to Friday. Always get to meet somebody cool, somebody new, learn about what they're building. So, and Bitget Wallet is no exception. But I guess before we get into that, really keen to kind of learn more about you. So if you will, please go ahead and give an introduction about yourself.

Yeah, so hi everybody. My name is Shen, I'm the Head of Partnerships at Bitget Wallet. As Narb introduced in the beginning, we are one of the top multi-chain wallets that actually started way back in 2018. Today we're serving over 100 million users. We're building a one-stop trading platform which basically provides all kinds of trading access to all kinds of assets. And we're processing billions of transactions every year, and we're continuing to progress trying to make sure that we are the place for people to trade and discover all the new assets and new earn opportunities. On the other hand, we're building this global dollar account infrastructure, allowing people to easily spend, save, earn, or send whenever they want. And this is not an easy task, but that's the future we are building towards. Personally, I've been in this space for over seven years now. Before that, I spent 12 years working at an industrial manufacturer called Honeywell. A lot of people may know that they've been around for over 100 years with over 100,000 employees. That's my first job out of college, I stayed there for 12 years straight. That was a very exciting time because I learned a lot from them. I had the opportunity to work on some of the most exciting localization projects, and what really changed my trajectory is the involvement of a local acquisition which started in China, and then I became the PM and marketing leader there and then took the product from China to globally. That's how I got to the US, because the product got so successful, so they decided to move me to the US to drive this business from a global standpoint. And I would say that's like a startup project for me, my first startup project. It took me 10 years to go from zero to actually over $100 million. But compared to crypto, I think that's probably too long. And I got into crypto, honestly, by surprise because I was enjoying my job at Honeywell, especially after moving to the US. But then my friend joined a crypto startup called BloxRoute in 2018. And then they were looking for a PM with Chinese background, and I happened to be the only Chinese PM that she knows, and then she started to lobby me and try to convince me to join them. Obviously it wasn't very successful because I didn't know anything about crypto, especially back in the old days. But after six months I decided to join, and to this day I think that was probably the best decision I've ever made for my career and also for my life, because look at where I am, right? So that was the beginning of my crypto career. And obviously BloxRoute today, a lot of people if they are in trading or DeFi know them as the leading trading infrastructure, especially on the MEV side of things. And very recently they got acquired by a prime broker called FalconX in the US, so that was a big deal for them after almost a 10-year run. And then I joined Blocknative, which is another category-leading project based in the US. So their focus was on mempool explorer, they were actually one of the first Ethereum mempool explorer providers, and from that they expanded the product line to gas simulation, gas estimation, etc. So they've been also quite successful, and they approached me because they wanted to take their business to the next level, right? They were already over 0-to-1 phase, they wanted somebody to build up the partnership team to take the business from 1 to 10. So that's how I joined them. And obviously it's an infrastructure business, but they're focused on builders versus traders. And that's what I wanted to do because I wanted to expand my experience and try to drive adoption of their developer tooling. Coincidentally Blocknative got acquired very recently by Deloitte. So both acquisitions happened I would say in the last 60 days, so that was quite exciting and I'm quite happy for the founders that I'm still in very close contact with today. And then I was there for, I think in the first two startups I spent about six years, and then I joined OKX. So OKX was actually a client of Blocknative. OKX has two business groups, one is the Exchange, the other is Web3, so I joined Web3 because they wanted someone to help launch their developer tooling platform, which was called OKX OS at that time. Today they're also promoting an AI platform called Onchain OS, similar name, but at that time it was called OKX OS, basically consisting of four different APIs like Wallet API, DEX Aggregator API. But they needed someone with the builder background, with the B2B background, so I happened to be the right fit for that role. So that's how I became an OKXer. Also I had been working with a lot of exchanges, they were always a mystery to me, so why not just get in there to figure out what's going on? So I would say that decision was mainly driven by my curiosity. I had a great run there for about two years. I was tasked to lead two major 0-to-1 projects: the first one was the developer platform, I did that for about less than a year, and then last May I was tapped to lead X Layer BD and partnerships. So that was very exciting and also a very challenging project because even though X Layer existed before, because of all the different structure and strategy changes, we basically started from scratch. But people thought, oh it's 0-to-1, but actually in my opinion it's from -1 to 1 because of the legacy you still have to deal with, and also I needed to build a team from scratch. But that was a very rewarding experience. Imagine starting as a one-man show and building it to ramp up real quickly. I also didn't have the chain operations and partnership background, so I needed to learn at the same time and also try to push things forward. But I would say that was quite a successful experience given we successfully launched major partnerships on DeFi, we focused on DeFi like Aave, Uniswap, and also on the payment side, for example we landed USDG and also USDT0, which are two major stablecoins that are much needed for our ecosystem and narrative. And of course in the later stage we also got into AI or agentic payment. Looking back, I feel like that feels much longer than two years, that's crypto time. And yeah, so I joined Bitget Wallet about three months ago, and super excited about this opportunity, mainly because I think Bitget Wallet is doing something really different than a lot of the peers, especially on the payment side of things. So I think we can dive into that more later. Gonna pause here.

For sure, and thank you so much for such a comprehensive overview of all your experiences. That's quite the track record, and yeah, when you first said you were at Honeywell for 12 years, my first thought was usually people that stay beyond the 5-year mark become lifers at whatever company they're at. But your curiosity led you on the right track, even though you gave up that tenure. And Bitget Wallet, that's pretty cool, I didn't realize you've only been there for a few months. I'm sure those few months feel like a year, right? Every month feels like a year. I think now looking back in my career, everything I did at that time might feel irrelevant, but actually they were all preparing me for today. At Honeywell, like you said, I thought I was going to retire at Honeywell. They were treating me very well, I liked the opportunities, but when opportunity came, you change. And when I first joined crypto, I didn't know anything about crypto, I didn't have any relationships, I thought I had to start from scratch. I thought a lot of the skills I learned from the past would not be transferable, but it turns out actually a lot of them are still very relevant to this day. Like how do you verify market opportunities, right? Because a lot of crypto startups are struggling about finding product-market fit. So that skill is very important, because I come from PM and product marketing background, so I know how to really dig into the user needs, what's deep down there, what they're actually trying to solve, what are the value propositions. And also another thing is you deal with different people—DEX traders, builders, nowadays institutions. So you need to be able to adapt your pitch or value proposition towards different people. Those feel very natural to me because of all the years at Honeywell. And same thing with BloxRoute, when we started MEV, we were actually the first to introduce commercial private transaction services before Flashbots. And to this day, I'm still doing a lot of MEV partnerships because at that time we were trying to convince wallets to offer private transaction service MEV protection, but it was probably two years too early. But now it becomes the norm, right? It also becomes a new source of revenue for a lot of wallets, you know?

100%, 100%. Bitget Wallet itself is one of the OG wallets in the space, and I know you guys offer a whole gamut of different things in that product itself. There seems to be something for everybody. Your earlier point on product-market fit, it's very interesting this particular industry struggled very hard in the early years to find that fit. When I first joined the space, I found a lot of people were trying to do the normal things people did in Web2, but trying to replace a database with a blockchain and it just wouldn't scale. But I think now we've really landed on payments as the de facto use case for blockchain, obviously with the rise of stablecoins, and now agents that need a way to pay for things using stablecoins. It takes a while, not every niche in this industry works the same trajectory-wise. But now we're here, 2026, very interesting time to be alive. I guess this is a good segue into all things Bitget Wallet. So can you give us a high-level overview of what it is and why it exists?

Yeah, so obviously Bitget Wallet is a self-custody wallet, and over the years there have been many wallets. There are still a lot of wallets out there, so this market is still very crowded and competitive. So to become successful is not so easy, because the entry barrier is not as high as a lot of people might think, and it's hard to really differentiate yourself. Operation can be very costly, and the business model for the longest time was not as clear. If you want to take money here, it can hurt your growth or reputation, etc. So a lot of wallets have been struggling for years, and we are just lucky that we've become a successful business after this year. We were founded in 2018, back then it was called BitKeep, and then in 2023, Bitget Group became a major shareholder, that's when we rebranded the wallet to Bitget Wallet. Today, a lot of people think that we are an exchange wallet, but in fact we are not. Even if you look at the logo, our logos are different. We just share the same name, but of course being part of the Bitget ecosystem gave us a huge boost. Within a couple of years, we went from basically 10x our user base, and we're talking about real users, not fake users. A lot of the resources we can share with Bitget Group definitely helped bootstrap a lot of our growth. For example, the trading platform. After joining the Bitget family, we spent a lot of efforts in expanding and upgrading our trading platform. For example, we built our own DEX aggregator, making sure that we can have an in-house solution to aggregate all the liquidity and optimize and customize for our user base. We also have prediction markets today—during the World Cup, we were number one by number of users and top five by trading volume. We also introduced the Earn platform, that is another boost to our growth. But at the same time, we make sure that we have a safe check on all these products, making sure everything we offer and endorse is safe, and if anything happens, we make sure our users are protected. And RWA is definitely another hallmark of our trading platform. Exchange is the pioneer of RWA trading, US stock trading, but on the wallet side, we're doing the same thing. Onchain RWA is completely different. We were one of the early supporters of Ondo, and for the longest time we were the major volume contributor to Ondo as well. Very recently, Bitget Group launched our own RWA tokenization platform called Reality. So that is a huge milestone for us because it takes our RWA business to the next level with better liquidity and price. If you look at the chart, we are definitely on the rise, and we're going to make sure that for all of our wallet users, we're going to have the best access to Reality going forward. Another growth driver for us is the user experience improvement. We are recognized as one of the easiest to use wallets out there, starting from social login and all these UX/UI improvements. I think we're still doing that every single day, looking at all the details just making sure that it feels right to the user. The challenge for us is that users in Asia may have different preferences than users in Latin America. How do we incorporate all the different preferences into our design? That is still a challenge for us every day. But that pays off because we are targeting everyday users, everyday people. These people are not sophisticated traders. They come to crypto because they want to buy some Bitcoin or do some investment. So how do you onboard them and then guide them through the journey from a beginner to a more sophisticated investor? I think we are the platform and the best people to do that for them. That definitely is important for our growth. The last thing I want to mention is the payment, the PayFi business. Everybody has been talking about onboarding the next billion users, and for the longest time, trading was probably the only proven use case for crypto. But the ceiling is there, because in order for you to really trade at a certain pace with high volume, you have to be experienced so that you are comfortable to do it. But if you're only looking at trading, it will be hard for you to grow as fast as you want. That's why now payment—not just us, most people see payment as the future for crypto growth because there's real-world demand out there. But also, it's not very easy to tap into that opportunity. People think, 'Oh, now we have the Genius Act, we have all the regulation, we have stablecoins, now crypto payment is going to take off.' No, you don't have the infrastructure! So that's why we're doing all the hard work. We are still doing a lot of the plumbing, especially in emerging markets, that's where we see the most product-market fit. Because in developed markets, you already have very mature, established financial infrastructure. Of course, there's still room for stablecoin payment and crypto, but compared to emerging markets where you have a huge unbanked population, these people have real needs for just having an account, real needs for US dollars because of the inflation of local currency and forex control. So they really need that for their life, but there isn't a really good infrastructure and solution out there. So we feel the responsibility to serve them, and actually a lot of them were also our users before we introduced the payment solution. We're already seeing the growth of payments surpass the growth of trading in terms of users. So that is very exciting for us, and we're going to continue to double down on that going forward. You're going to hear more about that. So that's a TL;DR of Bitget Wallet and where we're heading.

Amazing, man. Yeah, and definitely there's a lot that goes along with payments that people don't realize when you look under the hood—on/off ramping, making sure you're playing within the lines of whatever jurisdictions you're operating in, proper licenses, etc. There's a whole lineup of things you have to make sure you check the boxes on. Kudos to you guys for fighting that good fight. Very interesting to hear that payments is actually taking off, and I think it'll continue to take off, not only with human users, but AI agents are actually going to surpass humans for actual payment needs. It's very interesting how crypto started as a way to liberate people from traditional banking systems, but the UX was never there to help a non-technical user take that easy step without managing private keys. It turns out AI agents are actually very good at doing such things, and the way it played out seems like a perfect storm for agents to adopt crypto and blockchain payment rails as their de facto way of buying and selling things online. It's still not quite there, but heading towards that. Very curious to hear, especially you having a product mindset, where do you see that today and how it'll play out in the coming years?

So I may have a less bullish opinion towards agentic payment right now. First of all, I agree that this is going to be the future, no doubt, but *when* it will come. Because in crypto, we are living in this echo chamber, and we feel like the world is evolving around what we're doing, and we think everything happening in crypto is going to happen elsewhere. I think it's probably similar to the AI community as well. But everybody knows that the majority of companies, the majority of people, are not in this bubble. So if we're thinking about mass adoption of agentic payment, we still have a long way to go. I think the technology is getting better, the direction is correct. But think about two observations. One is when I was at OKX, we tried to explore partnerships with AI builder communities—not crypto builders, AI builder communities. We tried to find synergies, tried to educate these builders on crypto technology so hopefully we can drive adoption there. But then we realized that actually these people are not very crypto-savvy, even though they're very AI-savvy. They are the core AI builders, and core AI builders are not in crypto, they are in AI. They're not really paying a lot of attention to crypto. The only use case I think they would resonate with is payment, but that is not very high on their list. So if the AI builders are not paying enough attention, spending a lot of time on driving real adoption on their front, that's very telling. That's number one. Number two is that you look at all these traditional companies like Honeywell, IBM, all these companies, they are running on these gigantic ERP systems, SAP and what not. Anything they do on the business side, they have to rely on this system. But if you look at these systems, when do you think they will be... First of all, it's going to be very hard for you to overhaul the whole thing to replace it. Number two is because these systems have been built for a long time, the foundation was based on technology from 20 or 30 years ago. How do you upgrade it to be AI-compatible? All these different databases, how do you do that? It's not easy. And also, the people working in this space, unlike us who talk about AI every day, they're not. They probably know ChatGPT, they're using the chatbot, that's all. AI is very far from them, but those are the mass majority. So that's why I think it's going to take a long time. Just like many good concepts crypto came up with, for example DePIN. DePIN is a great concept, it does solve real-world problems, but I think we are probably getting a little ahead of ourselves. Until the real world really thinks that 'Okay, we need AI to solve this problem for us,' then there won't be real demand, there won't be huge demand that we're expecting. Twelve months ago there was a lot of AI hype, everybody was like, 'Oh yeah, we're doing AI.' But how many people actually own an agent? How many people are actually able to install and run an agent by themselves? A very tiny percentage of people. So let's be real, let me take ourselves out of the bubble, and then I think we will be able to do something meaningful here. We are also embracing AI at Bitget Wallet. We try to incorporate AI into our workflow, improving efficiency, and also into some of our features—for example, price notifications, signals, suggestions. We can use AI to optimize that. But not anything beyond, because if users are not asking, or AI is not really making much difference, it's not meaningful when you try to say, 'Oh yeah, everything AI.' That's why I really like the approach we're taking. We are definitely engaging, we're offering our agentic tooling, but also we are not like, 'Oh, we're all in, everything AI.' We're staying close to the trend, making sure ourselves is up to date, but also we're taking a very realistic, realistic approach to AI.

Yeah, as many people should. It's very easy for us being in this space to nerd out and go deep down the rabbit hole of local AI and whatnot. I've started to learn some pretty heavy DevOps-type things, realizing you need to know quite a bit hardware-wise to optimize models to run well on the machines you have. But echoing your point, we've got to take it more cerebrally and make sure what we're building is actually usable by normal people and not end up in the same echo chamber reality that crypto was a little while back. On that point, you having this product mindset, for builders and founders watching or listening today wanting to start a new endeavor or crypto-AI crossover product, what advice would you give them in honing down on their product?

Yeah, so I think there are a couple things we can help the builders out there. Number one, our wallet is one of the most used wallets in the world. If you have a project and want access to our user base, or if you have tokens you want to promote, we can be a partner and help you out. That's very straightforward. The second one is we recently introduced a new developer brand called Bitget Wallet X. It's just getting started, but we actually had the products before we introduced the brand. We decided to launch this new brand because our existing brand is more retail-facing, not builder-facing, and also we want to contribute a lot more to the builder community—working closely with foundations and ecosystems on their research, EIPs, SIPs, because as a wallet we have a very broad reach. We also have a very good team doing research, infrastructure operation, and we think there's a lot of good things we can contribute. So that is something we are going to do more and more, you're going to hear more from us. We're not just a wallet, but an active participant and contributor to the developer community and open-source space. Underneath, we have several API products. Today we're focused on the Swap API, sharing the same infrastructure of our DEX aggregator, providing liquidity aggregation across 11 chains including Solana, Base, Ethereum, and all these popular chains. Also, if you are into RWA, it is probably the best API where you can get liquidity for Ondo, xStocks, and what not. Cross-chain is another thing—a lot of people are building applications starting on one chain, but doing cross-chain. We have one of the best cross-chain capabilities in the space because of our own needs on the trading and payment side. Between EVM and non-EVM chains, which is very hard to do, we have a very good solution out there. So to recap: if you need exposure and access to user base, our wallet can be a best partner. If you're looking for a research partner or doing something cool, let us know, maybe we can help. Third, if you're building an application that requires swap infrastructure or cross-chain infrastructure, we have a ready out-of-the-box solution for you.

Amazing, amazing. If you're a builder watching this today and want to take that next step, this is definitely one of those avenues you should explore if interested. On that point, Shen, what's the best way for people to get in touch and get involved if they are?

We are very accessible! Go to our website, and follow us on X. We have the Bitget Wallet account, which is the wallet account, and also Bitget Wallet X, which is the builder account. If you're a user, definitely go download Bitget Wallet, check us out. Most importantly, try our payment offering—our crypto card already has over 150,000 users, QR Pay pioneering in emerging markets. For builders, go check out our API portfolio, reach out to us if you have any questions. Also, these days we are recruiting solvers, so if you happen to be running solvers, definitely reach out, we have a special offer for you guys. Myself, I'm also on X, my handle is @sunnursrock, and yeah, you know where to find me.

Amazing, amazing! All those details Shen mentioned are going to be in the description of the podcast below, so definitely give that a check out. With that, Shen, I want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to come chat with us. I would have never realized you were only three months in with everything you shared, so kudos to you! Really excited to see Bitget Wallet continue to grow, and wishing you guys the best of luck.

Thank you, thanks again for the opportunity. I really look forward to interacting with you and the community more and more going forward.

Excellent, as do I! And with that, just want to wish everybody a Happy Friday again, happy weekend wherever you may be, and we will catch you back here for another great episode of DevNTell next week. Until then, have a good one, folks. Cheers!

Cheers!