Exclusive Interview with Owen, Technical Lead at Bybit: Building a Secure and Stable Platform to Drive Crypto Adoption and Innovation
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Exclusive Interview with Owen, Technical Lead at Bybit: Building a Secure and Stable Platform to Drive Crypto Adoption and Innovation
Unveiling the technological drivers and future vision behind the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsInterviewee: Owen, CTO of Bybit
Interview and Compilation: Alex Liu, Foresight News
The cryptocurrency market is developing rapidly. Despite its volatility, market sentiment is gradually recovering, particularly with outstanding performance in the derivatives sector. Against this backdrop, Bybit, as one of the leading cryptocurrency trading platforms, not only maintains a top position in the derivatives market but also continues to push forward in user experience, security, and technological innovation. Recently, Bybit has achieved remarkable milestones in daily trading volume and technical breakthroughs.
Underpinning these achievements, technology plays a crucial role. From system stability and user asset security to innovative product design, technical capabilities directly determine a platform's core competitiveness. To explore this further, we spoke with Owen, Bybit’s head of technology. As a founding team member, Owen has led the technical team since Bybit’s inception, consistently overcoming technical barriers and helping the platform stand out in a fiercely competitive market.
In this interview, Owen shares insights into Bybit’s advancements in technological innovation, system architecture, and user security, while offering a glimpse into the platform’s future technical roadmap. Let’s dive into the story behind Bybit’s technology.
Foresight News: How did you enter the crypto industry and eventually become Bybit’s technology lead? Could you briefly share your background and professional journey?
Owen: Before joining Bybit, I held executive roles at major internet and financial firms and worked in quantitative trading. These experiences gave me deep insight into internet and financial trading architectures, and I was also highly optimistic about the potential of blockchain and the crypto industry. When I learned about Bybit’s vision and goals, I felt truly excited—because Bybit isn’t just a trading platform, it’s a driving force for mainstream crypto adoption and integration with traditional finance.
As a founding team member of Bybit, I’ve served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) since its inception, working with the team to build a secure and user-friendly platform that helps more people access and explore the world of crypto. Through continuous technological innovation and optimization, we aim to deliver the best possible trading experience.
Foresight News: Bybit ranks second among CEXs in derivatives trading volume. What makes traders trust Bybit?
Owen: Bybit has become the world’s second-largest crypto exchange, with daily trading volumes reaching tens of billions of dollars. This achievement stems largely from our strong emphasis on user fund security. Bybit employs state-of-the-art security and risk control technologies—including MPC wallets and multi-factor authentication—to effectively safeguard user assets. To reinforce confidence in asset security, Bybit conducts third-party audits to verify reserve ratios and uses Merkle Tree technology to transparently share this data with users. Additionally, Bybit regularly publishes Proof of Reserves reports, which show that our reserve ratios for key assets exceed 100%. We also enhance protection through advanced measures such as YubiKey, fund passwords, two-factor authentication (2FA), and biometric verification.
Bybit maintains regular communication with institutional and VIP clients, actively listening to their feedback and providing timely support, further strengthening user trust in the platform.
Going forward, Bybit will continue enhancing security measures and improving user experience to maintain our leadership in the competitive crypto market, delivering a secure and stable trading environment for global traders.
Foresight News: With growing trading demand and high-frequency requests, how does Bybit ensure system stability?
Owen: When developing product features or systems, Bybit allocates resources to system stability on par with those dedicated to business feature development. This includes investments in architecture and server infrastructure to ensure high availability across clouds and availability zones. To maintain stable operations, Bybit has built a comprehensive capacity evaluation model, using stress testing and historical data from major events and volatile market conditions to accurately assess system capacity. For example, Bybit conducts production-environment stress tests, leveraging traffic recording and replay to precisely simulate real user traffic—avoiding discrepancies between test and live environments.
Bybit implements multi-layer overload protection, circuit breaking, and rate-limiting mechanisms to ensure system functionality under high traffic. If traffic exceeds system capacity, the system automatically triggers overload protection, circuit breaking, and rate limiting to block excess requests, ensuring most users can still access the platform normally. Even if a small number of users encounter failed requests, retrying usually resolves the issue.
For major events, Bybit has comprehensive system risk assessments and emergency response plans, regularly conducting drills so teams can quickly identify issues and restore services. Prior to high-traffic events, Bybit activates business and technical fallback measures. During peak periods, non-core functions (e.g., search) may be disabled or downgraded to reduce system load. By pre-configuring popular search keywords, users can easily find desired trading pairs without invoking the search service, further enhancing user experience.
Bybit’s architecture supports elastic scaling, enabling rapid capacity expansion or reduction. For instance, one to two days before a major event, Bybit can scale up system capacity by 10–20 times, then quickly scale back down within one to two days after the event. This flexibility helps control server costs while meeting peak traffic demands.
In August this year, Bybit surpassed $100 billion in single-day trading volume and aims to achieve a processing capacity of one million transactions per second by year-end—demonstrating our commitment to system stability and providing a reliable platform for traders.
Foresight News: What are the technical challenges in implementing Bybit’s Unified Trading Account (UTA)? What advantages does it offer users?
Owen: Bybit’s Unified Trading Account (UTA) was an industry first. It allows users to trade any product using over 160 different tokens, significantly improving margin efficiency. UTA requires integrating multiple trading products—spot, futures, and options—and demands that the system support collateralization and calculations across various asset types, handle multiple margin modes (isolated, cross, and portfolio margin), and manage cross-product asset flows. This increases the complexity of system design and operation. However, from a user experience perspective, the benefits are substantial—simplifying the interface and boosting capital efficiency—making it well worth the effort.
By consolidating all trading tools into a single account, users can seamlessly access multiple products without switching between accounts. This “one-stop” model enhances convenience and simplifies asset management, allowing users to leverage their margin assets more flexibly. For example, even without holding a specific settlement currency, users can trade using other supported margin assets, lowering the barrier to entry.
Additionally, UTA improves risk management. Since profits and losses across different products can offset each other, users can better manage their overall portfolio. This flexibility enables traders to adjust strategies more effectively during market volatility, increasing trading efficiency and success rates.
Foresight News: As the tech lead, what technology do you consider most critical for CEXs? How does Bybit’s tech team focus its efforts?
Owen: For centralized exchanges (CEXs), system security and stability are the most critical technical factors. With surging user numbers and trading volumes, it’s essential that the system can handle high-frequency trading and massive concurrent requests. Bybit’s tech team ensures stability by building highly available architectures, implementing multi-layered security protocols, and conducting rigorous stress testing—enabling the platform to withstand traffic spikes and operate smoothly during peak periods.
We also implement robust measures to protect wallet security, user accounts, funds, and data—such as Multi-Party Computation (MPC)—enhancing security without compromising usability, thereby fully protecting user assets. Additionally, we have developed strong trading risk controls to prevent market manipulation and price "spikes," along with liquidation and deleveraging mechanisms that give users greater peace of mind during trading.
To maintain our industry leadership, Bybit’s tech team takes proactive steps in hiring and technology roadmapping. We continuously attract top talent and invest in cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain, ensuring our platform maintains superior processing power and security, continuing to lead the evolution of the crypto industry.
Foresight News: During previous large-scale airdrop token deposit events, Bybit experienced delays in token crediting. The platform responsibly compensated users and received positive feedback. Has Bybit upgraded its systems to prevent similar incidents?
Owen: Bybit continuously optimizes its existing products and systems. When developing new features or systems, we ensure that investment in system stability matches that in business functionality—covering architecture and server infrastructure—to guarantee high availability across cloud providers and availability zones, maintaining stable operations.
For major events, Bybit has comprehensive system risk assessments and emergency response plans, regularly conducting drills to ensure teams can quickly identify and resolve issues (e.g., service degradation or scaling). To further strengthen stability, we conduct accurate system capacity evaluations using stress testing and historical data from past major events. For example, we perform production-environment stress tests using traffic recording and replay to precisely simulate real user behavior, avoiding inconsistencies between testing and production environments.
Foresight News: After the FTX collapse, asset security and exchange system safety became top user concerns. What measures does Bybit take to protect user assets, and what technologies are used to secure the platform?
Owen: Bybit is committed to providing users with a secure, transparent, and efficient trading environment, actively responding to market needs and continuously improving service quality.
Bybit regularly publishes Proof of Reserves reports to demonstrate full backing of all user assets, reflecting our commitment to transparency and security. These reports allow users to monitor the platform’s asset status in real time, reinforcing trust in the exchange.
To further enhance security, Bybit partners with leading third-party digital asset custodians such as Fireblocks and Copper, expanding asset custody options. These collaborations not only boost user confidence in platform security but also offer more flexible asset management. Through technologies like multi-signature and cold storage, user funds receive higher-level protection.
In terms of defense mechanisms, Bybit has implemented comprehensive risk detection and emergency response capabilities. Our real-time risk control system detects abnormal behaviors—both from users and employees—identifying potential threats early and taking prompt action. Moreover, we have built robust trading risk controls to prevent market manipulation and price spikes, along with forced liquidation and deleveraging mechanisms to ensure fairness and transparency in trading.
Meanwhile, Bybit conducts regular internal and external audits to ensure compliance and transparency, helping identify potential risks and confirming that operations meet industry standards. Finally, to further strengthen platform security, Bybit launched a white-hat bug bounty program, encouraging security researchers to discover and report vulnerabilities. By rewarding those who help improve platform security, Bybit continuously strengthens its defenses. This open and collaborative approach not only enhances our own security but also sets a positive example for the entire industry.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
Foresight News
