ByBit Founder: I Survived the Biggest Crypto Hack and Still Had My Best Year | E168

Bybit CEO Ben Zhou recounts rebuilding trust after a $1.5B hack, delivering a banking‑grade security rebuild, AI-driven BI, and a plan to unite banking, trading and Web3 in one app.

Key Takeaways

After a $1.5B hack, CEO Ben Zhou led rapid trust-building with clear public communication, decisive marching orders for finance, wallets, support, PR, and acceptance of limited legal recovery.
Completed an eight‑month security overhaul: banking‑grade cold HSMs in air‑gapped vaults, split-key custodians, layered protections, improved vendor oversight, and expanded security scope.
Transformed BI with AI: shifted from fixed dashboards to self-service AI-built dashboards, OpenCLO/OpenClaw, MCP servers and AI subaccounts with safety limits for agent-driven trading.
Product vision: merge bank, broker and crypto exchange into one global 24/7 platform offering trading, payments, savings, real‑world asset tokenization and full money management.
Regulatory and partnerships strategy: proactively engage governments, prioritize compliance, support projects like Athena, and favor partnerships over direct competition.
Marketing rigor: require activation plans, asset inventories, invite tracking and invite-to-close KPIs to measure ROI before committing large sponsorship budgets (e.g., F1).
Business health: recovered hack losses by October, paid bonuses/dividends, reached highest revenue year, and grew to 85M registered/KYC users with ~500k daily active users.

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