Bybit

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 "users 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. To solve that problem, they decided to use Blockchain-Ads, leveraging the following capabilities:

• 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, and BNB Chain.
• Stablecoin-velocity segments: wallets with high transaction-frequency stablecoin movements.
• Privacy-safe wallet retargeting: for connected wallets that browsed without funding.

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.

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.

Outcome:

• Steady-state CPA settled at $29.
• Retargeted cohorts traded at 2.6x the rate of cold prospecting.
• 7-day active-trader rate hit 62% of acquired cohort vs. 38% baseline.

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