Ignacio Aguirre Franco, CMO of Bitget – Interview Series

Ignacio Aguirre Franco, CMO of Bitget, is a marketing leader with more than 15 years of experience merging technical expertise with strategic growth execution across the Tech, Blockchain, Fintech, and Crypto sectors. Before joining Bitget, he led global marketing at Scorechain and Kelp DAO, driving adoption in blockchain analytics, DeFi, and liquid restaking. His earlier roles at Xapo Bank and major tech firms sharpened his ability to scale brands, execute data-driven growth initiatives, and position products in highly competitive markets. His blend of coding proficiency, blockchain knowledge, and marketing strategy enables him to craft campaigns that resonate across Web3, compliance, and digital finance ecosystems.

Bitget is a global cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 platform offering spot and futures trading, copy trading, bot trading, and a secure digital asset wallet. Founded in 2018, it provides a comprehensive, user-focused environment for buying, trading, and storing cryptocurrencies, emphasizing security, accessibility, and high-liquidity infrastructure.

You’ve held senior roles across Xapo Bank, Scorechain, Kelp DAO, and now Bitget — all in areas where finance meets technology. How have these experiences shaped the way you see the next generation of digital trading platforms?

Looking back, I’d say my career has been one long lesson in what really matters when technology and finance intersect. Xapo Bank was where I learned what institutional trust means in practice — how much custody, asset protection, and reliability truly matter.

Later, at Scorechain, I had a chance to plunge into blockchain analytics and compliance, understanding how data and transparency scale. And my work at Kelp DAO helped me realize the power of community-first, decentralized governance models.

All of those experiences came together when I joined Bitget. Here, the vision isn’t to be “another exchange” — it’s to build what we call a Universal Exchange, or UEX. Modern-day users don’t live in separate financial worlds; they want both traditional and crypto instruments to be easily and securely available.

My career up to this point taught me that to answer those needs, the next generation of financial platforms must combine three things: asset variety, regulatory-grade security, and seamless client experience. Bitget’s UEX model is built exactly around that principle.

Bitget now calls itself a Universal Exchange, merging crypto, derivatives, and traditional market access. What does this unified model unlock that earlier exchange architectures couldn’t?

For years, traders had no choice but to jump between apps, wallets, and accounts in order to access different markets. Crypto lived in one stack, derivatives in another, tokenized RWAs somewhere else altogether. And traditional assets like stock futures generally operate on rails that have nothing to do with crypto at all.

The UEX model ends that fragmentation. It gives users a single platform, with one account and interface that covers everything — spot, futures, tokenized stocks, on-chain markets, and more. No need to switch platforms, no need to waste time. And AI-driven tools like our GetAgent help make navigation that much easier.

Efficiency is paired with intelligence, and people can interact with the financial ecosystem in ways that simply weren’t possible with older exchange architectures.

Bitget’s US stock-linked futures recently passed several billion dollars in cumulative volume. What does that kind of growth say about user appetite for stock-style exposure inside a crypto environment?

It tells us users want innovation, but without losing a sense of familiarity. For many traders, stock-linked futures are a comfortable entry point into digital markets, because they already have the knowledge of how these assets work. They simply want the 24/7 liquidity access and speed that crypto-native platforms offer on top of that.

The fact that our U.S. stock futures are on the rise shows how fast this demand is growing. Like I already mentioned, people don’t want to constantly switch between platforms. If they can get equity-style exposure inside a trustworthy crypto app, they’ll take it. This is exactly the kind of cross-market behavior the UEX model is designed for.

Liquidity fragmentation has been a persistent challenge across CeFi, DeFi, and TradFi. What is Bitget doing to create a more cohesive liquidity and execution layer?

Fragmentation exists because, broadly speaking, many systems still operate independently, like their own separate islands. CeFi has deep liquidity but is mostly isolated. DeFi is transparent but spread across many pools and chains. Traditional markets run on their own rails entirely.

What we’re doing at Bitget is building a unified architecture that brings all these markets together, aggregating liquidity from multiple sources and routing execution through a single engine. Our users get access to deeper books, tighter spreads, and faster settlement, all without having to move their assets anywhere else.

To put it simply, the goal is to bring the market to the user — not the other way around.

Hybrid CeFi–DeFi models are gaining momentum. Beyond the narrative hype, what tangible advantages do they offer traders?

Hybrid models give traders the best of both worlds. From CeFi, they get execution speed, predictable settlements, customer protection, and unified risk systems. From DeFi, they get transparency, permissionless access, and exposure to on-chain yield and tokenized assets.

The core value here is convenience without the need to compromise. Without having to choose between efficiency and transparency, or between deep liquidity and decentralized access. A hybrid model lets you move across these environments without friction.

User behaviour is shifting with the rise of AI-powered trading, including the pattern you’ve highlighted where users research during the day and execute at night. How is this influencing the way Bitget designs its products and workflows?

The shift toward AI-powered trading means we’re seeing users engage with markets around the clock, not in the old day-trader rhythm, but with distinct cycles: research by day, execution by night. That change isn’t a fringe behavior. It reflects how global, digital-first communities treat markets like living ecosystems. At Bitget, we don’t treat that as a curiosity, we build for it. 

AI tools, such as our GetAgent assistant, provide users with previously unattainable levels of speed and insight.  In order to help users find opportunities and make wise decisions, AI can instantly aggregate on-chain data, market flows, sentiment, and risk factors. That capability trades downtime for instant availability, meaning people can research during work hours and still execute when global markets move overnight.

Knowing this, we design Bitget’s product and workflow around flexible engagement windows and continuous infrastructure readiness. Our order-matching engines, liquidity layers, and execution systems are optimized for 24/7 operation, with latency, slippage control, and risk-management guardrails that hold up even under overnight volume spikes. On the UX side, we emphasize clarity and simplicity: analytics and AI insights during the day, one-click execution when it’s time.

We also build for personalization. AI agents today can learn individual user risk appetites, trading history, and behavior patterns, giving more tailored suggestions and reducing noise. 

For many users, the result is not just reactive trading, but a more thoughtful approach: research → plan → execute. That rhythm encourages longer-term engagement, fewer emotional trades, and more sustainable growth.

Finally, this behavior shift affects how we think about liquidity, execution quality, and user support. Overnight events, news, macro shifts, global market opens, matter far more when people trade across time zones. By building infrastructure and product flows with that in mind, Bitget ensures reliability and consistency regardless of when users engage. In a world where liquidity can dry up instantly, that continuous performance becomes a differentiator.

In short, the rise of AI-powered trading isn’t just changing how individual users behave, it’s redefining the design requirements for platforms. Bitget’s response is to build UEX-ready workflows that assume global users, global hours, and global liquidity, delivering simplicity, speed, and security at any hour.

Integrating traditional instruments, crypto assets, and DeFi participation introduces complex compliance and risk challenges. How is Bitget approaching this?

We fully realize that merging all these worlds together only raises the complexity, but the unified approach is something that global finance needs, so we push forward with the task nonetheless.

Bitget’s approach is three-fold. First, we build robust infrastructure: proof-of-reserves, multi-factor custody, and a protection fund that underpins the platform’s integrity. For example, in our Q3 2025 Transparency Report, we highlighted an all-asset PoR near 1.8× and an $800 million+ protection fund.

Second, we create unified risk-management systems that treat all asset classes under one view — spot, futures, tokenized stocks, on-chain discovery — so that risk doesn’t sit in silos.

Finally, we build compliance into the design, not as an afterthought. Our listings policy, chain integrations, and global regulatory strategy all reflect that. With more than 70 compliance specialists and registrations across Europe and Latin America, we’re building UEX for transparency and access, not opacity.

Most important of all, we don’t think of this multi-layered approach as a challenge that slows us down. Instead, it is a reflection of our belief in how architecture should be built: so that innovation isn’t compromised by risk or regulation, but enabled by it.

As exchanges become more “all-in-one,” complexity can become a risk. How do you keep things simple for users?

“All-in-one” doesn’t need to be complex. Not for users, at least. And not at the cost of limiting their access to what assets and products they can access.

What users need is a comprehensive interface that they can navigate without too much hassle or frustration. The complex work we do stays behind the scenes, so that users only have to deal with clarity without feeling the architecture underneath.

Regardless of what they do on our platform, the experience should feel like they remain in the same system — not multiple ones stitched together. That’s the core of UEX design.

Looking ahead 12–24 months, what do you believe will define the next market cycle?

I expect that the coming cycle will be defined by utility, infrastructure, and convergence. Not just price speculation. We will see tokenized assets scale, on-chain liquidity deepen, and hybrid CeFi/DeFi flows become a new norm.

It is my belief that the moment adoption shifts from niche audiences to mainstream, financial tools must feel like accessible, everyday instruments, not experimental tech.

Bitget is positioning itself for that future already. From our UEX architecture to AI-powered tools to expansion across global markets, we are lowering entry barriers to bring in the next billion users.

We’re not waiting for the next wave — we’re building the platform the next wave will land on.

Thank you for the great interview. Readers who wish to learn more should visit Bitget.