Bybit’s Bold Leap: Banks, IBANs, and February’s Surprise!

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Well now, crypto exchange Bybit-that lively critter that trades in digits instead of dirt-has announced plans to haul retail banking onto its platform starting next month. It’s the kind of notion that makes a riverboat gambler tip his hat and say, “Don’t that beat all?”

  • Bybit plans to launch retail banking services in February.
  • The service will offer users personal IBAN accounts to manage fiat funds, make payments and convert balances to crypto.
  • Bybit is also exploring U.S. market entry and a potential public listing.

Dubbed “My Bank,” the new contraption is slated for a February debut, according to CEO Ben Zhou, who announced the offering during a Jan. 29 online keynote. If that calendar don’t bear false witness, we may be in for a sight that would tickle a man’s whiskers and empty his pockets at the same time.

Zhou says this mighty service will hand you a personal IBAN, letting you send and receive funds across banks in a whole passel of currencies. At launch, it will also saddle up the United States dollar beside a bundle of other fiat notes. The full roll-call of currencies wasn’t bared to the public just yet.

To rope in a bank account, Bybit folks will have to go through Know Your Customer (KYC) verification, after which they can deposit fiat, pay bills, receive salaries in their own name, and flip their balances into crypto right from within the platform. It’s a tidy trick for sure, if you don’t mind a little paperwork with your progress.

In a chat with Bloomberg, Zhou added that Bybit has struck up partnerships with several banks to make this work, including Qatar National Bank (QNB), DMZ Finance, and Pave Bank, a startup lender licensed in the Eastern European nation of Georgia.

Bybit will launch a new custody product

There are also plans to roll out a new custody product aimed at institutional clients, according to Zhou. The service will back banks and other large investors who fancy tokenizing real-world assets like stocks or property. If you’ve got a receipt for a house in your pocket and want to pretend it’s digital, this is your show.

However, Zhou said the exchange has no plans to set foot in the predictions market, where outfits like Polymarket and Kalshi are scoring tidy sums. “We looked, and there have been a lot of compliance challenges,” Zhou said, as if that explains why the train won’t be stopping there anytime soon.

U.S. expansion plans

Among other schemes, Bybit is also priming for a possible entry into the U.S. market, which has grown more inviting under a crypto-friendly administration led by President Donald Trump. Yet the company would need to work with a licensed partner to operate in the states, lest they bring more ideas than a clock can wind.

Over the long haul, Zhou said the exchange was already in talks with major banks and is getting more and more prepared for a public listing in the U.S.

Bybit is one of the globe’s largest crypto exchanges by trading volume and has been toiling to widen its footprint in recent months. It launched Kazakhstan’s first regulated peer-to-peer trading platform in November last year, letting locals buy and sell digital assets through a licensed system backed by financial institutions.
But in Japan, Bybit had to stop onboarding new users since October to align with the country’s Financial Services Agency’s compliance requirements.

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2026-01-29 13:58