Bitget Wallet Initiates $10 Million Ecosystem Fund in Collaboration with Onchain Layer

Crypto exchange Bitget wants to develop its own on-chain ecosystem, following the greatest exchange examples such as Binance, OKX, and KuCoin.

"The Bitget Onchain Layer will not only integrate a host of native DApps [decentralized applications] within Bitget Wallet through joint collaboration with builders," reads a Bitget statement shared with Cointelegraph on May 15. "Concurrently, a $10 million BWB Ecosystem Fund has also been established, dedicated to accelerating the development of the Bitget Onchain Layer and supporting aligned projects," it added.

BWB is the native token of the exchange's namesake self-custody wallet, exactly similar to TWT of Trust Wallet. Lastly, we also have the native token BGB, which participants can use to offset trading fees, much in the same manner as the BNB token for Binance, the KCS token for KuCoin, and the OKB token for OKX.

The fund of the Bitget OnChain Layer Ecosystem will be initially invested and incubated in the various Web3 trading services. To date, the exchange has staked its claim on three pre-market price aggregators, an on-chain derivatives market, and trading bots, which it says will complement the interchain swap service of the Bitget Wallet.

Bitget Wallet is one of the more popular self-custody wallets in the Asia-Pacific region, having a current user base of over 20 million. Set to see the light of day this quarter is its native token, BWB, which has allocated 5% of its 1 billion maximum supply to Bitget community members in its pre-generation event.

After the launch, BWB will power the Bitget Wallet and OnChain Layer ecosystem through governance voting, eligibility to participate in Launchpad events, staking rewards, and payments of multichain gas fees. The move follows Bitget's efforts to facilitate day-to-day trading and expand to all aspects of the crypto ecosystem.

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, first launched its own BNB blockchain in September 2020. Around that time, the wallet service Trust Wallet, created by Binance, and later spun off into a separate legal entity launched their own TWT token, that since then had grown into a billion-dollar fully diluted market capitalization project.

And this year, the decentralized PancakeSwap is the first billion-dollar project on the Binance Smart Chain.

And finally, OKX, the crypto exchange that has built its own self-custody wallet and Web3 Marketplace for the trading of nonfungible tokens, interactions with decentralized applications, and trading novel inventions like Bitcoin Runes, Ordinals, Atomicals, and BRC-20 tokens.

May 13 marked the point at which the OKX Web3 Marketplace became the largest exchange for trading Bitcoin Runes, at 51.08%.