Changpeng Zhao: How did I earn 130 billion?

Source: W3C DAO

Hurun Research Institute released the "2024 Hurun Global Rich List" on March 25 (the deadline for wealth calculation is January 15, 2024). The 52-year-old Elon Musk regains the title of richest man with a wealth of 1.67 trillion yuan ($231 billion).

Furthermore, Hurun Research Institute writes that cryptocurrencies appear to have moved forward since the FTX crash. Although Binance was fined more than $4 billion by the U.S. Department of Justice for money laundering,its former CEO Changpeng Zhao’s fortune grew to 130 billion yuan ($18 billion) as interest in cryptocurrencies surged. No. 100 on the list.

The man who sold his house and entered the currency circle

Zhao Changpeng (alias CZ) was born in Jiangsu in 1977. When he was 12 years old, he and his parents They immigrated to Canada together, majored in computer science in college, and started a career in programming.

After graduating from university, CZ worked as a technical consultant for several companies, mainly designing and developing matching trading order systems. As a programmer, he developed a system for matching trading orders for the Tokyo Stock Exchange. He also served as the technical director of Bloomberg New York, developing futures trading software for it.

Received three promotions in less than two years. But he was still unsatisfied with the status quo. In 2005, he chose to leave his job and came to Shanghai, where he established his first company, Fuxin Information Technology Co., Ltd., specializing in developing the fastest high-frequency trading system for securities firms.

Li Qiyuan passed him until 2013 My good friend Bobby Lee, former co-founder and CEO of BTCC and BTC China, heard about BTC and started to get in touch with the blockchain. Bobby LEE once said this to CZ:

“If you invest 10% of your net assets in BTC, as long as it rises 10 times, your wealth will double, and if you suffer a loss, you will only lose 10% of your assets.”

Because of this sentence, CZ became very interested in blockchain; then CZ began to get involved in blockchain projects, and with the He joined Blockchain.info as three founding employees. During his eight months of working there, he had frequent contact with BTC evangelists Roger Ver and Ben Reeves, and his confidence was strengthened under the influence of some industry giants.

Where until June 2014 One (known as the first sister in the currency circle, now the co-founder and CMO of Binance) was invited to become the CTO of OKcoin.

At this time, CZ sold his house in Shanghai and invested all his funds in BTC. He had no other assets except his mobile phone, so he was also attracted by Crypto. Believers believe that he is the first person to hold 99% of his assets in Crypto.

Less than one In 2016, Shanghai housing prices doubled, but BTC plummeted. Faced with huge financial losses, he did not choose to give up. While working at OKcoin, CZ mastered the logic of the operation of Crypto exchanges and the entire industry.

Later, due to differences in culture and values ​​between the two parties, conflicts arose, so Zhao Changpeng chose to resign. He had a conflict with OKcoin founder Xu Mingxing, so he left OKcoin.

Creating Binance

Mastering the password to wealth. After leaving OK Coin, Changpeng Zhao saw the boom in the cultural products trading industry and founded Bijie Technology, which specializes in Responsible for providing trading systems for coins, stamps, phone cards and other collectibles. Although the company was doing well, he still wanted to have an exchange of his own, so in June 2017, he chose to found Binance and launched his own blockchain currency-Binance Coin. , and has since embarked on the road to billions of wealth.

Compared with other Crypto, Binance mainly wants to aggregate high-quality blockchain assets around the world to provide users with more convenient and safer services.

Binance provides ordinary people with a trading platform with extremely low investment threshold. In less than 10 days, the initial offering brought $15 million in financing to Binance. In less than a year, it attracted the attention of Fancheng Capital, Sequoia Capital and IDG Capital, all of whom wanted to provide financing.

As the price of BTC soared from September to December 2017, the price rose from US$3,000 to US$20,000. The increase was astonishing, so people began to rush to enter Crypto exchanges. .

During the bull market, Crypto’s trading volume broke all previous records. At its peak, the daily trading volume of all exchanges and Crypto in the world reached US$60 billion, and Binance accounted for one-sixth, reaching US$10 billion.

And don’t ignore it. In the currency circle, where there is Binance, there must be something. This chief customer service officer has been active on the front line of work. Binance can be what it is today. Most of the credit for market share and ecological environment should be attributed to this "first lady in the currency circle".

Rapid Development

In 2017, Changpeng Zhao founded Binance, which coincided with He Yi’s two-year competitive period at OKcoin. It was over, so Changpeng Zhao took the opportunity to invite He Yi to join Binance as co-founder and chief marketing officer CMO.

He Yi, who has returned to the currency circle, is indeed "the best marketer in the crypto circle". With her skillful series of marketing activities, in less than half a year, Binance became a cryptocurrency Ranked first in global crypto-asset trading volume, with a trading volume of over US$3 billion.

From 2017 to the present, He Yi and Changpeng Zhao have worked closely together to conquer the global crypto asset market and Web3 field and dominate the scene.

He Yi is the second largest shareholder of Binance. Counting the company’s shares and profits, plus the Binance currency BNB she holds, her assets must be more than 1.5 billion US dollars. No wonder when asked about her annual salary at Binance, she said with an arrogant look: "That's just pocket money, I don't think much about it."

Two-year plan for 2017 On June 24, Binance was officially established and began to raise the Binance platform currency BNB. At that time, Binance only took about a week to raise US$15 million in crypto assets.

On July 14, 2017, Binance Web was officially launched, and BNB was launched for online trading. The issuance price of BNB was US$0.15 at the time, and the lowest price after the launch was US$0.23, but in fact the currency An only raised more than 10 million US dollars, less than 100 million yuan, so this determines that Binance itself does not hold many coins. Also affected by "94", BNB fell, and Binance subsidized the clearing of these users. The refund was nearly 20 million.

For Binance at the time, this was a pretty big sum of money. It also includes the liquidation of BNB users in China. At that time, in many cases, the liquidation was based on the issue price, but Binance liquidated the money based on the market price of about 4 yuan. At that time, I had a feeling: "Binance only raised this amount of money in total, and spent most of its net worth on subsidizing users."

However, after that, the number of Binance user registrations increased. Ushering in explosive growth, from December 2017 to February 2018, the number of registered users increased from 1 million to 7 million, making Binance the world’s largest digital asset trading platform. An was developing very fast, and CZ was also on the cover of Forbes magazine at that time, ranking third on the rich list with a net worth of US$2 billion.

Looking back on the past

CZ mentioned in Binance’s sixth anniversary letter:

Today’s Binance has It is a platform that provides financial services to more than 140 million users around the world, and may welcome billions of new users in the future. And all of this was just a dream at first.

Six years ago, with your support, Binance raised the equivalent of $15 million in crypto assets and began building the Binance platform. Two weeks later (that is, six years ago today), Binance was born, with a total of 5 tokens listed and 2 service languages ​​available. At that time, our customer service team was borrowed from my friend's company, and we did not have our own marketing team.

Today, Binance has listed more than 600 tokens, provides more than 40 service languages, and has a customer service team of thousands of people. Now, BNB Chain provides support from decentralized trading platforms to various storage applications.

Two months after Binance was established, we encountered a severe test. On September 4, 2017, mainland China issued a ban on crypto-asset trading platforms and 1C0. Chinese ICO projects had to return funds to investors.

As soon as the ban was announced, the prices of many tokens plummeted. Several projects listed on Binance even fell below the issue price, and the project team did not have enough funds to repay investors.

Our team made a call after doing the calculations and asked me if I should use Binance’s own funds to compensate these investors. The total was $6 million, which was definitely not a small amount at the time, but we agreed to do it. The call only lasted 5 minutes and I was on a moving train. Within minutes, we had an announcement.

At that time, US$6 million accounted for more than 40% of our total funds. In terms of proportion, it was the largest expenditure in the history of Binance. At that time, we were only a start-up that had been established for two months and had not yet achieved profitability. We were still burning money on recruitment, purchasing servers, etc.

But at that time my only thought was: protect users.  

Sure enough, as long as you do the right thing, the world will give you positive feedback. Our decision received strong positive feedback from the global crypto asset community, with many new users coming to us. A month later, we had 120,000 users and started to make a profit.

And we have remained profitable ever since.

At the same time, we continue to build and the number of users continues to grow. On December 18, 2017, I received many congratulatory text messages from my friends. It took me a few minutes to realize: on that day, Binance became the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, a position we still hold today.

However, Binance’s growth has not been smooth sailing. Just a few days later, a potential venture capital institution (Sequoia) filed a lawsuit against us. The lawsuit lasted several years and we ultimately won a comprehensive victory.

Many Internet start-ups with relatively large capital flows may not be able to survive a lengthy lawsuit like this, but fortunately, thanks to crypto-assets, we have established a sustainable business model. A few years after the lawsuit ended, at our invitation, this potential investment institution also became a limited partner of Binance Labs’ second fund. I am happy to say that we still maintain a good relationship with them and most of the problems can be solved.

But this lawsuit also brought side effects to Binance, making it unable to accept investment from VCs. As a start-up, our risk is increased, but it may help us in the long run. We were able to maintain a flexible, independent operation. ”

Today’s CZ

Recently, Zhao Changpeng, who is still in the United States due to litigation, has not stopped moving forward. After establishing the world’s largest After launching a cryptocurrency exchange, today it officially announced its next entrepreneurial project "Giggle Academy".

Official website display, Changpeng Zhao has regarded this project as a new chapter in his life, aiming to establish a high-quality education platform that is completely free and open to everyone.

Looking around the world, there are many excellent education projects around adult education, primary school to university, and even early childhood education. These Internet education play an important role in universal basic education for mankind, eliminating the global Various regions have negative impacts due to geographical location, race, religion, belief, economy, culture and other factors. As long as you have a mobile phone and can connect to the Internet, the ocean of knowledge is within reach.

At present, the quality of some primary school education is actually uneven. Children in many areas still face problems such as lack of educational resources and low teaching quality. Some children can receive excellent resources at birth, while others are already far behind at the starting line. That’s exactly what Giggle Academy is trying to do.

Written at the end

In the majestic ocean of cryptocurrency,Changpeng Zhao (CZ) went from selling houses to leading Binance to At its peak, his wealth also took off, reaching an eye-catching RMB 130 billion.

In this article, we tell the legendary story of CZ from a teenager in Jiangsu to a giant in the cryptocurrency industry. His journey is full of wisdom and courage, from a programming workbench in Tokyo to From the technical field of Bloomberg in New York to his entrepreneurial journey in Shanghai, every step reflects his exploration of the unknown and his desire for the future.

It can be said that the rise of Binance is like an epic, showing the wisdom and resilience of CZ and He Yi. Together they wrote a new chapter in the history of cryptocurrency.

In the future, as digital currency continues to evolve, we have reason to believe that these digital pioneers will continue to lead us into a new financial era in the wave of change.