Bybit

How Bybit Acquired 2,800 Active Traders at a $29 CPA with Blockchain-Ads

−63%

lower CPA — $78 → $29 per Active Trader

2,800

New Active Traders acquired at scale

6.3%

click-to-activation rate

7.7M+

verified impressions; 0.54% CTR; $1.93 CPC at scale.

Objective

New-Trader Acquisition (Funded + First-Trade)

Primary KPI

CPA per New Active Trader (Funded + First-Trade)

Industry

Centralized Crypto Exchange

Duration

6 months

Key Markets

SEA, MENA, Western Europe, LATAM

About the Brand

Bybit is one of the major centralized crypto exchanges by spot and derivatives volume, serving traders across 100+ markets. The brand competes through deep liquidity, advanced derivatives products, and a relentless cadence of product release across spot, perpetuals, options, and on-chain products.

Target Audience: Active and aspiring crypto traders — including derivatives-curious users, intermediate spot traders looking to upgrade, and DeFi-active users considering CEX-native execution.

Growth Stage: Enterprise.

The Challenge

The goal was to acquire active traders, specifically users who fund a wallet and place a first trade within 7 days. And also to achieve that at a CPA below the brand's CPA economics. However, competitors were aggressively bidding on every trader-acquisition keyword, and the team faced other obstacles:

Key Obstacles

Mainstream-platform exclusion. Token-related advertising is policy-restricted on Google, Meta and TikTok.
CEX-acquisition keyword saturation. The handful of channels that do allow exchange advertising had become an arms race; marginal trader CPA exceeded first-90-day commission revenue.
Trader-quality drift. Volume was available but skewed toward sign-up-and-leave behavior; the 7-day-active rate had been declining for three quarters.
Cross-chain trader invisibility. Mainstream platforms could not target "user with active DeFi history" — exactly Bybit's highest-value upgrade audience.

Why Blockchain-Ads?

The brand's existing paid stack could deliver sign-ups but not active traders. Without on-chain signal, Bybit could not reach the next-best trader who already used DeFi but had not yet adopted CEX-native execution.

Decision Drivers

Wallet-level audience targeting — a way to find active DeFi traders, the brand's most-likely-to-upgrade cohort.
Premium curated inventory — adjacent to crypto editorial and on-chain analytics dashboards.
Click-to-trade attribution — measuring actual trading activity, not just sign-ups.
Wallet retargeting for connected-but-not-funded cohorts.

Unique Capabilities Leveraged

DeFi-power-user wallet segments — wallets with verified multi-protocol interaction history.
Multi-chain trader segments — users active across Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, BNB Chain.
Stablecoin-velocity segments — wallets with high transaction-frequency stablecoin movement.
Privacy-safe wallet retargeting — for connected wallets that browsed without funding.

The team made three commitments before launch: (1) primary KPI was Active Trader CPA — funded + first-trade within 7 days; (2) creative led with derivatives-product depth, not generic exchange messaging; (3) inventory whitelist locked at launch with ~80 vetted Web3 placements.

Results

Before Blockchain-Ads → After Blockchain-Ads

CPA (per Active Trader): ~$78 → $29
CTR: 0.10% → 0.54%
Click → Active Trader: 2.0% → 6.3%
7-day Active-Trader Rate: 38% → 62%

Active traders acquired through Blockchain-Ads showed 62% 7-day active-trader rate, 41% higher 30-day spot-volume per user, and meaningfully higher derivatives-product engagement than blended baseline. The campaign delivered the brand's first paid acquisition channel whose CPA aligned with first-90-day commission economics.

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Inactive-State

Active State

Execution

Phase 1 — Learning (Month 1)

Objective: Identify the wallet-behavioral profiles most likely to convert into active traders.

Actions:

Four wallet behavioral segments tested: DeFi power-users (>5 protocol interactions in 90 days), Multi-chain traders (active across 3+ chains), Stablecoin-velocity power-users, Existing-trader CRM lookalikes
Six creative variants — split between derivatives-product-led and brand-led
Geo split: SEA (35%), MENA (25%), Western Europe (25%), LATAM (15%)

Insights:

Multi-chain traders converted to active traders at 2.9x the rate of stablecoin-velocity segments.
Derivatives-product-led creative outperformed brand-led on funding-then-trading rate by 38%.
SEA and MENA delivered the strongest unit economics; Western Europe over-indexed on derivatives volume per trader.

Phase 2 — Consideration (Month 2–3)

Objective: Concentrate budget on multi-chain trader segments and tighten the trader-funding funnel.

Actions:

70% of budget reallocated to multi-chain trader and CRM-lookalike segments.
Creative cycle moved to weekly. Derivatives-product-led creative locked as primary funnel-entry format.
Funnel rebuilt: a wallet-aware on-boarding flow detected DeFi history and surfaced derivatives-tutorial content — reducing first-trade drop-off by ~31%.

Performance Improvements:

CTR climbed 0.27% → 0.61%.
CPC compressed $2.45 → $1.78.
Click-to-Active-Trader rate improved 2.8% → 5.4%.

Phase 3 — Acquisition + Retargeting (Month 4–6)

Objective: Scale across the four-region footprint and lock first-month retention through retargeting.

Actions:

Daily spend lifted 3.1x against winning cohorts.
Wallet-based retargeting for connected wallets that browsed without funding.
Behavioral retargeting for traders who funded but didn't trade within 5 days.
Market-volatility bid surging activated during high-volume crypto-market windows.
Geo expansion into Vietnam and Brazil — both cleared the CPA threshold.