DeFi meets CeFi: Bitget Wallet a few steps in right direction for mass crypto adoption
Recently, BitKeep, a popular multi-chain non-custodial crypto wallet, made a transformative brand upgrade to become the Bitget Wallet.
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Far from a mere name change, the merge brings distinct advantages for crypto users.
What is Bitget Wallet?
Bitget Wallet is the result of an additional $US30 million investment from leading cryptocurrency exchange Bitget into BitKeep, which happened in Q1 of this year.
BitKeep, founded in 2018, was a pioneering product in the industry that helped transform the decentralised digital wallet sector with powerful integrated swap functionality on top of its wallet function, setting a trend that’s become a mainstay across the industry.
In March 2023, Bitget acquired a controlling stake in BitKeep, which led to its evolution as Bitget Wallet.
The aim for Bitget Wallet, says the exchange, is for it “to serve as the most user-friendly web3 trading wallet, providing faster trades and better assets for users”.
Essentially, you can think of Bitget Wallet as the integration of some of the best parts of decentralised finance (DeFi) with Bitget exchange’s centralised finance (CeFi) structure.
And it’s a web3 collaboration that brings advantages to both parties.
By integrating BitKeep’s huge user base, Bitget has gained a new and large group of potential traders.
Now, with more than 12 million users across 168 countries and regions, Bitget Wallet is well placed to become the premier gateway into web3.
Bitget’s backing, meanwhile, has enabled the wallet to push on to an advanced stage of transformational growth, supported by the exchange’s proven technology and security capabilities.
Actually, on the matter of security, it’s a crucial point. And that’s partly because …
Security imperative for crypto’s grout
For the crypto industry and blockchain technology to grow, trust in easy-to-use products is everything.
Secure storage for investing and secure functionality for trading is imperative.
Therefore, establishing a strong security framework that protects user data, ensures transaction integrity and guards against malicious activities was always going to have equal top billing as a priority for Bitget Wallet – along with user experience.
It’s a commonly held belief in the crypto space that self custody is made for the smart investor mindset – “not your keys, not your crypto”.
Getting your long-term crypto holds off exchanges and into cold-storage hardware wallets, therefore, is widely encouraged in the industry.
However, hardware wallets are not exactly the simplest or most convenient non-custodial storage option for newcomers to the space, nor are they necessarily the be-all and end-all when it comes to security.
They’re also unlikely to be the wallets that help usher in mass adoption.
Why use Bitget Wallet over a hardware device?
It’s the $300 million question. And the answer is this – Bitget Wallet has security advantages that hardware wallets, and indeed other online wallets, do not.
And the primary advantage that stands out is that users of the Bitget Wallet have a uniquely important safety net of sorts – they’re using a product backed by a reassuring part of the Bitget exchange infrastructure – a $US300 million protection fund.
This provides a concrete layer of protection to cover potential user losses from unforeseen events that are not due to misconduct from the user or the platform itself.
Additionally, Bitget Wallet brings rigorous smart-contracts auditing processes to the table to provide a trading and swaps environment that’s robust and has little chance of glitching and harming user experience and eroding trust.
Bitget Wallet has partnered with several leading audit firms in the industry, such as Certik – for vetting and auditing smart contracts, and GoPlus – for integrated risk alerts to pre-emptively warn users before they interact with malicious DApps or tokens.
More than just secure storage
As mentioned above, Bitget Wallet has, through its BitKeep history, a strong background in trading and swaps features functionality.
Combine this with the broad, secure, Bitget trading infrastructure and you have something unique in the industry.
Bitget Wallet’s functions include a DApp (decentralised application) browser, as there are more than 20,000 unique DApps available to connect directly to from the wallet; an OTC feature, Launchpad (for accessing high-quality token sale events), a staking service and more.
Arguably the most important aspect of the platform, however, is the robust Bitget Swap service, which supports tokens from more than 90 different blockchains and offers cross-chain compatibility across 17 different chains.
Bitget Swap aggregates liquidity across over 100 DEXs and leverages intelligent routing mechanisms to provide users with the best trading prices across different protocols.
With this feature, says Bitget, users can seamlessly engage in cross-currency pair transactions, enabling efficient exchanges between diverse assets.
And to further enhance the user experience, Bitget Swap also enables a unique borrowed gas (transaction fees) feature that allows users to perform cross-chain swaps without needing to first hold on to the native token they’re purchasing.
What else? Ah yes, NFTs
It’d be remiss not to mention Bitget’s involvement with one of the most vibrant aspects of the trading community – through the NFT Marketplace.
Yep, we know NFTs have suffered a major decline in interest, trading volume and in price action during this longest of bear markets, but Bitget still foresees a positive outlook for the sector, provided projects are able to build a strong relationship of trust between themselves and their communities.
As a leading NFT aggregator, Bitget NFT Market supports unrestricted NFT listings from third-party platforms. And, Bitget NFT Market supports multi-chain NFT management and trading across multiple chains including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Klaytn, Arbitrum, Optimism, Heco, and Ethereum Classic.
Using Bitget Swap’s multi-chain interoperability, Bitget Wallet users will be able to browse more than 220,000 unique NFTs from any of these supported chains and purchase them using any token.
Additionally, the Bitget NFT Market features a collection of NFT airdrops curated by in-house analysts and researchers for users to mint NFTs from different projects for free.
Bitget Wallet’s ongoing evolution
The world of web3 doesn’t slow, at least not in the sense of innovative project and product building, and Bitget Wallet is a prime example.
With features such as Web3 DIDs (decentralised IDs) and account abstraction next on the horizon, Bitget Wallet is well positioned at the forefront of the crucial digital wallet sector and as an all-in-one comprehensive web3 solution.
“Ultimately, our vision is to allow users to leverage upon the comprehensive ecosystem we have built up and obtain meaningful ways to not just store and manage their assets, but also grow their portfolio,” said Karry Cheung, CEO of Bitget Wallet.
This article was developed in collaboration with Bitget, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing. This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.
