# Bitget Wallet crosses 100 million users as payments overtake trading transactions Stabledash Live, a Stabledash show. Aug 24, 2026. Alvin Kan. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/the-live-show/episodes/bitget-wallet-crossed-100-million-users-much-of-it-from-aBoOO3JyCbg COO Alvin Kan says the wallet's growth now comes from emerging-market users who spend stablecoins on everyday purchases, not from speculative traders. Bitget Wallet has crossed 100 million users of wallet addresses, according to Alvin Kan, who became the company's COO after leading ecosystem growth at BNB Chain and Sei Labs. Kan says that last month the number of payment transactions on the wallet passed the number of trading transactions on a daily basis. ## From speculation to spending Alvin Kan says that five years ago everyone would have named speculative trading as crypto's main use case, but today it is mostly payments and everyday finance. He says that over the last two years users holding stablecoins began asking how to spend them, which is when Bitget Wallet started building global payment rails. ## Local rails, region by region Kan says much of Bitget Wallet's growth is coming from South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. In Southeast Asia and Latin America, where QR payments are big, users can scan a grocery store's QR code and pay with a stablecoin. In Africa, he says, many stores take neither QR nor card payments but bank transfers, so users type in the merchant's account number and the crypto arrives as fiat. In Pakistan and other South Asian countries, users move crypto into dominant local e-wallets to off-ramp. ## Small swipes, first cards According to Alvin Kan, users swipe their cards about 10 to 15 times a month, spending about $10 to $13 per transaction, while some other crypto cards he has seen average over $700. For many emerging-market users, he says, the Bitget Wallet card was their first Visa or Mastercard, and after a few months of using it they started buying US stocks. ## Trade where you bank Kan says trading liquidity has rotated from meme coins to perps to RWAs, and in recent months to tokenized stocks. His view is that people may not bank where they trade but will trade where they bank. Because capital is most efficient in one place, he expects neobanks and trading apps alike to converge into super apps. On the infrastructure side, Bitget Wallet rebranded its trading product as Bitget WalletX. Kan says the Bitget bridge has processed $1.95 billion in swap volume across almost a million orders. Alvin Kan says the goal is for a wallet to eventually cover savings, earning, spending and borrowing, starting from trust. The company picks its markets on the belief that access to financial services should not depend on where someone was born or what they earn. ## Key takeaways 1. Bitget Wallet has crossed 100 million users, counted as wallet addresses, and its daily payment transactions have overtaken trading transactions for the first time. 2. Alvin Kan says most of the growth comes from South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa, where the wallet plugs into local QR codes, bank transfers and e-wallets. 3. Card users swipe 10 to 15 times a month at about $10 to $13 per transaction, which Kan points to as evidence of everyday spending. ## Chapters - 0:00 Bitget Wallet is building an everyday finance app - 1:56 Users who held stablecoins wanted to spend them locally - 4:10 Wallets have solved cross-chain swaps; local payments remain hard - 7:38 Each region needs its own payment integration - 9:49 Core belief in open financial access drives market choice - 12:17 Swap liquidity serves as infrastructure for payments - 14:26 People trade where they bank, so apps converge - 18:50 Small, frequent card spending shows everyday usage - 21:43 Payment transactions now outnumber trading transactions daily ## Transcript **Alvin Kan** (0:00) Hey, Bill. What's going on, man? You, man. Hey, Zach. Hey, Drew. Nice to meet you. All great here. **Drew Rogers** (0:05) Love it. Remember, Raish, you you you made this work at, like, two or three in the morning your time. Correct? **Alvin Kan** (0:12) What time is it? Yes. It's 12:42AM. I'm drinking lots of sugar right now to keep awake. **Drew Rogers** (0:19) Well, hey. We appreciate it. I will say you're one of the rare ones. We don't get a ton of people calling in from this this sector of the world. You know, Asia is probably the worst time zone for us to cover, and there is something to be said about being boots on the ground and and living in the market that you are building for. So we love covering neobanks. We love covering all things digital dollars. Before we dive into your questions, if anybody's watching right now, if you have a question for Alvin at Bigget Wallet, drop it in chat. We'll ask it to him live. But, Alvin, before we dive in, kinda give us the lay of the land. What do you do at Bigget Wallet, And, you know, what have you been spending your your career recently building? **Alvin Kan** (0:58) Oh, cool. So I'm the chief operating officer at Bigget Wallet. It's a fancy title for basically everything non tech. Right? I'm in charge of it. And what we're doing here is we're building an everyday finance app, right, where users can save, send, and spend in digital dollars or basically any assets that are on the blockchain itself. Right? And if you wanna access any markets from perks to crypto, you're able to do it as well. We have been fortunate to have been building in this space for the last eight years, so we're not a new project. We've gathered over a 100,000,000 users in these eight years. And much of the growth, which I'm sure we'll get into it, you know, very soon, is actually coming from emerging markets. Right? The likes of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. So I think, you know, DeFi and crypto has evolved a lot over the last two, three years. And, you know, five years ago, if you ask me, what is the dominant use case for crypto, everyone would say speculative trading. But today, it's very, very different. I think it's a lot on payments and everyday finance. **Drew Rogers** (1:56) How has your approach kinda evolved? Okay. Because, you know, we've talked with a ton of neobanks. We just had Western Union on. I think when you look at these on the surface, it's an app that you could spend digital dollars, but the way people, I think, are using the apps, the persona of who you're building for is is vastly different. Even when you mentioned trading perps, you see Dogecoin on the website. How has this evolved from, hey. You have your portfolio that you're trading, and then when you want an easy off ramp, you know, here's the option to, like you said now, everyday spend, finance, you know, managing your... The full stack of your finances. **Alvin Kan** (2:37) Yeah. I I think there's two parts to it. Right? And the first part is really a very natural evolution. So we started eight years ago, and we were the first cross chain wallet back then. Right? And, of course, along the way, edge of planters, you know, speculative traders, NFT lovers, they came in. And I think in the last two years, people have been starting to ask, like, alright. I've all this, you know, money on the blockchain. I have stablecoins and so on. So how do I start to use it and spend it, especially in the bear market, right, where you may not want want to be trading, you wanna use it. And this is when we started building, you know, the the global payment network rails. And the abilities then for you to be able to pay using local methods no matter where you are. Right? So for example, in Southeast Asia and in Latin America, QR payments are very, very big. Right? So you're able to, for example, go into grocery store, whether it's in Vietnam or in other Southeast Asian countries, whip out your Big Ed wallet, scan the QR code, and essentially use a stablecoin for payments, right, in a split second. So that's what we've been building, basically, to allow people who have crypto assets, right, to start using it in other ways other than trading. Now along the way, especially in the last one year, we started to realize that there are new, what we call, web 2.5 users coming in. They've heard about crypto. They've heard they... Their their friend is telling them that, hey. There is a shortcut to getting USD and that stablecoins. And why they want it is, again, their local currencies are depreciating, and they want a shortcut to get... You know, I want to be able to save in USD, but at the same time, in the same app, be able to spend it as well. And I think this is what we've been building. **Host** (4:10) Alvin, when you think about the... Just the evolution of this, it's... It sounds like originally, the the company was... Experienced a sense of, like, initial product market fit and hyper growth around solving this like, you said around eight or nine years ago, this like huge pain around cross chain connectivity. Help on... Help maybe talk a little bit about why that was so painful in the early days or like what that unlocked. I feel like right now we're entering... We're almost on the other side of that spectrum where it seems like that problem is so well solved for that it's almost like a... We... We've seen, in some ways, that's... That sort of functionality be expected by a lot of applications and a lot of builders. Talk a little bit about the early days of why that was... I think people really underestimate how much is happening behind the scenes with this stuff, cross chain. Can you expose a little bit like how... Why that was so powerful at that time? And also maybe now how you see the cross chain reality of that. **Alvin Kan** (5:20) Yeah. Well, anybody who has used the bridge, right, before would know the pain. Right? I have. And my first bridge experience was so bad. Like, I kicked bridge, and I was like, alright. Where's the money? It's gone. Right? And you have to wait for, you know, these RPC confirmations to... Like, half an hour gone, and you don't know what's happening. And so at a time, you you need to be really sophisticated and very patient. If you were to find the, you know, customer support for a breach, you basically can't find it. Right? You have to go to the Discord channel, pray and pray that someone will respond to you. And this is why, again, you know, wallets have always been the front end. Right? The interaction touch point. And if you're able to do a cross chain swap using the native swap experience, it's very easy and the liquidity is almost immediate, right, in executing that cross chain swap versus waiting for the bridge to confirm on both chains. This is why it's so important. Now today, I would say if your wallet is good enough, to be honest, cross chain swap is no longer a problem. Right? I would even argue to say that gas is no longer a a problem as well. It's interesting because today, we we did a focus group for a user who's like back 2.5 in in a way. So he uses his wallet, like, once in every six months. We got him in and, you know, trying to understand, alright, how's the flow for the new user and so on. There were, of course, some issues that we need to fix, but essentially, gas never came up as a problem. Right? He deposited the money in. He did all the things without needing to know about cross chain swaps, or he didn't even need to say, alright. I need to get gas and so on. No such problems. So I... On one hand, I keep hearing people saying like, hey. We need a wallet that has... That solves all these problems. But on the other hand, actually, many wallets like BiggetWallet have already solved it. What remains to be solved, of course, is a lot of things to do with payments because payments is... Can be a pain, to be honest. When you integrate a DeFi protocol, you integrate it globally. There's no problem. Any user around the world use it the same way. But if you wanna pay in, say, in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in Brazil, every country has different local payment methods, and this is the tough part to build. And I think the neobank or the wallet that can build for a global network of payments is the one that's gonna win the race. **Host** (7:38) Who do you see doing that well today? Or like, how do you... Because we we hear this a lot, like this last mile connectivity to to the last mile trade. Forex is the biggest biggest. It's FX. Yeah. We've been we've been talking a lot about this on the show. I guess, in your perspective, why... What makes that so difficult to solve for? And how are you either, one, internally approaching solving this or perhaps partnering with others in the space who are doing this really well? What does that look like right now? **Alvin Kan** (8:11) Yeah. The the difficulty here again is, for example, if I integrate, say, Polymarket. Right? And any user around the world with Internet access, you know, you you should be able to access it the same way. But like I said, if you want to pay in a grocery store in, you know, in Vietnam versus another country like in Africa or in Nigeria, the the methods and the views that they use are different because crossing over to the fiat world. Right? So for example, you know, card payments may be very big in Western markets. But in Latin America and in Southeast Asia, the daily form of payment is QR codes. Right? Then that means your wallet has got to integrate the local QR standards. And the standards for Brazil versus Vietnam may be very different. And some countries don't even have a standardized national QR framework. Right? And then you've got to integrate multiple standards within the country. So today, again, you know, if if you're in Southeast Asia, you can basically just whip out your phone, scan the QR code at a grocery store, and, you know, 99% of the time, you're able to pay from stablecoins to, you know, the grocery store's fiat account in a second. In Africa, though, it's different. Right? They don't really use QR payments nor card payments. Well, they do use card payments as well, but many of the stores, they actually use by bank account transfers. So what they do is they have this bank account number, and you're supposed to transfer money to them. And so in Big Ed Wallet, again, you can just key in the bank account number of the merchant, and your crypto just transfers to Fiat in their bank account. Right? And all these features need to be integrated into a wallet so that no matter where you're traveling to, you're able to pay with local payment net... Networks. **Host** (9:49) The user behavior is really fascinating to me on this. Like Yeah. And you've learned from that. Go ahead, Zach. No. I was gonna ask too. Like, I... I'm thinking about later, we're talking to to Roshan. He's building OverseePay. **Drew Rogers** (10:05) And, again, very, very explicit, like, they're building for Pakistan, users that are either in Pakistan or, you know, have have moved and have family there. How do you decide which market to build from? Because I feel like there's this dichotomy of in one breath, you wanna go out, you wanna capture the world. On the other breath, you wanna build for a very specific persona, and it's like, do you choose which of these markets do you really focus on, integrate the local payment rails on? Because I feel like it's really easy to cross the chasm of building for everybody, and now all of a sudden, you know, certain certain features or parts of the app may, you know, may suffer. Where has that, you know, where has that focus been for BitGet Wallet? What geos? You know, which which problems are worth even solving? Because the the pain points are so big there for the users, and you actually think you can capture meaningful market share. **Alvin Kan** (10:56) So the the selection is even easier than than, you know, you would think. It starts with the core belief. Right? Why are we doing all these things? And our core belief is that, you know, your access to financial assets and services should not be determined based on where you were born or what income you have. Right? Everyone globally should have that freedom of access to these assets. And when we look at where, you know, people are restricted from this kind of rights, right, we realize that emerging markets, again, comes up very high on this on this level. So essentially, because we've been building this for over the last two years, our users have also given us a feedback, right, where essentially, this is the market where we need to do this and that and so on. So we have heard a lot from, I think, four big regions. Right? Latin America, especially Brazil, Argentina, and I think a lot of the peripheral countries are coming up as well. South Asia... So Pakistan is definitely one of it. And today, a lot of our users are able to transfer their crypto, right, into the e wallets that are dominant in Pakistan or some of the South Asian countries. Right? So that gives them a very easy way to, you know, off ramp and then start to use it for their everyday payments as well using e wallets. So again, here, you're not just talking about direct payments. You're also talking about connecting Bigget Wallet to all the different financial infrastructure, **Host** (12:17) whether it's e wallets, whether it's bank accounts. That's what I was gonna kinda go into next. It kinda looks like Bitget is doing both. You have the application, like, first party products, but then also perhaps, like, the under the hood engine for some of these use cases. Like, it looks like here on the site, we're getting, like, the Bitget WalletX where you're really positioning these things for, like, the engine for trading. Like, speak a little bit about the... Maybe the infrastructure side of this and selling this to more of the enterprise builders that could take some of these components and build on top? What does that look like right now? **Alvin Kan** (12:53) Yeah. So we started big at WalletX actually quite quite a while ago, but we just rebranded it into into a brand here. Now how I how I see it is trading and payments, a lot of people think that they're two very different use cases. But to me, trading is both a use case and also an infrastructure for any neobanks. Right? Because if you are using a neobank for, you know, payments and stuff, at some point, you have to make certain swaps, whether you're swapping between stablecoins, whether you're swapping between different regional stablecoins, right, or basically doing cross chains because some of the chains have certain payment use cases that they've integrated. So we do think the ability to provide very, very good liquidity on swaps is an infrastructure that's necessary for payments to be doing this. This is why we've invested so much in it. Yeah. Now look, the total swaps... I was looking at this real quick. **Host** (13:47) Total swap volume, at least reported on the site, is... Or the Bitget bridge, 1,950,000,000 in volume, well, over Yes. Almost a million total orders. Is that accurate? **Alvin Kan** (14:01) Yeah. It's it's pretty big because it doesn't just serve Bitget Wallet. In this case, our DEX aggregator has an... In APIs that have been serving, you know, other aggregators and solvers as well. In fact, we're gonna launch a solver recruitment program as well because many of them are using it. So I think the the more we can actually build this, the better the infra for users in Bigget Wallet as well. So we see this as pretty synergistic. **Drew Rogers** (14:26) Well, I wanna go back. I'm gonna switch switch topics a little bit because, you know, we've seen this trend of of wallets look more like neobanks. Neobanks look more like wallets and trading experiences. We've met with people, you know, we're integrating yield into these. We're trading RWAs. Prediction markets are coming into these. It feels like the list is is never ending. You... You've mentioned a few times the... You know, doing focus groups and user feedback. Right now, especially in emerging markets, like, what is real? Like, what do people actually want? Do they actually want the 8%? Do they wanna trade, you know, prediction markets? Do people in, you know, Vietnam want access to trading US stocks? What are you seeing? What seems to kinda be that, like, that next era of, k, we... We've solved the US dollar, and you can hold US dollars, you can spend US dollars. **Alvin Kan** (15:16) Now what? Yep. So so there are two groups of users. Right? You have the degens who have been our old users, and they still wanna trade. Right? But the things that they're trading are are different today. I think a lot of the liquidity, based on our observation of our data, has actually rotated from, say, meme coins to perps and then to RWAs. I think earlier this year was more on perps, and then in the last few months, because of US stock, you know, craze and so on, has gone to to stocks, tokenized stocks. And at some point, it may come back into memes. We're seeing, like, Robin Hood coming up, you know, in terms of volumes and so on. Now, however, that is kind of the the older segment of users. Right? And they continue to trade. Yep. Now the new audience is coming in and they're coming in droves, right, are the stablecoin users. Now this is one thing which I I think is important to note, which is people may not bank where they trade, but they may trade where they bank. Right? And if Big Ed Wallet or Any Wallet becomes that trusted place for them to, you know, do their banking or everyday finance services, whether it's for payments, whether it's for savings, whether it's for earning yield and so on, they will start to use that platform to do some form of investments or trading, whether it's in tokenized stocks or crypto. And so I do think these two are synergistic. The other thing that is important to note is capital is most efficient when it's in the same place. Right? If you have your money in, you know, an earn app versus a trading app versus a savings app, your money is really not being used in the best way possible. If you have all in one pool, it means that, for example, you can collateralize your assets, right, to borrow more money and do more stuff. And this is why I do feel no matter whether you started off as a new bank or a trading app and, you know, at at some point, they're all going to converge into a super app because that is Yeah. That is a game play in the end. That that actually... I just had a flashback. I don't know if you remember when Plasma was doing the... Their their their ICO, **Drew Rogers** (17:10) and, you know, I think you could long it on hyperliquid, and I had had some CCash. And it was an absolute pain in the butt to move it from whatever exchange I was on. It was like from exchange to wallet to bridge to hyperliquid, like, just an absolutely horrible experience. So, I mean, those those those two points you just made are are definitely gonna stick with me because, yeah, there's nothing worse than, like, wanting to open the trade, and you're like, oh, well, my funds are in x y z wallet, or even worse when they're... Where they're in a bank account, and now you're like, hope... Well, hopefully, the trade is still good in three days by the time the funds actually make it there. **Alvin Kan** (17:49) Yeah. And and I think one interesting insight that we saw from a data recently was a lot of people started trading US stocks when, you know, AS stocks and stuff came up pretty big. But many of them actually onboarded into Biggat Wallet because of our Crypto card. So, you know, they came into Biggat Wallet wanting to apply for Crypto card. And the other insight that we learned from our focus groups was many of these folks in emerging markets, when they applied for Crypto card, it was their first credit card. It was the first time they had a Visa or Mastercard. And then, you know, they have been using it for a few months. And when the craze came with US stocks, they started buying it. This was many months after, you know, they they created the card on Bigget Wallet. So there is a very natural, you know, life cycle here. And like I said, I think people will trade where they bank. It's just a matter of timing, you know, whether it's a trending, whether it's easy for them to actually switch. And this is why, you know, we do give certain guidance in our home page in the app for people to understand what is out there and what is available. Yeah. **Host** (18:50) Yeah. What do you think is behind that kind of psychology? It sounds like you guys are doing a lot of user testing and and focus groups. What is behind that conviction of trading where you bank versus the alternative? Like, why why do you think that is the case? And maybe what are some examples that point to that being true in your mind? **Alvin Kan** (19:14) I mean, one, I'm an average user of different trading platforms in both Web three and Web two. Right? You know, I've used Sexo. I've used Interactive Brokers and stuff. I don't think I'll ever apply for an Interactive Brokers card, but I do hold stocks on my bank account. Right? If you if you look at it as well, there are a lot of exchanges that have released crypto cards. Right? Now those have done well only with the VIP users, but many of them have started, you know, either kind of dialing back on their card ambition programs. Or they've realized that it's not really useful for them to go for mass adoption because again, many people just treat trading platforms as a trading platform. Whereas for a bank, because your trust is there, you see it as your finance account, and that is a lot broader. So it's it's very hard to explain this. I think it's more of a mindset association to do with it. And and this is why, you know, we pay a lot of attention in doing focus groups and understanding how users are using it. I'll give you an example. Right? We want to be as close to what we call everyday life spending and finance. Now the the average number of times our users swipe their cards is about 10 to 15 times a month. And the average spend per card transaction is about 10 to $13. Right? So, you you know, there are there are various crypto cards out there I've seen before where the average transaction is 700 over dollars. I... I'm not sure about you guys. I definitely don't spend an average of 700 over dollars on one single... On a average transaction. **Host** (20:45) But I think It's probably very different than the, like, the Coinbase one card **Alvin Kan** (20:50) behavior Like, whales. At least for me. Yeah. So so when we saw this data, we were, you know, encouraged actually because it means that we are really, really close to everyday, you know, activities of these users. And in emerging markets, of course, the the amount is smaller than, say, in Western markets. But we're encouraged by that. And, you know, when we talk to them, we realize that they do have ambitions in, you know, what do they want? They don't just want some... A platform for them to spend. What they want is a financial account that can give them the freedom of access. Ultimately, it goes back to the core belief where it shouldn't be determined by where you were born. Right? And freedom of access to to assets and finances, you know, if you look at all the different features of finance, from savings to earning you to to spending to borrow, I think eventually, a wallet will have to cater to all these different functions of finance. But it starts from building the trust **Host** (21:43) with the wallet. What are you most... As we as we close here, what are you most proud of since being at Bitget Wallet that you've built or you've seen come to fruition that has created that level of trust as you look back? **Alvin Kan** (21:58) Yeah. **Host** (22:01) You're doing a lot. You're doing a lot of It **Alvin Kan** (22:04) is a lot, and it's pretty tiring. You know, I I envision this bear market to be easier, but it's busier than ever. You know, we we crossed a 100,000,000 users of wallet addresses, I think, one or two months ago. Pretty happy about that. This is eight years in the making, and I think what we're really proud of is last month, we reported that the number of transactions made for payments has actually crossed the number of trading transactions on a daily basis. More people are using us for everyday finance than for trading. Right? And I I do think this is both an inflection point for the wallet, but also very representative of where crypto has come and how far we've come as an industry. **Host** (22:46) And that seems to be very aligned with where you're trying to take things forward with everyday spending and the use case and the growth... The the the massive total addressable market there, it sounds like. Yep. It's awesome. Well, Alvin, let's stay in touch. It's it's fun to see what you're building and how it all connects together. For us, we are... I think we're we're diving into a lot of these different categories that Bitget Wallet as a business is tying together, like earning and wallet and card and the infrastructure behind it. And prediction markets is becoming, like, very interesting. Tokenized equities. There's all these different conversations that you operationally are touching with the business. So excited to continue learning from you. Thank you for coming on, and, yeah, let's stay in touch. This was fun. Thanks for hosting. Anytime. Thanks, Alvin. Have a good night. Thanks for making time.