Bybit CEO Ben Zhou on Making Crypto Payments Invisible at Abu Dhabi Finance Week

At Fintech Abu Dhabi during Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW) 2025, Ben Zhou, CEO and co-founder of Bybit, spoke about what it will take for crypto to move from niche to normal. The session, provocatively titled “Invisible Payments, Visible Growth: Under the Hood of Today’s Power Plays,” drew an audience curious to hear how payments, security and infrastructure are being reshaped as digital assets inch closer to everyday use.

Zhou shared the stage with Hosam Arab, CEO and co-founder of Tabby, and Mark Rydquist, managing director at Google. Lenah Hassaballah of CNN Business Arabic steered the conversation, which sat neatly under ADFW’s theme, “Engineering the Capital Network.” The panel didn’t dwell on theory; it dug into practical questions about rebuilding financial plumbing using tokenization, fast settlement and smarter coordination across markets.

From Security to Settlement

Security came up early, and understandably so. Zhou returned to a major breach earlier this year, calling it “the ultimate test” of Bybit’s operational instincts. He used the incident to highlight a bigger problem: attackers can move funds across chains and through mixers faster than investigators can trace them. “When an incident like this happens, it’s really a time race,” he said, pointing out that decoding transactions can involve a two-day lag during which “the hacker can simply move money to multiple locations.” It’s a blunt reminder that speed matters just as much as sophistication.

Zhou didn’t leave the problem as an inevitability. He urged the industry to coordinate more tightly and share intelligence faster. He described an initiative he’s been pushing, which he called the Lazarus Group, not as a single entity but as a cooperative, cross-industry mechanism for improving how exchanges, OTC desks and other market actors respond to incidents. The aim is simple and urgent: when another victim appears, the whole market can act quickly and with better information. “When another victim happens, the whole industry can respond faster,” he said. In other words, patchwork defense won’t cut it anymore.

But the conversation wasn’t all about threats. Zhou argued there’s a compelling upside to getting the technology and governance right: payments that feel invisible to the user because settlement happens so quickly and reliably in the background. He described crypto as a synchronization problem solved, “It’s modern. It’s 24/7,” he told the audience, and said merchants are beginning to prefer real-time settlement to legacy processors that only reconcile transactions at set intervals. On-chain transparency and tokenized models, he said, reduce the need for middlemen and widen access for users who today are excluded by slow or opaque systems.

Put together, Zhou said, faster settlement, tokenization and decentralized infrastructure can make payments more efficient and more open, the kind of invisible payment experiences consumers expect as digital finance matures. But, he cautioned, that won’t happen without building secure, scalable systems and earning user trust. “As digital assets move further into the mainstream, secure and scalable infrastructure, combined with a strong foundation of user trust, will be key to supporting long-term growth and practical adoption,” he said.

The panel captured a tension that’s becoming familiar across crypto: how to marry slick, user-friendly products with the sort of reliability and governance that regulators and customers demand. Zhou and his co-panelists argued that solving that puzzle means more than better technology; it means changing how the industry talks to itself and to outside stakeholders.

For Abu Dhabi, which has been positioning itself as a crossroads for capital and technology, that’s a welcome sign. Conversations like this suggest firms are moving beyond proofs of concept and toward practical systems that merchants and everyday consumers could actually use.

For exchanges such as Bybit, the work now is twofold: keep innovating on payments and settlement while investing in the operational resilience and information-sharing frameworks that make mainstream use possible. If the last year proved anything, Zhou suggested, it’s that progress depends on both speed and cooperation. Build faster rails, yes, but build them together.