Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
On August 14, Bitget officially announced that it had appointed former Binance executive Hon Ng as Chief Legal Officer (CLO). Hon Ng will play a key role in leading the development of Bitget's global business in the future and assist Bitget in continuing to promote global compliance operations and global strategic expansion.
According to Bitget’s official announcement, Hon Ng has more than 20 years of experience in the legal profession and was named one of the world’s top 20 legal leaders by the Financial Times. Before joining Bitget, Hon Ng served as Binance’s general counsel and head of government affairs and policy; earlier, Hon Ng worked at Uber, assisting the company in its journey from a startup to a public company and growing into a technology giant; and before entering the technology field, Hon Ng worked in several well-known law firms, responsible for mergers and acquisitions, listings and other related businesses.
For a leading exchange like Bitget, a "change of leadership" in compliance and other specific businesses often means that the development of the business will present a new trend. In order to further understand Bitget's future development plan, especially the focus on global strategic deployment, Odaily Planet Daily recently arranged an exclusive interview with Hon Ng. We were surprised by Hon Ng's frankness and talkativeness - we initially thought that professional legal professionals would be more conservative and serious, but Hon Ng not only confessed his career development process and changes in mentality to us, but also introduced in detail the less well-known exchange compliance work content, and explained Bitget's overall thinking on the road of compliance optimization and expansion.
Twenty years of experience, major changes in fields
Hon Ng started his career at the London law firm Herbert Smith. In the following years, Hon Ng worked in well-known law firms such as White & Case and Latham & Watkins. He was mainly active in London, Doha, Hong Kong and other places, responsible for legal work related to mergers and acquisitions and listings.
During his work in Doha, Hon Ng, a heavy football fan, was seconded to the Qatar World Cup Bid Committee to assist the Qatari government in completing the application and preparation for the World Cup. Hon Ng used the word "challenge" many times when recalling that experience, because at that time most people did not believe that the World Cup would really be held in the Middle East, but in the end Hon Ng and others overcame many challenges and successfully hosted the wonderful World Cup that ended with "Messi's coronation".
In 2015, Hon Ng's career once again ushered in an important turning point. That year, he joined Uber, which was still in its early stages of development, to assist Uber's strategic expansion in the Asia-Pacific region. At that time, online ride-hailing had not yet become a common choice for people's daily travel (at least in the Asia-Pacific market). With the expectation of "disrupting the old model", Hon Ng worked at Uber for nearly 5 years and witnessed the company's growth from a technology start-up to an Internet giant.
In 2020, Hon Ng officially entered the Web3 industry and joined Binance as general counsel and head of government affairs and policy. When talking about the choice of switching from Web2 to Web3, Hon Ng believes that the challenges faced by the two are actually common - Uber's opponents are taxi companies that have long dominated the market, and cryptocurrency's opponents are the traditional financial industry that has accumulated for hundreds of years. What both are essentially doing is using new things to iterate the old model.
However, Hon Ng also admitted that Web3 has some unique characteristics compared to Web2. For example, the former has a faster overall pace and higher speed requirements, which requires practitioners to respond more quickly to changes in industry trends. In addition, the policy environment faced by Web3 is relatively immature, but Hon Ng, as a professional legal person, believes that this gives companies in the industry the opportunity to focus on the product itself, that is, there is no need to consider too many complicated policy terms like Web2, but can promote business development purely from the perspective of improving product quality.
It is worth mentioning that during his tenure at Binance, Hon Ng helped Binance invest $500 million to participate in the acquisition of Twitter (now X) led by Elon Musk. Hon Ng believes that this is a very meaningful attempt for the development of the entire industry and will help promote the concept of cryptocurrency to hundreds of millions of potential users.
After working at Binance for 3 years, Hon Ng chose to resign in order to reflect on his career plan. During the nine-month gap, on the one hand, Hon Ng confirmed his desire to stay in the industry, and on the other hand, many leading exchanges, institutions, and projects also offered him olive branches. In the end, Hon Ng chose to join Bitget because he recognized Bitget's business plan and shared the same corporate culture.
Web3 Legal Work Revealed
The vast majority of cryptocurrency users may not be familiar with the specific content of the exchange’s legal work. Hon Ng gave a more detailed answer to this.
According to Hon Ng, Bitget's legal team currently has more than 70 people, accounting for about 4% of the total number of Bitget team members, which is generally higher than other exchanges in the industry. From the perspective of the operating model, Bitget's legal team is a distributed office, and the internal division is divided into multiple different groups according to different directions such as licenses, investments, cooperation, litigation, contracts, etc. In addition, in order to match the differences in regulations in various regions, Bitget will directly recruit local legal talents in multiple different jurisdictions to operate more smoothly and expand its business locally.
In addition to "piling up resources" at the human level, in order to ensure more efficient compliance construction, Bitget has cooperated with professional third-party compliance service agencies such as Chainalysis and Onfido to more smoothly adapt to the different regulatory characteristics of various jurisdictions.
Regarding his personal work rhythm, Hon Ng said that his work at Bitget mainly consists of three parts. The most obvious is compliance-related work, such as license application, KYC system, regulatory communication, etc.; the most complicated is the formulation of user terms (that is, the large number of terms that users need to read before opening the service). Hon Ng admitted that most users will not touch the content restricted by the terms when using the exchange normally, but there is still a very small proportion of users who may have some disputes for various reasons. At this time, the user terms will be used as a benchmark to fairly safeguard the interests of both the exchange and the users; another very important task is the drafting of various external cooperation contracts, such as Messi's endorsement contract or the contract for the launch of new assets.
When asked about the energy allocation in different content areas, Hon Ng said that the energy allocation in various tasks is relatively even, but he also admitted that there are obvious differences in the difficulty of different work contents. The most difficult work is still the license application, especially considering that there will be differences in regulatory attitudes in various jurisdictions, and even the regulatory attitudes of the same jurisdiction at different time stages are very different.
During the conversation, Hon Ng mentioned two areas that mainstream exchanges have been paying attention to recently. The first is the European Union, which has established the MiCA license specifically for crypto asset service providers. Holding this license means that crypto asset-related services can be carried out in more than 20 EU member states. The main provisions of the MiCA regulations will come into effect on December 30, 2024, but no crypto exchange has obtained this license yet. Secondly, Hon Ng also specifically mentioned the regulatory environment in the United States. Although Bitget has completely withdrawn from the US market, the local regulation is still worthy of attention from all practitioners. The different regulatory styles of departments such as the SEC, CTFC, and DOJ, coupled with the recent confusing election situation, make the specific regulatory attitude of the United States even more difficult to grasp.
Bitget’s Journey to Crypto Compliance
In the past few years, there have been many cases of exchanges suffering setbacks in the field of compliance, such as the case of FTX's collapse due to chaotic accounting, and many exchanges were fined or even bankrupted in certain jurisdictions for failing to meet requirements.
When evaluating Bitget's compliance measures, Hon Ng particularly emphasized these past lessons learned in the industry, and tried his best to avoid similar incidents from happening to Bitget. At the same time, Hon Ng also mentioned that he would spend a lot of time thinking about potential risks that "were not a problem in the past, but may become a problem in the future", to prevent and avoid challenges that Bitget may face in the future. For example, a few exchanges in the industry are still doing business in sanctioned regions such as North Korea and Iran, and these markets are absolute red lines within Bitget. Starting from multiple dimensions such as KYC, IP, and mobile phone number location, the most stringent method is used to "persuade" users in restricted areas to stop using.
According to Hon Ng, Bitget currently holds licenses in multiple jurisdictions such as Poland and Lithuania, and can conduct business in compliance with local regulatory systems. Looking ahead to future regional expansion plans, Hon Ng said that Bitget will not blindly seek perfection - because there are too many licenses on the market and trade-offs must be made - but will combine local market size, regulatory attitudes, entry barriers, local talent conditions and other dimensions to comprehensively judge whether it is necessary to enter the market.
Specifically, Bitget will continue to expand in Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and other regions, but the specific countries to be selected still need specific analysis; Hon Ng also mentioned that Bitget has strategically given up some markets temporarily, such as Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States, in order to return to relevant markets after being better prepared in terms of compliance... However, all choices are dynamic, and Bitget will make specific analysis based on different market demands at different times.
At the end of the interview, we asked Hon Ng this question: "As a compliance worker who has direct contact with regulators, how do you see the compliance process of the cryptocurrency industry? How long will it take for cryptocurrencies to become fully compliant, similar to stocks?" Hon Ng's answer exceeded our expectations: "Optimistically speaking, crypto assets are expected to be accepted by traditional large global companies within a few years."
Hon Ng added that this trend shift is already underway, with a direct example being that many traditional financial companies such as BlackRock and Fidelity are deeply involved in the issuance of Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs. Personally, he has witnessed Uber subvert the travel market at an extremely fast speed, and now he has a similar perception of the cryptocurrency market. The early market may still have certain concerns about the security of cryptocurrencies, but with the continuous accumulation of user trust, these concerns are dissipating at a very fast rate.
However, this does not mean that the cryptocurrency industry is perfect enough. From the perspective of the industry itself, Hon Ng believes that the industry still needs to further explore the potential use cases of tokens and create more practical scenarios for cryptocurrencies. This is the foundation for the industry to truly survive and develop, and gradually become popular and accepted.
