Exclusive interview with BitMEX CEO: What are the user philosophy of helping users become more mature traders?

Author: Weilin, PANews

As one of the pioneers in the field of crypto derivatives trading, BitMEX, which has been established for 11 years, has risen rapidly with its radical market strategies and technological innovations, and once jumped to become one of the largest trading crypto derivatives platforms in the world. However, with the increasingly strict global regulatory environment and increasingly fierce competition in derivatives markets, BitMEX is also facing unprecedented challenges.

Compared with BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, known for his high-profile style and keen market insight, BitMEX CEO Stephan Lutz is not the original founder of BitMEX, and his early resume is rarely directly imprinted in the field of encryption. After joining BitMEX as CFO in 2021, Stephan took over the position of CEO from Hayes during the company's regulatory crisis in 2022, leading the team through bull and bear markets, and comprehensively promoted the platform development, user education, product innovation and security defense line, aiming to continuously build a more neutral, transparent and secure derivatives trading platform.

Recently, PANews interviewed Stephan, who reviewed his mental journey from Deutsche Exchange to BitMEX, and deeply analyzed BitMEX's product planning and strategic priorities in 2025. At the same time, from perpetual contract screening mechanism to user education in high-leverage trading, from AI-driven trading analysis to functional iterations such as order trading and multi-asset margin, Stephan shared his deep understanding and insight into the crypto derivatives market. In addition, Stephan also expressed his firm commitment to the Asian market, believing that the future growth of derivatives will be based on a more inclusive, smarter and more transparent foundation.

From the German Exchange to BitMEX: Connecting the traditional finance

and the crypto world

In Stephan's resume, people will not see his experiences related to cryptocurrencies before joining BitMEX in 2021. But as he said, the relationship is far deeper than it seems. As early as around 2010, he began to pay attention to distributed ledger technology. "I was working at the Deutsche Exchange Group at that time, and we were evaluating whether this technology could replace existing securities trading and settlement infrastructure. The answer is no: it was not enough, and its throughput was not high enough. So I put it on hold for the time being," he recalled.

Still, Stephan participated in financial stability advisory projects by central banks in subsequent years—including central banks in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Middle East. It was in this process that he realized that in Southeast Asia, except for mature markets such as Japan and Singapore, more than two-thirds of the population in many countries still cannot access the banking system.

"These people are still part of the global supply chain. They were already using smartphones at that time, and I was wondering if there is a chance here? Isn't this where cryptocurrencies come in? Later I started buying and trading in small quantities, but mainly out of my enthusiasm for research on projects and technology itself."

In 2020, Stephan ushered in a turning point in his life. When BitMEX sent him an invitation to join, he described that moment as "like winning a grand prize": "It can finally turn what I am really interested in into my career." He joined BitMEX as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in early 2021 and experienced rapid growth in the bull market in 2021. In 2022, BitMEX was accused by US regulators. Faced with the trust of the company's founder, Stephan chose to stand up at the most turbulent moment in the market, take over as CEO, and face the cold winter brought by the FTX collapse with his team. In the interview, he admitted that this decision was not out of the pursuit of "titles", but out of a sense of responsibility for the team, mission and industry.

Reversal of the "Coin Listing is the Peak" curse and reveals the BitMEX

contract currency listing strategy

In the reality that many trading platforms have "listing coins is the peak", it is no longer rare for new currencies to fall rapidly after the first day. However, according to BitMEX's first quarter derivative report for 2025, "Top CEX's perpetual contract listing: vertex signal? 》 shows that BitMEX performed well in the contract launch in the quarter: BitMEX, which is a 58.33% perpetual contract token, appreciated after the first day, and achieved a return of 62.55%. In addition, only 41.7% of BitMEX listed transactions reached an all-time high on the first day, showing sustainable price trends.

Talking about the reasons behind this phenomenon and the standards for launching projects, Stephan said, "When we launch a new token as a perpetual contract, we will conduct strict due diligence instead of launching all projects on the market. We will start from an early stage and focus on the following characteristics: the first is market interest, whether the token is really interested in trading by our users. It is not just that 'someone is concerned'. Is there a real market trading interest? This market interest includes potential new users and existing users. The second is the community situation. Is this project already owned, or expected to build an active, enthusiastic community, and is it possible that it will continue to exist in two weeks? As well as the project context and narrative, we will have an in-depth understanding of the project itself. The token needs to meet certain compliance standards before it goes online, especially if it is also planned to be launched on the spot market."

In addition, Stephan also revealed that BitMEX will also evaluate the reliability of liquidity and price. "We must be able to obtain reliable source of price data, which usually evaluate which exchanges the price data comes from, whether these exchanges are formal and legal, whether they will manipulate prices, etc., to minimize the risk of market manipulation as much as possible, and minimize the risk."

It is precisely because of this all-round consideration that BitMEX maintains sufficient "stamina" in the "coin listing is the peak" trend.

Q2 Planning Focus: Improve liquidity, launch the order-following trading

and multi-asset margin function

When focusing on the work priorities of BitMEX in the second quarter (Q2), Stephan said that BitMEX will continue to improve the liquidity of altcoins and newly launched tokens, and plans to launch copy trading function, allowing users to copy the operational behavior of successful traders.

“If you look at altcoins and newly launched tokens, BitMEX needs to further improve liquidity. Our liquidity at least doubled in these categories compared to the fourth quarter of last year.”

Stephan said that the second one will launch the order-following trading function in Q2. "This is a natural continuation of the trading bots we launched last year. Trading bots can help users automate their strategies. The difference between order trading is to allow you to replicate the actions of successful traders. There are many of the strongest traders and 'whales' on the market on our platform. If you want to 'attend their rhythm', such as following them into and out, you can use the upcoming BitMEX order trading feature."

Stephan added that the third layout is to collect user feedback, respond and optimize user experience. “As the new generation of users enter the crypto market, we need to retain core functions, improve usability and comprehensibility, and provide users with a good experience. The entire Q2 will revolve around this topic. Finally, we are improving the multi-asset margin function, which means you can use more types of assets as margin. This feature will be launched one after another in Q2.”

11 years of zero hacking attack record, adhering to the three core

principles

In the increasingly competitive crypto market on exchanges, BitMEX maintains a record of zero hacking attacks since its inception for 11 years . Stephan said that BitMEX always adheres to three core principles: neutrality, transparency and security. He introduced that since its inception, the platform has adhered to the concept of "loyalty to the spirit of cryptocurrency" and is committed to building a truly fair and just peer-to-peer derivatives trading platform. BitMEX does not have its own market maker and does not bet with users. The asset price discovery mechanism, including capital rates, is completely neutral.

At the same time, BitMEX insists on transparency and releases asset proof and liability proof twice a week. Users can check whether their balance remains unchanged through open source software. BitMEX publicly publishes all infrastructure documents.

In addition, BitMEX sticks to the security line, or rather, asset security rather than technical security. To this day, it still uses the industry-leading cold wallet custody system for user assets. “We completely isolated assets, so user assets don’t mix with anything related to the company. BitMEX has built its own 100% cold wallet custody system since its inception, using Multisig, and not even a standard solution for MPC. As for hot wallets, it is to achieve the need for real-time withdrawals. Until about two years ago, we only provided withdrawal services once a day because all assets are in cold wallets. BitMEX’s security rules have been deeply embedded in the company’s daily operations, always emphasizing “trust, but verification”. This culture runs through all our processes.”

High leverage ≠ high risk, the goal is to help individual traders become

more mature

BitMEX is known for perpetual contracts with up to 100 times leverage. However, when the market fluctuates violently, high-leverage trading often leads to user positions, especially for inexperienced traders. Does BitMEX have plans to help users better manage this risk? Stephan also gave his answer to this.

"First of all, we even provide up to 250 times of leverage in certain specific contracts, but it is not open to everyone. First, we believe that the trader should decide how much leverage to use. In fact, 100 times of leverage itself is not the reason for the liquidation. This is actually an educational issue. We always remind users in the platform documents and provide a large amount of educational materials on the platform and official websites. For example: BitMEX Alpha series content; how-to guides for how to do it."

Stephan said that BitMEX has been emphasizing that users should set stop loss and limit orders, so that they will not "clear up and return to zero" when the market fluctuates violently, but will be able to exit the market in advance. Users should set their own buying points, stop loss positions, etc. As long as you have these basic operations, you will not be easily exposed. BitMEX's goal is to help individual traders grow into more mature traders.

At the same time, from another perspective: if one party is exposed in a transaction, the winner may also encounter problems, because BitMEX is a point-to-point platform, not an intermediate settlement counterparty, and will not pay for one party. "This is exactly why BitMEX set up an insurance fund -and we have the absolute largest insurance fund in the entire industry. We are even leading in terms of the ratio of insurance fund size to open contracts," Stephan added in the interview.

AI investment tools are still to mature, and related products will be

launched at the right time

In this interview, Stephan also talked about the current popular AI trends. He believes that most of the current discussions about the so-called "AI-driven investment decisions" are hype words and do not really bring any substantial help. In essence, this is just the next stage after "trading robots" and "subsidy trading".

"This is a path that will inevitably appear in the future, a natural evolution. We will also launch such products at the right time. But I think it is not mature yet. Maybe in a few months, or even a year or two, there will be mature plans," Stephan revealed in an interview.

Stephan further stated that BitMEX will use AI to perform significant applications in the user interface (UI) layer over the next 12 to 18 months. "If you look at the foundations of large language models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, their essence is not to provide 'knowledge', but to provide 'translation ability', which means broadly - you now open a web trading platform, no matter which exchange it is, you will see charts, order panels, news flows, chart trading tools, various KPI indicators... You need to understand and operate it yourself. Although it is not difficult, it is always a threshold."

He said, "In the future, AI Agent will be able to be further automated. It can convert your voice into structured trading instructions and access the exchange through the API. It can even be programmed to find the best price from 10 exchanges to execute. We have a more open interface (API), and the exchange itself is more flexible, and traditional financial companies are unlikely to be open so thoroughly."

Stephan said that BitMEX has another direction of development, planning to launch a new feature in the third quarter: AI-driven trading behavior analysis report. This function is analyzed by AI and provides regular suggestions. For example, AI will tell users: You frequently made transactions after the news was released last quarter, which means you reacted too slowly/too early and should be more disciplined. Your timing is good, but the risk control is not enough, either too radical or too conservative, and missed the opportunity to maximize returns.

Continue to deepen the Asian market, education and risk control will help

expand the derivatives market

At present, BitMEX mainly serves Southeast Asian and East Asian markets. The company has long adhered to the policy of "not connecting to American users" and has maintained active investment in the Asian market.

Stephan said, "This year, BitMEX has been granted pardons, which involves a relatively long historical period, such as between 2016 and 2018. We are very grateful for this, but it will not change our current strategic direction."

He said the current trend is that in the United States, the crypto industry is increasingly dominated and influenced by traditional financial institutions (TradFi). In contrast, the Asian market will continue to maintain higher innovation and focus more on retail investors and individual users. BitMEX will continue to deepen its roots in the Asian market and its commitment to the Asian market is sincere and firm.

At the same time, regarding the further expansion of the crypto derivatives market, Stephan believes that the focus is on the education part that BitMEX is already doing. Although it has a foundation, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Another direction is to create more accessible risk management tools. Looking to the future, what he hopes to achieve is an AI assistant that can truly allow users to express their trading intentions freely, and avoid "instruction translation errors".

Finally, he said that this natural path is to allow more people to enter the crypto spot trading market first and then transition to derivatives. Many users usually start using perpetual contracts after they come into contact with the spot market. This trend will become more obvious in the near future. He explained that this bull market was not actually driven by the large-scale influx of new users, but more because of the increase in transaction volume of existing users, and some institutions have begun to get involved. So I think the next round of explosion will not be three years later, but a closer one: it will be driven by two factors: AI lowers the threshold for trading and more people are willing to try trading because of trust and ease of use.