Gracy Chen leaves quite an impression. As the only female CEO among the top 10 crypto exchanges, she’s well aware of the challenges facing women leaders, and she’s determined to use her feminine wiles to her advantage. Yet, unlike some of her counterparts who yank up the step ladder on their way up, Gracy lifts as she climbs—half of Bitget’s management team is female. As she jokes:
“That’s like finding a Bitcoin wallet that didn’t get lost in a boating accident—rare, but glorious.”
Gracy’s humor is a powerful weapon in her arsenal, and she uses it often to put people at ease, along with a showstopping smile and killer intellect. Underestimate her at your peril. With an MBA from MIT with a GMAT score in the top 1% of the country, Gracy’s as sharp as a razor.
Under her leadership, she’s taken Bitget out of relative obscurity to become a leading exchange with the largest copy trading platform and 120 million users globally.
“My goal is to bring Bitget to a higher level, to acquire more users, and to build stronger partnerships,” she says.
If Gracy’s chosen career path is rare, her background is equally unconventional, growing up in Southwest China with a strong female role model. She shares:
“I was so inspired by my mom, who was a single mother, but also an MBA. Because she was so busy with her work and study, at nine years old, I was basically a Michelin-starred chef already. If a Michelin star means boiling instant noodles without burning the house down.”
She smiles:
“My childhood was very much like a mini MBA, where MBA stands for Master of Basic Autonomy. Lesson one: if you want noodles, you better learn to cook them yourself.”
While her mother didn’t pass on her culinary skills, she did take Gracy to a lot of restaurants, and, having studied at the best university in the region, she imparted three valuable lessons:
“One: independence. Two: going after what you want. Three: how essential it is to get an education.”
Research has shown that educating women and girls is key to improving communities, Gracy explains, and even to increasing a country’s GDP. “That’s why I was so excited to partner with UNICEF and join the Game Changers’ Coalition,” she enthuses.
The Game Changers’ Coalition seeks to advance digital education and gender equality by empowering women and girls in blockchain and web3. Together with UNICEF, Bitget will provide scholarships, mentorship, and educational programs to 300,000 participants across eight developing countries, including Morocco, India, and Cambodia, with a long-term goal of reaching 1.1 million people across 12 countries by 2027.
The initiative emphasizes building foundational skills, supporting girls as creators in the digital economy, and developing a global support network. With such lofty goals, Bitget isn’t doing things by half, but then, I rather doubt that Gracy would put her name on anything less.
“We know that women are underrepresented in our crypto community, but we want to rewrite the rules of inclusion in web3. The Game Changers’ Coalition is our next step in doing that. If we want to have true equality, it’s essential that all these women are given opportunities to learn about this new and paradigm-shifting technology. “
I tell Gracy about a fact I heard that women CEOs typically have to go through a lot more postings than their male counterparts, and that women in blockchain come up against additional barriers, such as widespread misogyny and stereotyping. On more than one occasion at a conference or side event, I’ve been mistaken for the lady serving drinks.
Of course, educating women is a solid initiative, I say, but when barriers like this exist, how else do we go about changing these lingering perceptions? She sits for a moment in quiet thought before answering:
“That’s definitely one of the goals of Blockchain4her. It’s about building female role models and changing people’s perspectives. We have a long line of female ambassadors… We want to set up these examples for females to know that you can be one of them… if they can do it, you can do it.”
She continues:
“The other thing about changing the mindset is, I actually say this a lot in various panels, especially when I’m in a panel with five different gentlemen talking about stablecoins or regulations, or exchanges, or business, et cetera. People ask me a lot: You’re a female CEO. How do you balance work and life? I’m like, why don’t you ask them? They also have a family. Why don’t you ask them how to balance work and life? Things like that about mindset changing are what we want to work toward.”
Are there ever times when Gracy feels she’s taken less seriously as a female CEO or her opinion given less weight?
“There might be cases where I’m not taken seriously, and in those cases, I don’t really care. I’ll just prove myself and do the right thing for me and the company. Also, there are certain other cases, especially in terms of marketing, where being a woman became a leverage, and an advantage.”
She gives the example of a recent feature in Coindesk’s top 50 most influential women in web3 and AI, among the likes of Cathie Wood and Cynthia Lummis. She shrugs:
“It just gives me more marketing opportunities. That’s what I mean by saying being a woman in this industry is both a blessing and a curse.”
Gracy started at Bitget in 2022 as Managing Director and was promoted to CEO in May 2024. I ask what vision she brought to Bitget and what her objectives were coming on as CEO:
“My vision, and also part of the founding team’s and higher executive team’s vision, was to bring the 2022 version of Bitget to a more global platform.”
As a China-born exchange, Gracy was one of the “very few” executives who spoke fluent English, and her role as Managing Director was to elevate the Bitget brand image and influence globally. She affirms:
“Today, we are indeed a global exchange. We serve more than 100 countries. Our own employees come from more than 42 different countries, and passport holders, and we have teams on every single continent other than the Arctic and Antarctica.”
She unlocks her phone and holds it up. “Here,” she says, “I can just quickly show you.” I’m looking at a screen with the clock faces of multiple destinations. She says:
“I literally have Los Angeles all the way covered to Auckland in New Zealand. So I need to know where everyone is and if I need to have a meeting with them, what’s their time zone, what’s my time zone? Things like that are a good way of looking at how global we are.”
This is the first time I’ve come across a CEO or founder who gave a flying hoot about what time they called their employees, or who didn’t outsource this task to their EAs. Looks, brains, wit, and respect for her fellow humans. I think I’m developing a little crush. She continues:
“Now, am I satisfied with all the results? Are we global enough? I think there are still ways to work and to improve.”
Beyond onboarding international users and employees, a sizable chunk of Bitget’s growth this year is driven by institutions. Gracy says:
“I’m in conversations with lots of market makers, VCs, some tokenized money market funds, and all the various institutional partnerships we’re building. Today, we are more focused on the institutional side because we were lagging in terms of institutional clients, maybe before last year.”
If Bitget was lagging in the institutional race, the exchange has quickly caught up: 80% of Bitget’s spot volume now comes from this group, and 80% of crypto quant firms are using Bitget to trade. What attracts them to the platform specifically, and how does this influence the company’s approach?
“This afternoon, actually, I need to meet local regulators to talk about us getting different licenses. Dubai is one region. Actually, it’s not just Dubai, it’s also Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, different countries and jurisdictions we’re looking at to have conversations or we’ve had some conversations.”
She says that Bitget has modified its strategy to accommodate institutional clients in several ways, but “compliance is definitely one of them.” Bitget is also rolling out continuous updates and tooling, such as unified trading accounts, to make institutional clients feel at home.
“Institutional clients need more dashboards. They need higher, faster lines. Otherwise, they just don’t want to join you. Unified trading accounts is a new product we are launching in order to better serve our institutional VIP clients.”
Since no two clients’ needs are equal, Bitget takes its institutional approach on a case-by-case basis. Gracy explains:
“Even if they are all market makers, they have different preferences. Some want this, some want that. So what we do is just like running a restaurant, we give them a menu and they can choose this and that.”
She smiles as she returns to a restaurant analogy, a business she appears to understand well and thinks fondly of from her days boiling noodles and shadowing the footsteps of her superhero mom. I want to ask if that’s where Gracy would be if she hadn’t fallen down the crypto rabbithole, but I know she doesn’t have much time, and we move on swiftly instead.
“We have given a lot of thought to serving the U.S. jurisdiction, maybe starting with a certain group of users. But so far, we haven’t decided whether we will enter the U.S. market. I don’t see that coming soon. Even if the U.S. is becoming more crypto-friendly, passing the stablecoin bill… regulations around exchanges are still kind of cooking, and we can’t make any decision based on assumption or speculation.”
And what are Gracy’s thoughts on the market today? With Bitcoin grinding slowly up, then trading sideways, and altcoins notably trailing, are we in a bull or a bear? For that matter, are we even in a traditional cycle, or does Gracy subscribe to the supercycle thesis?
“My personal opinion is that we don’t have the four-year bull-bear market anymore. We are in a supercycle, and this supercycle is largely driven by macroeconomic factors, including M2 supply, like quantitative easing, and different fiscal and monetary policies around the world, especially in the U.S., Europe, and China.”
“In my opinion, you know, $100K, today’s Bitcoin price, is still a good purchase price or entry price for those who don’t have any Bitcoin. I think we are in a supercycle. But supercycle for Bitcoin doesn’t mean supercycle for altcoins.”
Beyond Ethereum, Solana, and “maybe some other coins,” Gracy says it’s not as easy as it used to be to raise capital and build a project that attracts and retains a meaningful user base.
“The very small coins are seeing lots of problems right now, especially the older projects that have been listed on many exchanges, but the project team is not doing very well… Today, it’s much harder because you really need to build an appropriate product and have lots of users. And I think that is a healthier way of people entering this industry.”
Beyond engaging with regulators and growing its international and institutional base, what else is in the pipeline for Bitget?
“We’re not just building an exchange,” Gracy insists, “we’re more interested in how to serve our users better. What are their needs in terms of trading? What are their needs in terms of daily activities? So we’re embedding a lot around PayFi.”
PayFi is Bitget Wallet’s blockchain-based initiative to simplify crypto and real-world payments and financing by integrating DeFi and real-world assets (RWAs). Gracy explains:
“What we see right now is, all the global credit card networks have almost a 3% to 6% cost per transaction that is taken from merchandise and from the retail users, and sometimes it takes three to four days to just settle a global transaction. So lots of efficiency, and money, and time can be saved in those transactions by stablecoins and PayFi.”
She’s quick to add that Bitget will, “of course,” follow all the necessary procedures, including Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), and Know Your Business (KYB). She adds:
“Another thing we are working hard on is AI; how to have AI bots and using AI to streamline some of our services to detect fraud, or to serve our users for efficiencies, those sorts of things. So, AI and PayFi are some of the businesses that we are more interested in.”
Gracy has to meet with another journalist before her afternoon appointments, but she’s not too busy to insist on a photo with me in front of Lionel Messi’s signed football shirt with the Bitget logo embossed on the front.
I wonder if this type of interaction comes naturally to Gracy or whether she’s had to work at it; and, for that matter, whether she’s had to work at it twice as hard as a man. She replies:
“Being a woman is who I am and what I was born with. I don’t really care what people think of me. It’s more about what’s the right thing and how to bring this company forward.”
