ByBit Expanding Beyond Crypto With Banking Services
The company plans to begin offering banking services, including accounts that allow users to hold balances in U.S. dollars and other fiat currencies, CEO Ben Zhou said in an interview with Bloomberg News Thursday (Jan. 29).
These “MyBank” accounts, he said, will come with an International Bank Account Number (IBAN), letting customers transfer 18 currencies in and out, and expected to go live next month, pending approvals from regulators.
Bloomberg notes that this might put ByBit into the same “neobank” territory as companies like Revolut and Robinhood. Those companies added crypto offerings after starting with trading and banking services, while ByBit aims to do the same thing in reserve.
“The moment that your pound or US dollar arrives, you can choose to transfer it to crypto,” Zhou said. “That’s a huge update.”
With more than 81 million customers, ByBit is one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world in terms of trading volume. Zhou said he believes the country’s reach gives it an edge, as it is active in 200-plus markets and has partnerships with nearly 2,000 banks.
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The CEO added that ByBit also aims to introduce a custody product for institutional investors, involved in tokenizing real-world assets. However, the company has no plans to enter the wildly popular prediction market space.
“We looked and there had been a lot of compliance challenges,” Zhou said. “That’s why you haven’t seen any centralized exchanges launching these products.”
ByBit suffered a historic hack early last year, with $1.5 billion stolen. The company was forced to borrow from other platforms and dip into its treasury funds to make its customers whole. When blockchain data platform Chainalysis did its roundup of crypto thefts for 2025, the ByBit hack accounted for nearly half of $3.4 billion in thefts recorded from January through September.
The company is entering the banking space at the same time that digital assets are being integrated more and more into the banking world, as PYMNTS wrote last month.
The big story last year, that report said, was one of “structural adoption, regulatory articulation and financial integration. These trends signal crypto’s steady migration from fringe innovation toward the core of financial architecture.”
