In Conversation with Zhao Changpeng: We Are Still in the Early Stages of the Biggest Cryptocurrency Surge

Analyzing the underlying logic of wealth and collapse.

Written by: When Shift Happens
Compiled by: Blockchain in Plain Language

From starting from scratch to leading the world's largest cryptocurrency empire, from being trapped in a prison across the ocean to receiving a presidential pardon, Zhao Changpeng (CZ) has almost encapsulated the wildness and growing pains of the entire cryptocurrency industry in his life.

Can a tweet really destroy FTX? What public relations philosophy lies behind the '4' gesture? What dark moments did he experience under judicial pressure? Facing the onslaught of decentralized forces like Hyperliquid and the rotation of a trillion-dollar bull market cycle, the now-retired CZ dissects the truth of sudden wealth, commercial battles, prison reflections, and the ultimate ambition of AI education in this in-depth conversation. This is a deep confrontation stripped of glamour, taking you through the noise to understand the underlying survival rules of super winners.

1. Personal Experience, Family Background, and the Reconstruction of Wealth Perception

Host: Let’s start from the beginning. There are many definitions of you from the outside, and even President Trump once called you an expert in the field of digital currency. You have traveled to many countries, providing consulting advice to governments on the regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies. But perhaps what the outside world is most curious about is: what exactly happened in your life that allowed you to rank among the world's top billionaires before the age of fifty?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): I have always felt that the rankings of global billionaires are not accurate. The data on these lists is severely constrained by valuation methods, and many undisclosed assets or complex rights cannot be accurately reflected, not to mention that many of my assets are not cash in the traditional sense. I have even heard rumors that competitors deliberately spent money to have the media rank me very high to attract more regulatory scrutiny. So I have never taken specific rankings seriously.

Host: If you reflect on your growth process, where do you think the motivation that propelled you to where you are today comes from? Many successful people often have adversities in their childhood; is that the case for you?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): I haven’t experienced particularly dramatic hardships, but I did grow up in a relatively impoverished family environment. When my family immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, my parents' jobs barely paid close to the local minimum wage. In Vancouver, many of my friends came from wealthy immigrant families from Taiwan or Hong Kong, and they were well-off. Being in such a disparity during my youth did create an invisible pressure.

But I still feel very lucky. As a first-generation immigrant, I witnessed the tremendous efforts my parents made for my sister and me to settle down. First-generation immigrants often have to start from the bottom due to language and cultural barriers, doing the hardest jobs. As a second-generation immigrant, being able to clearly see the hardships of the older generation transforms that memory into a deep-rooted desire to strive—you want to go further and not let their sacrifices go to waste.

Often, this inner drive for entrepreneurship and hard work is difficult to carry on to the third or fourth generation. My sister is also very accomplished; she started in technology, worked at a startup in Tokyo, and later joined Morgan Stanley, becoming one of the global executives in her thirties. After experiencing some psychological challenges due to motherhood, she resigned from her investment banking executive position, and now she is dedicated to providing counseling and help to those struggling with depression.

Host: You mentioned that the spirit of hard work often fades in the third generation after becoming wealthy. How do you plan to prevent your own children from losing that intrinsic drive?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): Honestly, I don’t have a perfect solution yet. My children are still very young, and I have somewhat postponed this issue because they still have some time before facing the world on their own. I have talked to many wealthy entrepreneurs with young children about how they plan to educate the next generation, and the vast majority of them respond with, “I don’t know.”

The current conventional education system largely trains qualified cogs on an assembly line, encouraging egalitarianism. But today’s world is evolving at an extremely fast pace, especially with the explosion of artificial intelligence, where future social divisions will greatly reward “super specialists.” If you are a programmer, you need to face competition from millions of developers worldwide; if you can enter the top 0.1% in a specific niche, the value you create and the rewards you receive could be several times or even dozens of times that of the top 0.2% group.

Traditional schools often force students to allocate more time to weaker subjects when they excel in math but are slightly weaker in languages, ultimately dulling their edges and producing an average student with no outstanding advantages. Education certainly needs a basic general knowledge baseline, but it should also encourage individuals to excel in their true passions. Moreover, the current education costs are exorbitantly high and inefficient, with excellent teachers leaving due to salary caps.

The future of more efficient education will inevitably be based on personalized adaptive learning platforms powered by artificial intelligence. AI can customize teaching plans according to each child's learning pace, even accompanying their growth. While physical interactive robots are also a direction, the emotional interaction and fine expressiveness of current hardware are still primitive, and distribution costs are too high; whereas software-based AI teaching platforms can be distributed to millions or even billions of children at almost zero marginal cost. The Giggle Academy, which I am currently investing a lot of energy in, is based on this logic, aiming to provide completely free basic education to children worldwide who lack quality teaching resources.

2. From Zero to Global Leader: The Founding Philosophy and Execution Genes of Binance

Host: Many people are familiar with the famous image of Jack Ma holding a meeting with the eighteen Arhats in Hangzhou's West Lake Garden in 1999. What was the scene like when Binance was born in 2017?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): The media often likes to dramatize startup stories, but the reality is usually simple and pragmatic. Before Binance, we had a technical team of about 15 to 20 people, and the company was called Bijie Tech. Our main business at that time was as a B2B technology provider, building trading matching systems for traditional commodities, cultural exchanges, postal currency cards, and traditional asset trading platforms, with very healthy and stable cash flow.

By around May 2017, a new cycle in the cryptocurrency industry was starting. One day, I gathered all the core members of the team in a small meeting room, even smaller than an ordinary bedroom. I told everyone, “The real window of opportunity in this industry has arrived. If we don’t create our own cryptocurrency trading platform now, we will definitely regret it in the future. We already have the world’s top high-concurrency matching engine system and a ready-made technical backbone; the only thing we lack is an operation and customer service system for C-end users.”

Everyone had almost no disagreement and voted unanimously in favor. We discussed several brand options and finally settled on “BN” (a fusion of Finance and Bitcoin). We then launched an ICO and developed the platform, stepping onto the global stage from that shabby meeting room.

Host: What the outside world is most curious about is how Binance managed to leap from obscurity to become the largest cryptocurrency trading platform in terms of trading volume in just six months?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): The core lies in the team’s extreme execution, agility, and unburdened focus.

Our initial team not only had solid technical skills but was also extremely humble, with no office politics or vanity at play. We drew strong execution cohesion from the fusion of Eastern and Western management cultures. In many traditional Western companies, even a slight product change often requires multiple rounds of validation and negotiation; whereas our team, after establishing a common vision, exhibited amazing tacit understanding. As long as the decision direction is correct, the team can implement it to a very high standard day and night. Fortunately, we completely aligned our judgments with the market’s urgent needs in the early iterations of several key products and strategic layouts.

Additionally, regarding the so-called “hard work,” my understanding is that results and efficiency will always outweigh mere hours spent. Many people sit at their desks for over ten hours, producing very little effective code or solving business problems; whereas an engineer driven by passion may solve the entire system's architectural bottleneck in just a few highly focused hours. Of course, in the early stages of entrepreneurship, when the sense of mission is very strong, everyone doesn’t even calculate working hours—after putting the kids to sleep, they reopen their computers at ten o'clock at night to continue troubleshooting and optimizing the system until dawn. This kind of hard work is not forced out by external assessments but comes from an inner desire to refine a groundbreaking trading system to perfection.

Host: What is the most common misunderstanding the public has about Binance today?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): The most common misunderstanding is still the stereotype that we are a “Chinese company.” In fact, we have operated with a global distributed architecture from day one, with team members spread across dozens of countries.

Another deeper misunderstanding is the black-and-white view of centralization versus decentralization. Many people believe that as the largest centralized trading platform (CEX), Binance must inherently reject decentralization (DEX). But the reality is quite the opposite: at the current stage, centralized trading platforms provide the lowest entry barriers, convenient fiat currency deposit and withdrawal channels, and a complete account recovery and customer service security system, meeting the practical needs of the vast majority of ordinary investors worldwide; but in the long-term endgame, true decentralization is the underlying color of blockchain. We have long invested in and incubated decentralized ecosystems precisely because we understand that centralized trading platforms are merely a bridge to a fully decentralized financial world in the future.

3. Media Storm, Market Panic, and the Symbolic Origins of the '4' Gesture

Host: In the Chinese and global cryptocurrency community, your photo showing four fingers has almost become the most recognizable meme. How did the number “4” evolve into this community phenomenon today?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): Its origin is very pure. On New Year's Day 2023, I tweeted my core work focuses for the new year: the first was education, the second was compliance and regulation, the third was product experience and security. And for the fourth point, I wrote “Ignore FUD, fake news, attacks, etc.”

I jokingly told the community on Twitter that if malicious rumors or panic statements appeared online again, I wouldn’t write long rebuttals word for word; I would simply reply with the number “4,” representing “please focus on the first three core constructions and ignore those noises.”

Sure enough, within 24 hours, a completely false short-selling statement appeared online. I followed the agreement and only replied with a “4” on Twitter. The community was instantly ignited; everyone found this light-hearted yet highly recognizable approach both humorous and effective. Subsequently, core members of the community began posting photos with the four-finger gesture, and I also took a casual selfie while on a business trip. After two years of community remixing, “4” has completely transcended its original meaning, evolving into a collective symbol in crypto culture of “facing the storm, focusing on construction, and resisting panic.”

Host: FTX founder SBF publicly accused you, claiming that a tweet of yours directly destroyed FTX. Do you really believe that a tweet can have such destructive power?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): This kind of blame is logically untenable. If a company valued at hundreds of billions of dollars can be easily toppled by a tweet from a competitor, then that company fundamentally lacks the foundation for existence from the start. It’s like if a CEO of a chip giant today tweets that they are liquidating their shares in a startup chip company; as long as the latter's finances are healthy, chip performance is excellent, and customer loyalty is strong, its stock price may experience short-term technical fluctuations, but it absolutely cannot collapse in just a few days.

Any healthy and sound business entity cannot go bankrupt simply because of a competitor's statement. The fundamental reason for the collapse of FTX is singular: they misappropriated hundreds of billions, even over a trillion dollars of customer funds for high-risk proprietary trading and to cover the massive losses of the affiliated hedge fund Alameda.

Before the famous balance sheet investigation report by CoinDesk was disclosed, the market was already rife with undercurrents. At that time, as an early equity exit party, we indeed held hundreds of millions of FTT Tokens on our books. Upon learning of the significant doubts regarding its financial foundation, and out of responsibility for Binance's own balance sheet, we decided to gradually liquidate these tokens at market price in batches. I chose to publicly and transparently announce this via Twitter, clearly emphasizing that we would gradually clear them over the coming months to avoid causing a sudden stampede in the secondary market.

What truly accelerated the run on deposits and revealed the industry's underlying issues was the subsequent public response from the other party's executive—she directly stated her willingness to fully buy at $22 off-market. This effectively exposed their fatal bottom line to global short-selling institutions and panicked customers. Following this, users initiated withdrawals, which completely unveiled the truth that they had already substantively gone bankrupt months prior. Blaming their liquidity crisis caused by the illegal misappropriation of customer assets on a competitor's transparent risk warning is not only absurd but also an insult to public common sense.

Host: In major black swan events in the crypto industry, we often see the market rushing to find a scapegoat. For instance, during the so-called "1010 crash" in 2025, when the entire network's tokens nearly went to zero in a short time, a massive liquidation wave ensued, and many voices again tried to point the finger at Binance. What is the truth behind this?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): Every time a macro-financial crash occurs, the public psyche needs a tangible scapegoat. During the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, people blamed investment banks; when the crypto market experiences severe volatility, the largest infrastructure often becomes the easiest target.

The real timeline of that crash is very clear: at the macro level, it began with a sudden announcement by the U.S. regarding tariff policies, leading to a waterfall decline in global risk assets, U.S. stocks, and Bitcoin. In the most extreme moment of chain deleveraging, a relatively niche stablecoin on the Binance platform (originating from certain derivative protocols, with a market cap of only a few hundred million dollars, not a major asset like USDT or USDC) encountered a partial de-pegging and matching delays.

However, certain competitors and self-media quickly seized upon this minor technical anomaly, vigorously portraying it in global communities as "Binance pulling the plug caused the entire network's avalanche." Even some well-known investors, when interviewed, casually echoed this narrative without verification, which was then amplified by competitors paying for articles globally. Later, that investor publicly admitted in a deep conversation on my podcast that he had not conducted thorough research into the facts at the time and completely disagreed with the notion that "Binance was the main cause of the crash."

What truly reveals the truth is never the narrative of public opinion, but the real on-chain flow of money. During that storm across the network, despite Binance having no legal fault or rigid repayment obligations, we still proactively took out about $80 million from our own funds to provide relief for retail users affected by extreme network fluctuations. The data after the crash speaks volumes: amidst the clamor of public opinion, Binance's net funds did not experience an outflow; instead, it recorded a massive net inflow of several billion dollars. Users voted with their wallets, and they understood better than keyboard warriors which platform's depth, liquidation mechanisms, and risk resistance capabilities were truly worthy of trust.

IV. Judicial Journey, Presidential Pardon, and Thoughts on the Future of Decentralization

Host: You experienced a long and arduous judicial struggle in the U.S., ultimately serving four months in prison. What does this experience mean to you?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): That was undoubtedly a long and exhausting period. For two whole years, you faced an enormous national machine every day.

Before entering the process, my greatest concern was actually uncertainty. You worry whether the other party will continuously pull out second, third, or even indefinite unknown charges from their judicial toolbox after you plead guilty to one charge. In the entire judicial history of U.S. banking and anti-money laundering regulation, no financial institution executive has ever been sentenced to actual imprisonment solely for violating the Bank Secrecy Act (failing to establish sufficient KYC and anti-money laundering interception procedures). The vast majority of CEOs of traditional multinational banks facing such charges ultimately settle through company-paid deferred prosecution agreements (DPA) and fines, with no personal consequences; peers in the crypto derivatives field, like Arthur Hayes, have only received home confinement.

Therefore, when I ultimately accepted a four-month sentence and completed it, although I endured immense physical and mental pressure, I also felt a sense of relief. I took on the legal consequences that I should bear for Binance's management oversights during its early chaotic growth phase.

Host: The pardon signed by President Trump in 2025 caused a sensation across the network. What was the real process from the initial application to the final signing at the White House?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): There are many dramatized fabrications about the pardon in the outside world, with some even speculating whether I had any private dealings with the president.

The truth is, throughout the entire process, I never had a single phone call, email, or text message communication with President Trump. The last time I saw him in person was merely at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he was speaking as a keynote speaker, and I was just one of the hundreds of audience members, with no private contact or handshake.

The entire pardon was strictly driven by a professional legal team following U.S. constitutional procedures. From late 2024 to early 2025, Trump repeatedly stated at campaign rallies and public events that he believed innovators in the cryptocurrency industry had been subjected to excessive and harsh political witch hunts by the previous judicial department over the past few years. He explicitly announced his intention to pardon Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and formally signed pardons for BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes and others in March 2025.

Due to the nature of my charges being highly similar to the above cases, and even being far less severe than cases directly involving dark web transactions, my legal team (which had also deeply participated in industry legal appeals) formally submitted a detailed pardon petition to the White House Pardon Office in April 2025. Then came the long and compliant legal review process, with lawyers updating me on progress approximately every two weeks until the president ultimately signed the pardon.

This is by no means political rent-seeking, but rather a judicial correction of the historical bias of "over-regulation suppressing early technological innovation." In the early days, as Binance expanded into international markets, our business outpaced the pace of compliance infrastructure, but we never misappropriated a single cent of customer funds, nor did we ever directly participate in the malicious laundering of any criminal assets.

Host: Speaking of early models and compliance, decentralized perpetual contract platforms (DEX) like Hyperliquid have emerged, even continuously encroaching on the territory of traditional trading platforms in terms of market value and liquidity. Some say Hyperliquid is Binance's true competitor, even suggesting that Binance is suppressing the listing of its native token. What is your view on the emergence of such new decentralized platforms?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): This view is very narrow. I genuinely welcome and am extremely pleased to see innovative forces like Hyperliquid rapidly grow.

First, let’s talk about the token listing mechanism. I have long since stepped down as CEO of Binance and no longer participate in any daily management or token listing decision-making committees. To my knowledge, this token has not been widely circulated on public multi-node networks for a long time but is highly concentrated within its self-customized application chain ecosystem. Centralized trading platforms, out of responsibility for user asset security, must strictly review cross-chain counterparty risks and the degree of decentralization of token custody to ensure that underlying contracts cannot be unilaterally modified or maliciously shut down; this is purely a technical risk control standard, with no so-called malicious suppression involved.

More broadly, the entire crypto finance today accounts for less than 1% of global wealth allocation; we are in an extremely early "0.01% era." At this stage, trying to compete for so-called existing territory in the wilderness is meaningless. Just as Google was not the first search engine, Facebook was not the first social platform, and Binance is not the first crypto trading platform, the new generation of decentralized infrastructure will enhance industry efficiency with lower slippage and higher on-chain settlement transparency, ultimately expanding the entire crypto asset pie by dozens of times. As the overall market value transitions from $3 trillion to $30 trillion, as the largest infrastructure participant in the industry, the ecosystem we build will inevitably rise with the tide to share in the enormous dividends of this era.

V. Future Layout: Web3 Investment, AI Education, and Ultimate Life Goals

Host: If centralized trading platforms were to completely cease to exist tomorrow, what true mark would you like to leave on the world?

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): My life has already fully transitioned to the post-centralized trading platform era. My daily work schedule is extremely fulfilling, but it can basically be divided into two core dimensions:

In the short to medium term, I will spend a lot of time engaging in dialogue with policymakers and central banks from various emerging sovereign nations, assisting them in building an inclusive and innovative legal framework for crypto assets that provides comprehensive consumer protection, helping more underdeveloped regions globally integrate into the open financial network; at the same time, through my family office and incubation institution (EasyLabs), I am heavily investing in the next generation of decentralized Web3 startups and artificial intelligence technologies worldwide, accompanying young founders with strong technical enthusiasm to refine their underlying products.

In the long-term life dimension, my greatest efforts have been fully devoted to Giggle Academy.

Human genes have endowed us with a fundamental instinct during evolution: when you purely help others, especially in changing the fate of the younger generation, the sense of happiness and fulfillment you gain is irreplaceable by any wealth figure. The vision of Giggle Academy is to completely break down the educational barriers brought by geography and wealth. We utilize generative AI technology to reconstruct high-quality teaching outlines from kindergarten to elementary school worldwide into interactive adaptive learning software that is gamified, completely zero-threshold, and permanently free.

In less than a year of testing, our student body has explosively grown from tens of thousands to over 1.3 million children. Many of these children grow up in areas with extremely scarce global infrastructure, and they may never step into a physical school with qualified teachers in their lifetime, but as long as they have a cheap smartphone with internet access, AI can become their top-notch private tutor, accompanying them 24/7.

Host: One last question, you have consistently appeared in the community as a very firm long-term bull. Many investors are curious whether CZ's optimism about bull and bear cycles comes from blind faith or rational calculation.

Zhao Changpeng (CZ): I will always hold an optimistic view on the technology-driven progress of society, which is the philosophical foundation of my beliefs. However, this does not mean I have the ability to predict short-term daily fluctuations.

The cryptocurrency industry has evolved along a clear medium to long-term trajectory since its inception, driven by the underlying computational power cycles, halving patterns, and macro liquidity. In the short term, a piece of geopolitical news or a macro interest rate cut decision can trigger market fluctuations of 20% or even 30%; however, on a macro scale of five to ten years, those technological entities focused on decentralization and providing asset autonomy and efficiency leaps for the real world have never ceased their upward momentum.

I once read a saying that goes, "If you want your future self to thank your present self, you must take actions today that have long-term compound value." This saying is entirely applicable to this industry. Whether in a trough or in a frenzy, it is essential to eliminate the noise of impatience, stay away from deadly high-leverage speculation, and build irreplaceable core value in the areas where one excels. History will eventually prove that once the wheel of technological evolution starts turning, no force can stop its pace in reshaping the world.