Founded in August 2018 and headquartered in Singapore, BiKi.com is a global digital currency trading service provider that serves nearly 100 countries and regions, with over 2 million users worldwide. In this interview, Ethan Ng, CEO of BiKi, will be telling us more about the company’s brand philosophy, how did they get the domain name BiKi.com and what are some future plans for the company.

What led you to the creation of BiKi? Looking at it now, is it how you have imagined it develop?

Hi, I’m Ethan Ng, CEO of BiKi Exchange, Southeast Asia. A brief introduction about myself – I was the former Marketing Lead at Huobi Global and was handpicked by Jun Du himself, the Co-Founder of Huobi for my role at BiKi. Jun Du is also the CEO of Node Capital and Jinse Finance (China’s most established crypto media), he has been the biggest backer of BiKi and operates as BiKi’s Co-CEO.

BiKi is founded by Winter Li, who started as an investment manager and a serial entrepreneur. He believes in empowering the cryptocurrency space and connecting all the traders in the ecosystem and that has led him to start BiKi Exchange in August 2018. During the 1990s, when the internet was just beginning, no one would have thought that the internet would become a mainstream industry with the likes of giants in the form of Google, Amazon, Paypal, Stripe, and more. Winter Li saw the same opportunity in the blockchain industry with the exchange being the financial institutional centre.

Since stepping in my role as CEO and launching the Southeast Asia office in April 2019, BiKi’s global communities and presence has grown and continues to expand from strength to strength. Growth is a continuous pursuit and I am excited to be leading the charge for further global expansions and developments.

What is the story behind your brand name? Did you have other options or BiKi was the one from the outset?

We started with the name of BikiCoin.com with our exchange token in mind, as the exchange grew beyond 1 million registered users, we progressed to the name of BiKi. This company is created for the long-term vision of our founders with the goal of becoming a truly global exchange with users around the world, hence we wanted a universal name that everyone could relate to. Eventually, the “BiKi” name was agreed upon, as it resembles a user friendly, warm-hearted brand that everyone can relate to.

How did you get the domain name BiKi.com for your brand? 

As I hinted earlier, we were in the earlier domain of BikiCoin.com and as we grew bigger, we decided to invest in the domain name that we were targeting in the first place, BiKi.com. The upgrading of the domain to BiKi.com also resembles BiKi’s brand moving into the international stage as an upcoming dark horse.

With cryptocurrencies there is a huge issue with trust, how do you address that? What role does your brand and marketing strategy play in communicating to your audience that you are trustworthy and here to stay?

I often like to tell my colleagues and team members that ultimately, we are in the business of trust. First of all, users would definitely notice that our engineering team puts paramount importance on security, our kyc and withdrawal processes are set up in a place with user protection as our priority. Secondly, as we are known to be a community-driven exchange, our users get to interact with each other in our communities with BiKi’s 24/7 community customer service team interacting and collecting feedback to show that we care. BiKi communicates a consistent message from the time we launched until today. This is based on BiKi’s principles and values of being a highly secure, reliable, and fair exchange that puts our traders’ interests and protection as our top priority.

With BiKi’s long term vision of being a full-fledged financial institution in the future, we want our users to know we are here to stay.

How would you value the domain BiKi.com for your brand now?

We have seen very valuable domains with poor businesses carrying those domain names, so in my opinion, the domain is only as valuable as the business goes. We like the fact that users just have to type 4 words to search for us.

Who is your target audience? How does your brand name speak to them?

When we started during the bear market of 2018, we specifically targeted districts in the Chinese markets where the big boys have not covered, having said that, that meant that our users back then were all new to crypto users, choosing BiKi as their first exchange. Slowly through time, these users have seasoned to become semi-pro users. As the exchange grew, our target audience became everyday people. From crypto traders to financial partners, to crypto communities globally and new people looking to jump onto the crypto bandwagon. Ultimately we want everyone to know that BiKi is a safe and reliable platform for all to trade cryptocurrencies on and is a choice exchange for people who are both new or familiar to crypto. In this day and age, we like to be transparent with our users, so our users can get to speak to each other, including BiKi team, including me, in our community. This gives our users a sense of belonging and a place where they know they are important.

Many blockchain-related startups have domain extensions like .io, .crypto, etc., why did you go with .com?

We believe in crypto becoming mainstream and having a .com domain signifies our belief and it makes it easier for all who are interested to trade crypto to remember BiKi as a top-tier global exchange to trade on.

You rebranded at the end of last year, what was the reason for the rebrand? How has the upgraded BiKi brand been received by your customers, team, and business partners?

It has been very well received. In celebration of our rebranding and BiKi’s 1st year anniversary, we invited the industry’s influencers from top venture capitals, market makers, top media, and more to our party, surprising, the venue was jammed packed before the event actually began. The decision of rebranding at a sensible time was essentially a well-planned one. We needed to give a message to the industry and especially our users that we will take a new approach to the industry and that we are more serious than ever to attempt the upcoming challenges ahead. BiKi is constantly looking to evolve our brand and strengthen our position in the market as a top tier global exchange.

Is it hard as a brand to appeal to such a wide global audience? What are some of the challenges you face?

Indeed the challenges are very unexpected, we saw different cultures being practiced in different countries. For example, some users in countries are very against doing kyc while on another spectrum of the world, the users from another country like the fact that we have kyc for withdrawals which gave them more confidence about us. So we had to find a balance to meet the demands of our users and appealing to them while not compromising on our standards and principles. One of the key challenges we face is being able to cope with the demand to expand and grow our physical presence and offices globally! Last month we rolled out a new recruitment program to cope with this demand, it is called the Community Global Manager program.

What should your audience expect from you now, what’s next for BiKi?

Our audience can expect more exciting projects and product offerings from BiKi in 2020. With our focus in DeFi and Gaming industries, we have been receiving a lot of interest from projects looking to list on BiKi and accessing our strong global communities and wide reach.

We have been conducting a stealth experiment for a while now and we are in the final stages to conclude the finishing touches. We will also be rolling out a new strategy and model to support our projects’ growth globally which will excite all stakeholders – communities, traders, project users, etc. Stay tuned and we look forward to sharing more in good time!

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We hope this will be of use to you in the process of getting your perfect domain name. If you have any questions, need any help or just want to chat with someone about the process, book a free consultation at MarkUpgrade, we are always happy to hear from you.

Find out more about BiKi.

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