After the Bitget hack, a lot of people started digging up HL Jeff’s old posts criticizing Bitget. But if you’ve been in this industry long enough, you’ll realize one thing: Most exchanges in their early days weren’t as clean as people imagine. The term 'not clean' actually covers a wide range of practices. For example: Leaving intentional backdoors so users from regulated regions can still register and trade; A/B Book setups, where some user orders are sent to the market while others are kept internally for counter-trading; Collaborating with market makers to pump, dump, or create liquidity; Watching whales’ stop-loss and liquidation points, then deliberately triggering spikes to clear positions. In simple terms, it’s about leveraging information and rules to do things that, in hindsight, are hard to justify publicly. Early crypto was inherently a market with vague regulations, extreme information asymmetry, and exchanges wielding immense power. If you look back at any major exchange that’s survived long enough, you’ll almost always find a pile of shady history. During the wild west days, if you didn’t do it, someone else would. In a fiercely competitive environment, many practices gradually became unspoken industry norms. But there’s still a difference. Some platforms were wild in their early days, but after making money and growing bigger, they started focusing on compliance, improving risk controls, increasing transparency, and distancing themselves from those shady practices. Exchanges that rely solely on shady tactics from start to finish rarely go far. Because once an exchange reaches a certain scale, its biggest assets become its brand, licenses, banking relationships, liquidity, and the trust of millions of users. At that point, pulling shady moves for short-term gains just isn’t worth the risk anymore. The bigger the company and the richer the boss, the more they’ll fear things going wrong under normal circumstances. The Bitget hack this time can be seen as a mirror. It’s about watching how they handle it, how they compensate, how transparent they are with information, and whether they clarify the vulnerabilities and responsibilities afterward. Exchanges always talk about how secure and compliant they are, but that’s just marketing. It’s only when something goes wrong that you can truly see whether a company has genuinely grown over the years.