Business risk management strategy
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The most revealing crypto story Bybit CEO Ben Zhou has heard lately did not come from a trader chasing returns. It came from an Argentine family office that wanted to do the opposite.
They were not interested in Bitcoin. They were not looking for leverage or a 100x. They wanted access to tokenized assets, gold, ETFs, foreign-market exposure, as a more efficient way to spread their risk. Most of their wealth sat in one region, and getting diversified exposure through a bank like HSBC or Standard Chartered was slow and difficult. On-chain, it was neither. The request surprised even Zhou.
“Typically people don’t use crypto to de-risk,” he said. “Typically they use crypto to go 100x.”
“They said, we don’t even want to deploy Bitcoin, we just want to deploy stablecoin to these things,” Zhou recalled. “We are actually de-risking our existing portfolio. We’re not touching crypto. We’re just using crypto as infrastructure.”
The clearest sign that crypto has crossed from speculative asset to financial plumbing is not institutions buying it. It is sophisticated capital using the rails while refusing to touch the asset.
The graduation
Zhou describes the current market as one that is, in his words, graduating. “Crypto is becoming the infrastructure,” he said.
Speculation has not gone away. It remains a large part of the ecosystem. But it is no longer the center of gravity. Payments, settlement, tokenized assets and cross-border connectivity are doing more of the work of adoption than price action is.
Whether that transition is happening fast enough remains debated. Trading still dominates industry revenues, and speculative activity remains responsible for much of crypto’s public attention.
His reference point is not a financial product. It is the internet. Just as the internet eventually flattened access to information regardless of where you lived, blockchain rails could flatten access to financial services. A user in Hong Kong, Lagos or Buenos Aires today faces wildly different banking systems, capital controls and investment menus. A system that runs continuously and across borders narrows those gaps.
The practical version of that is mundane and important. Bank wires for institutions still take two to three days to settle, and the markets they touch close on weekends. Crypto rails do not. For an exporter managing currency exposure, or a family office repositioning a portfolio, those two or three days are not dead time. They represent capital that can be moved, hedged or redeployed. That is true even in places where the banks work perfectly well.
The numbers behind the shift are no longer small. The total supply of stablecoins, the dollar tokens that move value across these rails, sits at about $315 billion as of mid-2026, an all-time high reached while crypto prices spent much of the year falling. In May, the total briefly topped $322 billion, which by CoinDesk’s measure was enough to exceed the foreign exchange reserves of 95 countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada. A purely speculative asset does not grow through a down market. Infrastructure does.
For Bybit, which built its reputation as a crypto trading venue, the shift is also reshaping what customers expect from the platform.
Why tokenization makes the de-risking possible
The timing matters. Tokenization remained a niche concept through much of the previous crypto cycle, which was dominated by NFTs and meme coins. But elevated Treasury yields, the rise of stablecoins, and a wave of institutional products have shifted attention toward using blockchain rails to move and manage traditional assets. The result is a market increasingly focused on infrastructure rather than new cryptocurrencies.
For years, the relationship between traditional finance and crypto was framed as a fight: incumbents versus disruptors. Zhou thinks that framing is out of date.
What he sees instead is convergence. Asset managers are exploring tokenization, payment companies are buying crypto infrastructure, and regulators are writing frameworks to fold blockchain assets into the existing system. “What used to be segregated is now being connected through this technology,” he said.
Tokenization is the mechanism. For an asset manager, it opens distribution to investors who previously could not access the product. For an investor, it provides exposure to things that were otherwise expensive or impractical to hold. The Argentine family office is exactly that dynamic in miniature. Tokenized gold and ETFs were simply the faster route to diversification, and the blockchain was the distribution layer, nothing more. What they required was transparency. They wanted to see the paperwork, understand how the real-world asset could be redeemed, and test that redemption process before deploying capital. Once that was proven, they were comfortable putting stablecoins to work.
That family office is not an outlier. The value of tokenized real-world assets excluding stablecoins has surged to roughly $32 billion, more than five times larger than it was at the start of 2025. Tokenized US Treasuries are the largest single category at around $15 billion, with money-market funds from BlackRock and Franklin Templeton each holding more than $2 billion on-chain. The buyers driving that growth are not retail traders. They are banks, asset managers and treasuries treating the chain as settlement and custody infrastructure.
Real, but not here yet
The catch is that the big money has not actually shown up. For all the talk of institutional adoption, the allocations remain tiny against the scale of traditional markets.
Zhou points to the largest spot Bitcoin ETF as an example. “It’s only 0.5% of their overall ETF portfolio,” he said of BlackRock. “It would be nice to get to 5%. Then it’s 10 times where we are.”
The broader data backs the caution. Most institutional surveys still put crypto allocations in the low single digits, often between 1% and 5% even among firms that have adopted it, with the biggest commitments concentrated in crypto-native funds and family offices.
So the infrastructure thesis is real and the flows are still a rounding error. That is what “early” now means. The industry has called itself early for a decade, but the definition has shifted. It is no longer early as an asset class. It is early as a financial infrastructure layer, with trillions of dollars yet to route through it, and the unlock Zhou keeps returning to is regulatory.
“We really need clarity to pass to really start to see institutional massive flow,” he said.
The picture there is half-built. The GENIUS Act established the first federal framework for dollar-backed payment stablecoins in the United States, giving issuers and financial institutions greater regulatory certainty. But the market-structure legislation Zhou points to as the next unlock for institutional adoption, the CLARITY Act, has yet to become law. The rails are being regulated. The broader framework for digital assets remains unfinished.
The risk Zhou actually worries about
Asked for his single biggest fear for the next few years, Zhou did not name a hack, a regulator or a market crash.
He named success.
His worry is that when prices recover, speculation comes roaring back and drowns out the innovation the industry actually needs. He looks at the last cycle and sees meme coins, decentralized derivatives and prediction markets, things he considers more speculative than genuinely new. The next wave he wants to see is different: agentic wallets, AI-driven transactions, real utility built on the rails now being laid.
“My fear would be that when the market recovers, the speculative nature will come back and potentially overcome the true innovation that we need,” he said.
That tension may define crypto’s next chapter. A family office in Argentina is already treating the technology as a utility, a way to hold less risk rather than more. The open question is whether the rest of the market follows that lead, or whether the next bull run pulls everyone back toward the same speculation the industry has spent years trying to outgrow.
