From Crypto Wallet to Dollar Account with Bitget’s Alvin Kan

Hey everyone,Alvin Kan is the COO of Bitget Wallet. I caught up with him at Blockchain Rio to discuss how a self-custody wallet turned into an everyday finance app, and what that shift looks like across emerging markets.Bitget Wallet reported in August that daily payment transactions overtook daily trading transactions for the first time in its eight-year history.That crossover is a useful marker for where wallet products are heading, and for the competition now forming around dollar accounts, cards and tokenized assets in the same app.🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversationBits & Borders is Presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub’s internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub’s customer base.Some of the key global highlights include:* Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).* Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.* Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.Key Takeaways:* Daily payment transactions on Bitget Wallet passed daily trading transactions for the first time in August, which Kan reads as spending becoming the mainstay behavior rather than a bear market substitute for trading.* The card is the onboarding wedge, not the destination. Many of the wallet’s tokenized stock buyers signed up for the card first and made their first RWA purchase roughly three months later.* Kan expects payments, savings and trading products to converge into a single finance app, partly because payments margins are being competed toward zero while trading margins are not, and partly because pooled capital can be collateralized and redeployed in ways that fragmented balances cannot.* Tokenization solves distribution, not liquidity. Bitget Wallet screens RWA listings for assets that already trade with depth in their home markets, which is how Korean names like SK Hynix ended up as perps demand on the platform.* RWA holder counts have grown steadily since the wallet integrated Ondo and later xStocks, without the spike-and-collapse pattern of meme coins. Kan attributes this to both a different user profile and a different holding mindset.* Regional demand varies more than the “dollar account” label suggests. Southeast Asia wants dollar access and workable card limits, South Asia and Africa want cheaper remittance rails, Argentina wants dollars outright, and Brazil wants dollar exposure alongside BRL savings given high CDI rates and a real that has firmed against the dollar over the past year.* Kan’s closing argument: institutions treat stablecoins as a useful innovation, but he sees them as a disruptive one, which means newcomers rather than incumbents should be expected to win the category.I enjoyed this conversation with Alvin and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.Have a great weekend everybody.- AWSRecent Episodes Get full access to Bits and Borders at <a href="https://bitsborders.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_