Bybit leads $8M funding for licensed Hata, as Malaysia stablecoin pilots (RMJDT) advance

Bybit led an $8 million Series A round in Hata, a Kuala Lumpur–based digital asset exchange. The funding includes support from global family offices and follows Bybit’s earlier $4.2 million seed investment, making this a follow-on bet on the same platform. The capital will be used to expand Hata’s liquidity, user base and compliant digital asset products. Since launching in 2023, Hata says it has 209,000+ registered users and processed about 1 billion Malaysian ringgits (around $225 million) in transaction volume in 2025. Hata’s core edge is its regulatory status: it holds licences from Malaysia’s Securities Commission (SC) and Labuan Financial Services Authority (LFSA), enabling regulated trading and custody locally. Bybit CEO Ben Zhou pointed to Malaysia’s digitally engaged population and long-term crypto adoption potential. The round comes as Malaysia tightens and clarifies its digital-asset framework. Bank Negara Malaysia is running a Digital Asset Innovation Hub sandbox and a three-year tokenization roadmap with major banks (e.g., Standard Chartered, CIMB, Maybank). In the same ecosystem, the ringgit-backed stablecoin RMJDT was launched on the Zetrix blockchain under the sandbox framework. For traders, this is mainly a regulatory and market-structure catalyst. Bybit’s funding strengthens expectations of more regulated onshore liquidity in Malaysia, while RMJDT’s sandbox momentum could support incremental activity—though it is not a direct, immediate signal for broader token prices. Keywords: Bybit, Hata, Malaysia crypto regulation, Series A, stablecoin, tokenization sandbox.