How Ben Zhou Built Bybit Into a Global Exchange, Survived a $1.5 Billion Hack, and What Comes Next

In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit, to discuss how he led the company through the largest security breach in Web3 history, and why he believes the next generation of crypto exchanges will be full financial platforms for the internet age.

From Crypto Exchange to Financial Infrastructure

Ben’s story goes beyond Bybit surviving a crisis. It is also about how much the role of a crypto exchange has changed. In the early days, exchanges were mostly trading platforms. Users came for derivatives, spot markets, leverage, and speculation. Today, Ben sees a transition happening. As he puts it, crypto exchanges are becoming “one financial platform,” offering payments, cards, savings products, cross-border transfers, yield products, and access to both crypto and traditional assets.

His larger argument is that crypto is doing to money what the internet did to information. Before the Internet, access to information depended heavily on geography. Today, someone in Vietnam, Iceland, Nigeria, or New York can access the same information online. Ben believes finance should evolve the same way, and tokenized assets, RWAs, and 24/7 global markets as part of the same shift. The long-term goal is not just to make crypto trading easier. It is to remove the financial barriers that still exist because of geography.

Why a CEO Goes Public Three Days After Losing $1.5 Billion

Many people criticised Ben for appearing on a podcast just days after Bybit lost $1.5 billion in a hack. To them, it looked strange for a CEO to be doing interviews during a crisis. Ben saw it differently. “To me, building trust at that critical stage of one week and also explaining the journey of why we do certain things is probably where I should be spending my time,” he says.

That line captures much of Ben’s leadership philosophy. In a crisis, the CEO’s job is to become the public trust layer for the company. He also makes a deeper point: the fact that he could communicate publicly showed that Bybit was not falling apart internally. If the company still needed him to manage every operational detail, that would have been a different problem. His job was to go where the company needed him most. At that moment, it needed clarity, trust, and visible leadership.

The Discipline of Recovery

Despite the $1.5 billion hack, Bybit still paid bonuses and dividends that year. Beyond the finances, the recovery required operational discipline, security redesign, and emotional control.

One of the biggest lessons Ben took from the hack was that security could not stop at internal systems. The breach involved a third-party wallet provider, which exposed a gap in how Bybit defined security responsibility. After the incident, the company expanded the scope of its security function so that any asset touching Bybit would fall under stricter monitoring.

The response also became deeply physical. Ben describes building a banking-grade cold wallet system using HSM infrastructure, vaults, restricted access, multiple approval layers, and offline controls. The point was simple: after a failure of trust in external infrastructure, Bybit had to build a system where compromising assets would require an almost impossible combination of physical access, internal collusion, and technical breach. The public moved on after a few days, but internally, Bybit worked on the problem for months.

Crisis Management as Clear Thinking

Ben’s advice to leaders facing a crisis is to stop spending energy on what cannot be controlled. The money was already gone. Public criticism was inevitable. The past could not be undone. What mattered was what Bybit could still do: communicate transparently, reassure users, keep withdrawals open, organise teams, and rebuild trust.

He explains that in those moments, a leader cannot create more chaos by asking everyone what to do. The leader has to give clear marching orders. Finance does this. Wallet team does that. PR prepares this. Support tells users this. That does not mean pretending to have all the answers, but every move should stem from an understanding that uncertainty spreads quickly when people do not see direction.

AI, Data, and the Company as a Kitchen

Another important theme is how Bybit is using AI internally. Ben offers one of the clearest metaphors in the episode. Before AI, business teams were served “pre-cooked meals” by BI teams. They received standard dashboards and had to request changes whenever they needed something new.

Now, he says, “everyone gets a kitchen.”

The BI team no longer cooks every meal. Instead, it cleans, structures, and packages the data so business teams can use AI tools to build their own dashboards, ask better questions, and respond faster. For Ben, AI is not magic. It is more like the arrival of Excel: a major productivity layer, but one whose true impact depends on how each department learns to use it. He is also cautious about companies using AI as an excuse for layoffs. The real question, in his view, is not whether people are using AI, but whether the company can measure actual efficiency gains.

Building for an AI-Agent Financial World

Bybit is also preparing for AI externally. Ben says existing exchange APIs were built for trading firms, not AI agents. An AI agent trying to use a traditional exchange API has to waste time and tokens figuring out how to place orders, buy products, or interact with the platform.

Bybit’s response is to make the exchange more “AI-ready,” with clearer API specs, MCP servers, and sub-accounts that allow users to control what an AI agent can and cannot do. In simpler words, if AI agents are going to participate in financial markets, exchanges need better road signs, menus, and safety rails. This is where Ben sees crypto and AI converging. AI may become the decision layer, but crypto provides the transaction layer.

The Endgame for Bybit

When asked about the next dimension for Bybit, Ben’s answer is clear: Bybit wants to become the one-stop financial platform for users’ finances. In his words, the future concepts of “bank, broker, crypto exchange” will merge. Users should be able to buy crypto, stocks, gold, earn yield, spend with cards, transfer money, pay bills, and access financial products from one place.

And Bybit is trying to become that global, always-on financial interface.

A Responsibility-Driven Problem Solver

The episode closes with a more personal reflection. Ben says money has not made him happier by itself. What it gives him is freedom over how he spends his time. He also admits he is better at building than investing, and that much of his personal strategy is defensive. When asked who he really is, Ben gives perhaps the most revealing answer of the conversation: he is a “responsibility-driven problem solver.”

That phrase ties the whole episode together. The hack, the recovery, the security rebuild, the AI strategy, the sponsorship discipline, the regulatory conversations, and the super-app vision all come back to the same operating system. Ben is driven by problems, responsibility, and the need to keep moving when things break.

For an industry that has seen many leaders disappear, deflect, or collapse under pressure, that may be the most important lesson from Bybit’s recovery. Trust is rebuilt through decisions, systems, execution, and the willingness to show up when it would be easier not to.

👉If you enjoyed reading the summary, head over to When Shift Happens on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform to access the full convo. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQxppCk6hJM