Interviewee: Owen, Bybit CTO
Interview and Compilation: Alex Liu, Foresight News
The cryptocurrency market is developing rapidly. Although the volatility is high, the market sentiment is gradually warming up, especially the performance of the derivatives market. In this context, Bybit, as one of the leading cryptocurrency trading platforms, not only ranks among the top in the derivatives market, but also continues to make efforts in user experience, security, and technological innovation. Recently, Bybit has achieved remarkable results in terms of average daily trading volume and technological breakthroughs.
Behind the impressive performance, technology has always played a crucial role. From system stability to user asset security, and to innovative product design, technological capabilities directly determine the core competitiveness of the platform. For this purpose, we have specially invited Owen, the technical leader of Bybit. As one of the founding team members of the platform, he has been leading the team to continuously break through technical barriers and help the platform stand out in the fierce market competition since the establishment of Bybit.
In this interview, Owen will share with us Bybit's exploration and achievements in technological innovation, system architecture, and user security, and will also give us a glimpse of the platform's future technical development direction. Let's dive into the story behind Bybit's technology.
Foresight News: How did you enter the crypto industry and eventually become the CTO of Bybit? Please briefly talk about your personal background and work experience.
Owen: Before joining Bybit, I had served as a senior executive in large internet companies and financial companies, and had also engaged in quantitative trading. These experiences gave me an in-depth understanding of internet architecture and financial trading architecture. At the same time, I was very optimistic about the prospects of the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. So when I learned about Bybit's vision and goals, I was very excited, because it is not only a trading platform, but also an important force in promoting the widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies and integrating with the traditional financial system.
As one of the founding team members of Bybit, I have been serving as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) since the establishment of Bybit, working with the team to build a secure and user-friendly platform to help more people enter and explore the crypto world. Through continuous innovation and optimization of technology, we hope to provide users with the best trading experience.
Foresight News: Bybit's derivatives trading volume has ranked second among CEXs. What has Bybit done to gain the trust of traders?
Owen: Bybit has become the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, with an average daily trading volume of hundreds of billions of dollars. This achievement is mainly due to our high emphasis on user fund security. Bybit has always used the most advanced security and risk control technologies, including MPC wallets and multi-factor authentication, to effectively protect user assets. To ensure user confidence in asset security, Bybit has also undergone third-party audits to prove our reserve ratios, and transparently shares this information with users through Merkle tree technology. In addition, Bybit regularly publishes reserve proof reports, showing that the reserve ratios of our major assets exceed 100%.
Bybit also uses advanced security measures such as YubiKey, fund passwords, two-factor authentication (2FA), and biometrics to further enhance user protection.
Bybit maintains regular communication with institutional clients and VIP clients, actively listens to client suggestions, and provides timely support and assistance to users, further enhancing user trust in the platform.
In the future, Bybit will continue to optimize security measures and improve the user experience, maintaining a leading position in the highly competitive cryptocurrency market and providing global traders with a secure and stable trading environment.
Foresight News: Faced with growing trading demands and high-frequency requests, how does Bybit ensure system stability?
Owen: When developing product features or systems, Bybit ensures that the resources invested in system stability are on par with those required for business function development, which includes investments in architecture and server resources to ensure high availability across clouds and availability zones. To maintain system stability, Bybit has established a comprehensive capacity assessment model, using stress testing and historical data from major events and market conditions to accurately assess system capacity. For example, Bybit conducts production environment stress tests, using traffic recording and replay to accurately simulate user traffic, avoiding the problem of inconsistency between the test and production environments.
Bybit also has multi-layer overload protection and circuit breaker throttling mechanisms to ensure the system operates normally under high traffic conditions. If the traffic exceeds the system's load capacity, the system will automatically trigger overload, circuit breaker, and throttling, blocking excess requests to ensure that the majority of users can access the platform normally. Even if a small number of users encounter request failures, they usually only need to retry to succeed.
Additionally, for major event scenarios, Bybit has developed comprehensive system risk assessments and emergency plans, and conducts regular drills to ensure the team can quickly identify issues and restore service. Before events, Bybit will enable business function and technical downgrade measures. During peak traffic periods, some non-core business functions may be disabled or downgraded (such as the search function) to reduce system pressure. By pre-configuring popular search keywords, users can more conveniently find the required trading pairs without invoking the search service, further improving the user experience.
Bybit's architecture supports elastic scaling, allowing it to quickly expand or reduce capacity. For example, a few days before major events, Bybit can quickly scale up the system capacity by 10-20 times, and then quickly scale down within 1-2 days after the event. This flexibility not only better controls server costs, but also ensures that peak traffic demands are met during events.
In August this year, Bybit's single-day trading volume exceeded $100 billion, and it hopes to achieve a target of processing 1 million transactions per second by the end of the year, reflecting Bybit's determination to maintain system stability and provide a reliable platform for traders.
Foresight News: What are the technical challenges in implementing Bybit's Unified Trading Account (UTA), and what are the advantages in user experience?
Owen: Bybit's Unified Trading Account (UTA) is one of the first of its kind in the industry, allowing customers to use over 160 tokens for any type of trading, greatly improving the efficiency of margin utilization. UTA requires the integration of various trading products, including spot, futures, and options, requiring the system to support collateralization and calculation of different asset types, as well as handle multiple margin models, including isolated margin, cross margin, and portfolio margin. This cross-product asset management requires highly efficient data processing capabilities, increasing the complexity of system design and operation. However, from the perspective of user experience, the Unified Trading Account has significant advantages, as it can simplify the user experience while improving capital efficiency, so we believe it is very worthwhile.
By integrating all trading tools into a single account, users can easily access various trading products without switching between different accounts. This "one-stop" account model not only improves the convenience of trading, but also simplifies asset management, allowing users to more flexibly use their margin assets for trading. For example, even if users do not hold a specific settlement currency, they can use other supported margin assets to trade, thereby lowering the threshold for capital utilization.
Furthermore, the Unified Trading Account also optimizes risk management. Since the profits and losses of different products can offset each other, users can more effectively manage their overall investment portfolio. This flexibility allows traders to better adjust their strategies in the face of market volatility, thereby improving their trading efficiency and success rate.
Foresight News: As the technical leader, what do you think are the most important technologies for CEXs? How is Bybit's tech team working on this?
Owen: For centralized exchanges (CEXs), the security and stability of the system are the most important technical factors. With the surge in user numbers and trading volumes, ensuring that the system can withstand high-frequency trading and large-scale user requests is crucial. Bybit's tech team has built a highly available architecture, implemented multi-layered security protection measures, and conducted rigorous stress testing to ensure system stability and the platform's ability to withstand sudden traffic surges, maintaining normal operation during peak periods.
Here is the English translation:At the same time, we have taken a series of measures to ensure the security of wallets, user accounts and funds, as well as data security, including multi-party computation (MPC). These measures can enhance security without sacrificing the user experience, fully protecting user assets. We have also established strong transaction risk control capabilities to prevent market manipulation and spoofing, and implemented a strong forced liquidation mechanism, so that users can trade with more peace of mind.
To maintain our industry-leading position, the Bybit technical team has also taken proactive measures in terms of recruitment and technology roadmap. We continue to attract top talent and invest in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, to ensure that our platform always has strong processing capabilities and security, and continues to lead the development of the cryptocurrency industry.
Foresight News: In the previous large-scale airdrop token recharge incident, Bybit had experienced delayed token crediting, for which Bybit responsibly provided compensation and received positive feedback. Has Bybit made targeted upgrades to the system to avoid similar situations?
Owen: Bybit has been continuously optimizing its existing products and systems. When developing product features or systems, Bybit ensures that the resources invested in system stability are on par with those invested in business function development, including investments in architecture and servers, to ensure high availability across clouds and availability zones, in order to maintain the stability of the system.
For major event scenarios, Bybit has comprehensive system risk assessment and emergency response plans, and conducts regular drills to ensure the team can quickly identify issues and restore services (such as business downgrading or scaling). To further enhance system stability, Bybit conducts accurate system capacity assessments through stress testing and historical event data. For example, conducting production environment stress tests, using traffic recording and playback to accurately simulate user traffic, in order to avoid the problem of inconsistency between the test environment and the production environment.
Foresight News: After the FTX collapse, asset security and the security of the trading platform system are the primary concerns of users. What measures does Bybit take to ensure user asset security and maintain platform security through what technical means?
Owen: Bybit is committed to providing users with a secure, transparent and efficient trading environment, while actively responding to market demands and continuously improving service quality.
Bybit regularly publishes proof of reserve reports to ensure that all user assets are fully supported, demonstrating Bybit's commitment to transparency and security. Through these reports, users can understand the asset status of the platform in real-time, enhancing their trust in the exchange.
To further enhance security, Bybit collaborates with leading third-party virtual asset custody service providers (such as Fireblocks and Copper) to support more asset custody options. This collaboration not only enhances user confidence in the platform's security, but also provides users with more flexible asset management options. Through multi-signature and cold storage technologies, user funds are protected at a higher level.
In terms of security defense, Bybit has implemented comprehensive risk detection and emergency capabilities. The real-time risk control system can identify abnormal user behavior and employee account anomalies, and promptly detect and take measures against potential risks. In addition, Bybit has also established strong transaction risk control capabilities to prevent market manipulation and spoofing, and implemented a strong forced liquidation mechanism to ensure fairness and transparency in the trading process.
At the same time, Bybit regularly conducts strict internal and external audits to ensure compliance and transparency, helping to identify potential risks and ensure that platform operations meet industry standards. Finally, to further enhance platform security, Bybit has launched a bug bounty program, encouraging security researchers to discover and report potential vulnerabilities. By rewarding those who help improve platform security, Bybit can continuously strengthen its security measures. This open and collaborative attitude not only enhances the platform's security, but also sets a good example for the entire industry.
