Young girls who grew up in Asia in the ’90s were enamored by female anchor Yang Lan, much like Americans were with Oprah. Gracy Chen was so inspired that she followed Lan into a career as a TV host and producer.
Chen then went from TV host to entrepreneur, falling in love with the mathematical beauty of Bitcoin and later became the only female CEO leading one of the five biggest exchanges in the world (although Binance recently announced Yi He as co-CEO along with Richard Teng.) Chen was poised, positive and pragmatic when she spoke to Magazine.
During her stint at Phoenix TV, she interviewed business leaders and celebrities like venture capitalist Tim Draper and renowned computer scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil.
It was the perfect role for the curious host, standing on the front line of innovations, building her little black book of contacts. This was 2014 in Beijing, and it was in this inner circle of tech and TV friends that she first heard about “this thing called Bitcoin.” She bought a little bit of Bitcoin, which was USD $300 at the time, but the investment turned into much more than she bargained for.
But more on that later.
Chen had the entrepreneurial itch after interviewing all those founders and futurists, so in the next seven years she created two companies. One failure, one unicorn.
The first company, Accumulus, was a financial technology service providing payment settlement for freelancers in China. “The company still exists today and has more than 100 million users. It’s the largest taxpayer in the Tianjin province,” Chen said.
The second startup, ReigVR, was a VR metaverse company. She shut that down because it wasn’t doing well. Although these endeavors weren’t in crypto, Chen said there were similarities, given that she built a platform to deal with lots of transactions on a daily basis.
Over these seven years, she continued to invest in cryptocurrencies and crypto companies and noticed much of her personal wealth had come from that early-stage Bitcoin she bought. She had a realization: “If I invest my money in crypto, why not invest my time in crypto, too.”
From fintech to crypto CEO
In 2022, Chen joined leading cryptocurrency exchange, Bitget, first as managing director and today as CEO. She brought strong marketing chops and a bias to build. She knew the formula for success: Scale up, get profitable, then IPO – unlike crypto projects, where IPO activity happens early and startups aren’t incentivized to continue to scale.
Bitget has since experienced record growth, doubled its user base from around 50 million to 120 million, and secured a place among the top five crypto exchanges in derivatives trading volumes.
Chen also plays a key role in institutional business development, working closely with major clients and partners to strengthen Bitget’s global presence.
One of those initiatives brought her back to her TV roots, when she became a judge on Killer Whales – Shark Tank’s doppelganger for crypto companies. It was streamed on mainstream platforms, including Apple TV and Amazon Prime. She was the only female, Asian and exchange representative on the panel, sitting alongside the likes of Anthony Scaramucci and YouTubers Austin Arnold from Altcoin Daily and Ran Neuner from Crypto Banter.
Chen was only able to participate in one episode in season one, but found her footing in season two. “I’m a statistics person, I have an MBA from MIT, and I’m CEO of this big crypto exchange. So, I used that same kind of judging criteria when we were reviewing the projects. If a project had good fundamentals, a business model that made sense, good cash inflow and revenue, and the founders were serious, I’d usually go for it. They have to be entrepreneurs, not wantrepreneurs.”
She was put off by projects with arrogant founders. “We had a famous YouTuber tell us it would be easy to transfer his followers into users,” Chen shared. She had a soft spot for female-led projects.
Chen had experience blocking out the haters, not from her days in TV, but from her teenage years when she ran the school station. “When I was 16, I got aired on the school’s TV every week. One day, one of my friends said that I had become famous on this Chinese Reddit. They were writing bad things about me that weren’t true.” She learned that if she were a speaker, she would be misunderstood, so she moved on. It gave her thick skin to be in the public eye.
Women in high places
Chen always went against the grain. A troublemaker, tinkerer and pseudo-scientist, she was the token naughty kid. She skipped classes, didn’t do her homework and spent all her time obsessed with oddities. “I tried to build this little swimming pool for ants, without knowing anything about architecture. I probably killed a…
cointelegraph.com