Binance CEO: 4 Months in Prison, $4 Billion Fine, and What Comes Next

CZ, welcome to the All-In podcast.

Well, thanks for having me here.

It's really great to see you.

It's a pleasure, Hannah.

I want to go all the way back to the beginning because I think a lot of people don't really know your background the way they probably should. The part of your background that I really care about is that parts of your early journey in Canada are very similar to mine. You worked at McDonald's; I worked at Burger King.

Okay.

But before that, your parents were able to immigrate from China right around Tiananmen Square, right? My father went to Canada to study in 1984. That's 5 years before Tiananmen Square.

How did that come about? Did your father stay in Canada once he went there, or no?

He could visit us twice a year, basically, but most of the time he was in Canada.

And he was a teacher in China?

He was a professor in China, and then he went to do an exchange program at the University of Toronto first.

Uh-huh.

A couple of years later, he moved to UBC, the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. We were applying back then, and it's actually very difficult to get a passport. It took 2 or 3 years to get a passport. We started applying in 1985 or so.

Meaning a Chinese passport?

A Chinese passport, yeah. After you get a passport, it takes another few years to get a visa. That's just how long the process took back then. We got it shortly after, in 1989.

When you look back, it almost seems fortuitous. Isn't there a version where, post-Tiananmen, they kind of just shut everything down and say, "Okay, let's just reset," and maybe they wouldn't have approved the visa?

No, actually, after that, the visa got easier. The passports got harder. They no longer issued new passports; the reissuing of passports got harder. But we were lucky. We got the passports maybe a year before that and were waiting for the visa. Afterwards, the visa got easier, so in some ways that actually helped us get the visa.

Wow.

Yeah, in some really weird way.

Did that event shape your perspective in any way, shape, or form, or not really? Were you too young? You were 12, right?

I was 12, so consciously, no. It didn't change me that much, but subconsciously, I think it may have had some kind of impact.

I was actually living on a university campus back then—the University of Science and Technology of China, one of the top 4 universities in China. There were a lot of discussions among the university students, who were older—probably 7 to 9 years older than me. I was 12, so I wasn't really clued into it, but I think subconsciously it may have had some kind of impact. I don't know.

What was it like when you moved to Vancouver?

I moved to Vancouver, yeah.

So you land in British Columbia, in Vancouver.

Yeah.

It's like a different—

It's just different.

It's very different.

It's very different. It's just a completely new country.

Did you know English at all?

No. I studied English for a couple of years in school, but I wasn't fluent at all. Vancouver is great. Canada is nice—greenery, open space. The living standard is high. Everything's pretty good. Everything is very clean. The fruits are bigger.

It's just a really nice environment.

Did both your parents work when the family was reunited? What did they do?

My father was an assistant professor at the university. He got about $1,000 Canadian per month—I don't know what you call it.

Like a stipend?

Yeah. We got some really low-cost housing, faculty housing from UBC, so we lived on campus. I think on the 3rd day after our arrival in Canada, my mom went to a sewing factory to work. She was a math and history teacher in China, but she didn't speak much English, so she couldn't get the same level of jobs. She could basically only work at a minimum-wage factory. She did that for 7 or 10 years.

My mom was a nurse in Sri Lanka, and when we immigrated and got refugee status, my father was unemployed. My mom became a housekeeper, and that's what she did. Then she became a nurse's aide.

Yeah. Yeah. I got my first job at McDonald's when I was 14 or 15. I think it was 15.

14. Yeah. We're the same age, so it probably would have been 14. Do you remember what the minimum wage was in British Columbia then?

I do. The minimum wage was $6, but McDonald's—

Oh, that's incredible. In Ontario, it was $4.55.

At McDonald's, they paid $4.50. That's below minimum wage because McDonald's somehow had a special exemption, since a lot of young kids worked there. I think it was on my 14th birthday that I applied for the job, and a week later I was flipping burgers there. It was the first income I had.

You're not this precocious technical wonder kid who was coding 24/7 and learning computer science, or were you?

No, I wouldn't describe myself as that. I'm a technical guy. I started computer science, and I was interested in programming even in high school, but I wasn't a programming wizard. I wasn't one of those really genius coders.

Yeah.

I think I'm a decent coder. I wrote some decent code in my career, and then when I was around 28 to 30, I moved away from coding. I was doing more business development, sales, and so on. So there were maybe, I would say, 8 years of my career focused on coding.

So you're a normal immigrant kid learning to adapt in Canada.

Yeah.

Did you have a lot of friends?

Yeah, I had a lot of friends.

Only Asian friends, or no?

Both. I actually had both Asian and non-Asian friends. At our school, most of the Asians hung out with Asians, but I was one of the exceptions. I had Caucasian friends and all kinds of different friends.

Yeah.

My teenage years in Canada were great. They were some of the best years. I think those years really shaped me into a happy person. I'm generally a happy person.

How did it feel when you weren't able to get into my alma mater, the University of Waterloo, and had to settle for McGill? Did that make you feel stupid?

Actually, I was deciding between Waterloo and McGill, and maybe U of T. My sister went to Waterloo. I knew I wasn't going to go to UBC because I wanted a different city.

Yeah.

UBC gave me an offer, but I knew I didn't want to go there. At the time, a friend's mother whom I really respected said, "You might want to become a doctor because doctors have a good living and a good lifestyle." I took her advice. I studied biology, and Waterloo is not much of a biology school.

True.

I went to McGill, but 1 semester later I said, "No, no more biology. I've got to move to computer science."

Was it a typical college experience for you? Did you have great jobs in the summertime, or were you just an average, normal university kid? How did you pay for school, by the way?

I worked every summer, and I also worked part-time during the school year.

So no debt? You were like, "I must graduate without debt."

Yeah. I didn't take any student debt. The first year, I took about $6,000 Canadian from my dad. The 2nd year, I was still a bit short, so my sister gave me $3,000. From that point on, I never took money from anyone at all. I was self-sustainable.

Wow.

Yeah. So, no student debt. Very lucky. I just worked every summer and every—

You know, the best thing about Waterloo, which was a savior for me, was the co-op program. I had these incredible co-op jobs. I still graduated with about $30,000 of debt, but I was also a pretty prolific trader in equities.

Okay.

My boss, this guy Mike Fischer, did this incredible kindness for me. I was working at a bank, and I was a derivatives trader. That was my day job, but I was trading equities, and I had made him enough money. He called me Sherman; he didn't call me Chamath. He said, "Sherman, how much debt do you have?"

I said, "It's about $30,000. It's $32,000." He said, "Go downstairs right now to the CIBC, pay your debt, and I'll write you a check."

Wow. You should have.

He wrote me a $32,000 check. I should have said $300,000.

But Canada is incredible because you can get this education and it doesn't saddle you with debt that you can't overcome.

Yeah.

That's not true in the United States for many people anymore.

Yeah. Even at McGill, there were people from the United States going to McGill, paying international-student tuition, and it was still cheaper than in the U.S. I was like, “That’s crazy.”

That’s crazy.

Yeah. So, we were lucky that the Canadian tuition was okay.

So you graduated from McGill in computer science?

Yeah. In computer science, actually, I didn’t graduate from McGill. I went there for 4 years, and in my third year I got an internship job. Then I extended, extended, extended, and I didn’t go back to McGill, so I didn’t graduate from McGill. Later on, I found out I still needed a bachelor’s degree to apply for work visas in Japan. So I went to one of these online education programs—this was the dot-com height, in 2000—called the American College of Computer Science and got a degree there.

Oh, my God. Yeah. So you’re technically a graduate from that school.

Technically, yes.

Okay. So which internship did you get where you started to work there?

I got an internship in Tokyo. From my first year of college, I always worked programming jobs. I worked at a company called original sim, writing some simulation software. Then, in my third year, I got into a company in Japan, in Tokyo, called Fusion Systems Japan. They were writing order-execution systems for brokers on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Sorry, was that a Japanese company with an office in Montreal or an office in Canada, or no?

No, no, I went to Tokyo.

You went to Tokyo.

Yeah. It’s actually an American company—a bunch of American guys—in Tokyo.

And you’re thinking, “This is an adventure. I’m going to go and live in Tokyo for a summer.”

Yeah. I was a college student, and living in Tokyo was fun. It was a dream.

And the first time you go there, it’s like—

From the future.

It’s cool, yeah.

And what kind of software did you write?

Mostly order-execution software. It’s the same kind of software that moves orders and buys—the software that drives Binance today.

Pretty much. It’s the same style. Actually, all the software I was involved with had no decision-making.

So when you were first exposed to this, was it not like, “Oh, wow, I love this. This makes sense,” or was it more, “Okay, I’m asked to write this code, and I understand the concept, so let me just do it”? Were you attracted to the subject matter, or did you just do it because it was your job?

I first did it because it was my job. I was so young; I didn’t know what all the different industries were. Actually, when I got to the company, they gave me a project working on digital-imaging storage systems—basically an iPhone Photos app, but for medical imaging for Nikon.

But very soon, the company’s main product was the order-execution system, so I was involved in that, and then that became the thing over my career. I like it because it requires quite a lot of technical expertise. Everything is about efficiency: making it go as fast as possible and processing as low-latency as possible. That appeals to me. I’m an efficiency-driven guy, subconsciously.

And just to double-click on that, when you look at high-frequency-trading organizations—the Susquehannas, the Jumps—they go to such a degree to optimize for efficiency and low latency. They have their own circuit breakers and their own physical fiber infrastructure. They’re willing to pay the price to shave off a handful of milliseconds on either end.

Yeah.

How does that manifest in the software? When you’re writing that kind of software, how do you actually optimize for those boundary conditions in code?

Yeah. So, well, there are quite a few levels. The first level is basically writing software to be efficient and fast—no slowness. You want to remove all the database lookups, so you want to do everything in memory. Then you want to reduce any sort of additional computation. You want to simplify the risk checks, especially pre-order, pre-trade risk checks.

Then, in the more advanced versions, you move on to the FPGA, which is a network chip on the network card—what we call the Ethernet card—so that you don’t have to go all the way up to memory and come all the way back down to the processor. Back then, when I was still writing code—maybe 10 years ago—that round trip was about 100 microseconds.

Microseconds, yeah.

And then, by avoiding that, you reduce it down to 20 microseconds. Then you move to physical infrastructure. You want co-location.

Why, when so much money is on the line for high-frequency trading, did these organizations never try their own custom silicon? In the AI world, for example, with Groq, our big observation even 10 years ago when we were starting the business was this exact idea: it’s really inefficient for data to sit in a GPU, go all the way up to HBM, and come back down. So let’s just take SRAM and do everything here on-chip, managing it with C. That technical problem made a lot of sense, and it’s very, very fast for the decode phase of inference.

Why, when so much money is on the line for high-frequency trading, did they never try their own custom silicon? I understand FPGAs, but nobody really went to the point of saying, “Here’s a specific ASIC.” Or did they, and we just don’t know about it?

I don’t think it exists on a very large scale. I think the algorithms change too often. When you go to hardware—when you want to design your own chip—it is highly efficient and very fast, but when you want to change it, it takes a long time. When you want to reprogram it, I think FPGAs already offer the best of both worlds. Even with an FPGA, if you want to reprogram it, the programming cycle is much longer—10 times longer than software.

The company you worked at in Japan—was it successful?

It was successful. That company got sold to a NASDAQ-listed company just before 2000.

For a lot of money.

For about $52 million back then, so that was decent money.

So, is that when you said, “Hey, hold on. There’s something here”? Or was it something else that happened?

No. At that time, I was too young. I was 20-something.

So you’re working at this place. You’re just a coder.

Yeah.

You’re a salaryman.

Yeah.

In Japanese terms, right?

Salaryman, yeah.

You’re a salaryman. So then walk us through what happens afterward.

That company got sold. There was a lot of culture clash between the parent company and the original company. That was my first experience of how mergers may not work. The 2 management teams were just clashing, and then the same partners went to start a different company called Building 2.

But by then, these partners—I didn’t get any money, but the partners got quite a bit of money—had rented a very fancy office. That company only lasted a year. It means that previous success doesn’t guarantee future success. In fact, they spent a lot of money and had a very nice office but zero revenue, so that folded within a year. That was 2001.

In early 2001, I was looking for new jobs, and then Bloomberg was hiring. This was right before 9/11. I got an offer before 9/11, and then 9/11 happened. I still hadn’t moved, and then—

Where was this—to New York?

I was still in Tokyo back then, and Bloomberg is in New York.

The offer was in New York.

The offer was in New York.

After 9/11, I called Bloomberg and said, “Hey, is the job still there? Do you still want me to go?” And they said, “Well, do you still want to come?” I was like, “Yeah, okay.” So then I went. I went to New York in November 2001.

Wow. What was that like?

The streets were pretty quiet. But I was fine. New York was quiet for a few months, but it became lively pretty quickly, I think. So I didn’t feel too many issues.

Yeah.

I then went to New York and worked at Bloomberg for 4 years.

Doing exactly the same thing again. You’re kind of a salary guy. You’re working at a big company.

Salary, bonus, maybe some options or some phantom equity or something like that.

Yeah. I joined as a senior developer. I was put into a team called Tradebook Futures. They had just formed this team, and they had a system that allowed people to trade futures on Bloomberg, but it was spread out. So they collected that into one team.

And still no inkling of that entrepreneurial bug?

Not really. Back then, I was like, “Nah.”

What were you looking for? Stability? Why Bloomberg? Being in New York—what was it?

I was just a young guy. I think I was 24 or 25. I was just a young guy trying to get a job, experience different parts of the world, and just find my way through. I knew I wasn’t experienced enough to do entrepreneurship myself, right? I was working at a small company in Tokyo; the company only had about 20 people. Bloomberg at the time had about 3,000 people.

So to me, that was a big company.

Yeah.

They had fancy offices, fish tanks, free food, and everything. So I joined as a senior developer. I got some good bosses. I got promoted 3 times in 2 years, and then I was leading a team of 60 initially, which grew to about 80 people. That's when I became a manager. I no longer wrote code, and I started—

The worst transition.

The worst transition.

Right. The worst.

So that's my Bloomberg experience. I had to stay there for 4 years.

And then you quit and moved to China.

Yes.

How does that happen?

I think it was around the beginning of 2005. Again, the same friends I had made in Japan were talking about starting a new company, a new fintech company, and they were in Asia. They were talking about Tokyo, Shanghai, or Hong Kong. They said Shanghai was most likely the most happening place for the future of fintech. We should have picked Hong Kong. Hong Kong had a lot more happening since then.

So I went there in 2005. From a Chinese perspective, it was like 5 foreigners: 4 Caucasians, a Japanese person, and me. I'm the only one who speaks Chinese, and my Chinese was kind of rusty back then, too. So the 6 of us went there to do a new IT startup in Shanghai.

So all you guys just landed there. What was the idea?

We thought we had all this Wall Street experience—Wall Street trading technology experience.

So your other friends—had they moved to New York, or were they still in Japan?

2 of the friends were in New York with me, and the other 3 were from Japan. They were still there, so the 6 of us came together. We wanted to bring Wall Street trading technology into China so we could service the brokers and exchanges in China.

But then we went there, and they rented a very fancy office again.

Wait, okay, so hold on. When you guys started this company, this was now your first entrepreneurial venture? You were like, “Okay, let's do this.”

Pretty much.

Did you know to even ask the question, “Okay, guys, what's our equity split? What's the cap table?” Did you know any of these things, or were you just like, “Great, let's go do it”? Were you assuming it was 1/6 and that you were all equal? How did it all work?

It wasn't 1/6. The top guy had around 39% or 40%, and the other 5 of us split the rest equally. So I had about 11% or so.

Okay.

I knew that, but I didn't know all the ins and outs about shareholder rights or terms. I didn't know any of that.

Yeah. Preferred versus common—none of it.

You're like, “Great, I got 11%. I'm moving to Shanghai.”

Yeah.

I just had 11%. I had no idea what common stock was versus preferred stock. So I just went. I was a junior partner in this group.

Once we landed in China, because I speak Chinese, I began talking to potential clients. I went to talk to brokers and found out we were registered as a wholly foreign-owned enterprise, or WFOE. The Chinese brokers and financial institutions are not allowed to work with a WFOE.

So we found that out after we started the company, while we were in Shanghai, and the company pivoted toward doing any IT system for any company. We could be—

Work for hire.

Work for hire. We could be a dev shop.

A dev shop. You became a dev shop.

Not even a dev shop. We could be fixing printers, or we could be writing SAP implementations for you. We did all of that, so there was a whole spectrum of things. We did that for a few years, and we actually made a living—

For a few years.

Yeah, for a few years. We made a living out of that. We had quite a number of automotive clients. Shanghai General Motors, Shanghai Volkswagen, and Shanghai First Automotive Works were all clients of ours. Maybe 3 or 4 years in, we started having offices in Hong Kong, and then we were dealing with Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse.

So it grew. It was successful.

The company is still around. I left in 2013 after 8 years, but the company is still around.

So in the 8 years you worked at that company, was it all in Shanghai?

I was mostly in Shanghai, but I spent quite a bit of time helping to set up the Hong Kong office. I was also doing quite a lot of work for some clients in Tokyo.

How big did that company get?

I think we even got to about 200 people again, and it's kind of stayed there, as far as I know, even till now.

As a junior partner, you just took profits and shared them?

Yeah. Well, actually, we didn't take that much profit. I invested most of my savings back into that company, and I actually didn't cash out a penny.

Wow.

After a few years, the company was stable enough to pay the partner salaries. All of our kids went to international school, so we got a 6-figure salary.

At that point, you had gotten married.

Yes. At that point, I got married when I was in New York. I had 2 kids.

And you had met your ex-wife how?

I met her in Tokyo when I first went there. I met her in 1999 or so, when I was first in Tokyo doing the internship.

Okay.

She visited me in New York, and we got married, and we had kids. Now we're divorced in Shanghai. I had young kids, and it was enough salary to put them into international school. That was good enough for me.

Wow.

Yeah.

So far, again, nothing here tells anybody that you're about to go and start Binance.

No, nothing. I didn't know.

So then, 2013 or 2014, how old were you at that point?

In 2013, I would be 36.

Mid-30s.

Yeah.

So again, salary guy.

Yeah.

Junior partner at this thing, it's going well, and your kids are in private school.

Yeah.

So then what happens?

I came across Bitcoin. One of my friends told me, “Look, you got to look at this thing called Bitcoin.” I looked into it, and it took me roughly 6 months to fully understand it. That was from roughly July 2013—

And that's because you read the white paper and said, “I need to read it again,” and read it again?

Yeah, pretty much. Back then, there was BitcoinTalk, or the forum, and that was pretty much it.

But did you see my Bloomberg article in 2012? Did that have any influence?

Unfortunately, I don't remember. I read a bunch of stuff.

I'm just kidding. But I did write this thing, and it's funny because I had a kind of a relationship with Mike Bloomberg. He was kind of—not even a mentor; he was just too senior—but he knew me, he liked me, and he would invite me to certain things.

With Mike Bloomberg?

Yeah, with Bloomberg. I got to know some of Mike's team, and in 2012 or so, they said, “Would you write an op-ed?”

Okay.

I said, “Yeah,” and I wrote it about Bitcoin. I said everybody should put 1% of their net worth into Bitcoin, and I said it was basically schmuck insurance. They published it on the Bloomberg terminal or whatever, and that's when I got red-pilled on Bitcoin. I thought, “Man, this is the most incredibly interesting technical product that I had read about.”

The thing that captivated me—I don't know if you felt this way—was that it was the only white paper I had read end to end where I thought, “This is one of the most elegantly written pieces of nontechnical prose.” Do you know what I'm trying to say? It's not something that's dense and arcane and just meant for PhDs. You could literally give it to your sister, your brother, or somebody nontechnical, and they would understand it.

Yeah. It's only 9 pages.

Exactly. Do you know what an enormous amount of intellectual skill it takes to do that?

Oh, yeah. It's much harder to write it very short.

Much harder—and elegantly and simply.

Yeah. Anybody else who tried to rewrite that, I think it'd be 90 pages.

So the friend who showed it to you—was he a co-worker of yours?

He's a friend. Not a random friend—he's a friend. We didn't have any working relationship. His name is Ron Tao. He runs, I guess, Skyline Ventures. Back then, he was at Lightspeed China. He was a managing director of Lightspeed China.

Of course.

We played a small-stakes poker game at somebody's house. It was a bunch of entrepreneurs—struggling entrepreneurs—versus VCs. The VCs had all the money.

David versus.

It was a fun game. It wasn't a very serious game. In one of the poker games, Ron said, “CZ, you should look at this thing called Bitcoin.” I was like, “Okay, Bitcoin.”

So we talked about it a little bit. Bobby Lee, who at the time was working for Walmart, was just about to quit Walmart to join BTC China as its CEO. As part of that deal, Bobby said he would bring Ron in as an investor, with Lightseed investing in BTCC. That was in July 2013. I thought, “Okay, these 2 guys are pretty serious about this.”

I had lunch with Bobby the next day, and Bobby said, “Put 10% of your net worth into Bitcoin.” He said, “There’s a small chance you’ll go to 0, and then you lose 10%. There’s a much higher chance you’ll go 10x, and you’ll double your net worth.” I thought, “Okay, that sounds pretty serious.”

That’s when I started learning about it and reading the white paper more carefully. It took me 6 months. By the end of 2013, I was convinced and ready to go. But Bitcoin went from $70 in mid-2013 to about $1,000 by the end of 2013, so it had already gone more than 15x.

How did that make you feel?

I was like, “I’m too late. I wish I’d gotten in early.”

Yeah. Back then, it didn’t matter when you got into Bitcoin; you always felt late. Everyone you talked to in the Bitcoin industry had bought before you. Did you talk to anybody while you were learning about it? Was there a community in Shanghai?

There was a very small community in Shanghai, and I was basically talking to anybody in the world who was willing to talk with me. I had a couple of friends in Taiwan who worked for TSMC back then. They were trying to make a mining chip for Bitcoin.

Two of those guys left TSMC to try to do this startup. The startup never really took off, but that was one group of people I was talking to. There was another couple of guys who were mostly miners, and there was another guy whose nickname was Fish—Silver Fish—in China. He was a big miner, and he runs F2Pool even today.

Those guys were based in Hangzhou. They came to Shanghai, and I talked to them. There was a group of people I talked to, but the biggest thing was that in December 2013—around December 13, 2013—there was a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.

I flew there to meet everyone. Everyone in the industry was there. It was a 200-person conference. Vitalik Buterin, Matt Rosak, Charlie Lee, and a bunch of other people were there. The same guys are still around today.

Just before that, there had been the Silk Road arrest of Ross Ulbricht.

Ulbricht.

The media was saying, “Bitcoin is only used by drug lords.” But when you went to the conference, it was a bunch of kids and geeks, and they were very nice people. You talked to Vitalik, and he was a very nice person.

Were you still working at that company while you were doing all of this moonlighting?

Yes. I was.

You told your partners, “Hey, guys, I’m just going to go to Vegas for a couple of days. I’ll be back”?

Pretty much. When I got back, I told the partners, “We should do a Bitcoin payment system,” because BitPay was the big player back then. BitPay had just raised $4 million in 2013.

So they were kind of the large player, actually, in the industry. Can I tell you a very funny bit? I have 2 BitPay stories.

Sure.

I was very focused on trying to prove the transactional capability of Bitcoin. I went to my local car dealership and bought a car with Bitcoin using BitPay in 2012 or 2013.

Wow.

That Range Rover is probably $90 million. Then, even more stupidly, there was a real estate development in Lake Tahoe called Martis Camp. Beautiful. I owned a couple of lots, and I said, “It would be great if I could actually prove that you could buy real estate with Bitcoin.”

I called the guys at BitPay, and they said, “Yeah, we can facilitate this transaction. No problem.” I bought a piece of land, and again, I thought it was an interesting story. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it. Now that piece of land is worth $1 billion.

But you can’t calculate it this way, right?

It’s easy. I calculate it this way every day.

You can’t calculate it that way. It was the stupidest purchase ever.

No, no, no. That’s the bucket-of-money mentality, right?

No, no, no. It’s true.

Even if you hadn’t used Bitcoin, you would have used some money to buy the land. You could have used that money to buy Bitcoin.

Yeah.

So you were like, “Hey, we should do a version of BitPay.”

Yeah, yeah.

And your partners were like, “What are you talking about?”

Exactly.

At this point, you still hadn’t bought any Bitcoin?

No. At this point, I had maybe 1 Bitcoin. One Bitcoin was only about $1,000 back then.

So what happens?

I told my partners, “Look, I think this is the biggest thing in my life.” When I thought about it, there were 2 fundamental technologies in my life: the internet, which I was too young to do too much with, and this Bitcoin thing. I was 35 or 36. I wasn’t going to miss it. The next thing that was going to come along would be 15 years later.

You feel old when you go to Vegas and see all these 22-year-old kids. You’re like, “I missed it.” Did you think that at any point?

No. At 35 or 36, it was still okay. You didn’t feel super old. Today, I feel that. But I thought the next thing that would come would be 10 or 15 years later, and that would be AI. Today, I say there are 3 fundamental technologies in my life. Back then, Bitcoin was the thing.

For me, it was very clear that I had to do something in this industry. I told my partners, “Look, I’m going to quit, and I’m going to work in the Bitcoin industry.” That’s what it was called back then.

I also needed to buy Bitcoin, and I didn’t have much money. I said, “I’m going to sell my apartment in Shanghai and buy Bitcoin.” But selling the apartment took time, so it took me a solid few months.

You sold it? Where did you go? Did you just get a rental apartment?

At the time, my family also moved to Tokyo. We lived in a rental apartment in Tokyo, and I was traveling in Shanghai. That was also when I started separating from my family. I was spending a lot of time traveling.

I sold the apartment for roughly $900,000, just under $1 million, and then started buying Bitcoin. I got paid in tranches because you get a first down payment and then get paid in tranches. Every tranche I got, I just bought Bitcoin.

The first tranche was at $800, and then Bitcoin dropped to $600 and $400. I averaged in at about $600.

Incredible. So now you have your Bitcoin position, but you still don’t have a job. Were you looking for a job in the Bitcoin industry, or were you just looking for any job?

I was looking for a job at the same time, but it was specifically in the Bitcoin industry. It didn’t take me that long to get a job. The gap from the time I said I was going to quit until I finalized the job was probably 2 to 3 weeks.

Oh, wow. Who hired you?

I first discussed it with BTCC. Bobby wanted to hire me, but then Blockchain.info came along. I bumped into Roger Ver, and at the time, Blockchain.info had 2 people: Ben Reefs, who was the founder, and Nicholas Kerry, who had just been hired as CEO.

I was the third person to join the team. I was VP of engineering because Ben wanted to reserve the CEO title for Ben. I joined Blockchain.info and flew to York, England, about 3 hours north of London. I spent some time there figuring out what to do.

And how did that go?

It didn’t go very well. We expanded the team to 18 people, and then Peter Smith joined as CFO, wanting to raise money for Blockchain.info. Coinbase had just finished raising $30 million, and that was a big financing in the industry back then.

Peter Smith somehow maneuvered himself into the CEO position, pushing Nicolas Cary into more of a product manager role. The culture changed a little bit. I left, and a bunch of the developers I hired left. Ben Reef sold quite a lot of his position and also left a few months later.

I was only there for 6 or 7 months, so it didn’t work out too well. But I learned a lot from that experience.

You learn what not to do.

No. Everyone knows Blockchain.info. When I joined, Ben Reef said, “Look, we have no company and no office. Everyone works remotely, and we just pay everybody in Bitcoin.” That’s something I learned from that company, and it’s still very heavily used at Binance today.

I also learned that the company’s entire marketing, at the time when Blockchain.info was the largest user platform in the industry, was 1 thread on Bitcointalk.org. Just 1 thread.

The thread is 150 pages. Ben Reef just replied to that thread, and that's how they grew to a 2-million-user platform. I was like, “Okay, so you can do quite a lot of guerrilla marketing to be successful.”

Wow.

So I learned a lot. But the culture changed a little bit. It wasn't a fit for me, and then I left. That was when he hired me into OKCoin. He said, “Why are you working for this wallet company? Your experience is in dealing with order execution and exchanges.” So he hired me there.

As a developer?

As a CTO.

As a CTO.

Yeah. In the process, I think BTC China helped me again. I was looking for a job again, right? I left, and then he was talking to me. Bobby Lee found out, and Bobby Lee mentioned that OKCoin back then would offer me 5% equity. BTC China came along and offered me 10% equity, and then OKCoin matched it within 3 hours. I was debating between Shanghai and Beijing, and I decided to go to Beijing to join OKCoin back then. Hu at that time had 1% equity, so she hired me to be the bigger sort of partner in the business.

Wow.

So that's how I went to OKCoin, for about 8 months or so. That didn't last long either.

Yeah, because—

I think there were also cultural differences at OKCoin. There was some stuff that I didn't agree with, both in terms of simple examples, like how they ran promotions and how they did fee discounts. You had to ask for it. They advertised a fee discount, but you had to ask for it to get it. It didn't apply to everybody, even though they advertised it as such.

So, small things like that.

And then, yeah, that was in early 2015. I said, “No, I'm going to leave.” That lasted for a few months in 2015.

Yeah, 2014 mostly. So how do we get from there to Binance?

In 2015, with a couple of my old colleagues, I said, “We're going to do a Bitcoin exchange in Tokyo, in Japan.” This was a year after Mt. Gox and all that, so there was a vacuum in Japan. We had 2 developers come to me on the same day I decided to leave OKCoin. They had also quit their respective jobs. I said, “Okay, why don't the 3 of us do something?”

I said, “I will be the CEO and the bigger guy with more equity, and I'll be responsible for raising money.” I was paying them a salary out of my own savings, and I wasn't taking anything. The 2 developers and I whipped up a demo very quickly. We downloaded open-source software for an exchange, tweaked the UI to be a little bit sexier, and then hooked it up.

You just forked an open-source project, like, “This is Binance”?

No, we didn't say it was Binance. This was before Binance. I was very transparent. I said, “We whipped up this demo in 2 days, or in a few days. This is a demo that we can show you, but this is not our ultimate product. It's just a proof of concept.”

Yeah.

We had a script that took Bitfinex market data. Bitfinex was the large exchange back then, and we just copied their order book. The order book was flashing, and there were trades going on, so it was a very lively demo. When investors saw that, they were like, “Wow, this is good technology.”

When they asked me questions, I could answer in very deep ways. When they asked me, “How do you structure this to be a fast exchange?” I could talk about in-memory matching, optimizing databases, and all the stuff you've learned.

Yeah—

I could go really deep when they asked questions. My knowledge was there.

Right.

They were like, “Okay, this technology is cool, but you won't be successful running a Bitcoin exchange in Japan. You don't speak Japanese, right?” I was like, “Okay, they have a point.” They said, “Why don't you sell this technology to other exchanges? Most of the Japanese exchanges don't have very good technology.” I was like, “Okay.”

I went to talk to a few exchanges. Literally 2 weeks later, we signed a contract with 1 of the exchanges, and they paid $360,000 for the system. They made a down payment of $180,000. That was enough for me not to pay salaries anymore, so I was happy with that. We pivoted from wanting to run our own Bitcoin exchange to being an exchange-systems provider.

Yeah. You're selling software.

We were selling software. In July 2015, a bunch of Chinese companies came to us.

Can I just say, by the way—sorry to interrupt you—but it's really incredible, because there are so many founder stories where somebody says, “I've started a company,” and then somebody says, “Well, how much is it worth?” or “How successful is it?” Let's just say Binance is a $200-billion company—

Probably less than that, but—

It's in the neighborhood. A lot of people think there's some incredible origin story that's lightning in a bottle. But more often than not, the story is more like yours: moving along, meandering, learning things, trying some other things, this non-obvious iteration, and then all of a sudden things catalyze. But even then, you still don't get the right form because you're licensing it, really. People misunderstand that this is actually more what entrepreneurship is. It's the resilience and grit to just keep grinding.

For sure. For sure. I think most people idealize entrepreneurship. They just hack it together and—

It's like the Facebook story. You hack it together in college, and, oh, it's now a million users.

Facebook, Microsoft, right? Exactly. And also Google. These 3 are like college, garage, and they just—

Exactly. But the reality with Binance or Tesla is that it's a grind. It's a grind and it's a grind. You have to go so many different ways.

It wasn't obvious from the beginning.

Yeah. Right. So I think those 3 are the exceptions that kind of just hit it from day 1.

Exactly.

But then that kind of shaped people's perception, like 99%—99.9%—of other successful businesses are not like that.

Right.

Right. So if you look at any other successful company—

Yeah, so the same here.

So get us to the founding moment.

We licensed the software. That business went pretty well. We had about 30 different exchange clients.

Wait, no way.

Over—

Over multiple years.

Over 2 years. In 2 years, we signed up—

Yeah, so this is a multimillion-dollar—

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Licensing business.

Yeah. It's a SaaS business, right? What we call an exchange-as-a-service business. We charge a fixed monthly fee every month. It's a platform business, and it's paying us. It's a very steady business. Every new client increases the revenue. Every new client is like a step up.

Exactly. So it's a very, very good business model.

But in March 2017, the Chinese government shut down most of our clients.

Right, and they don't touch you because you're the software vendor.

We're the software vendor. Exactly. We don't run any business. But then our business—we had no clients, right? We lost our clients, and by May we were like, “Okay, we need to pivot.” By April or May, we were figuring out how to pivot.

By the end of May, 3 guys who worked for me said they wanted to do a Poloniex copycat. Poloniex was the biggest exchange back then. I said, “Let me invest. We have some extra cash.” Three days later, they wanted to do some on-chain arbitrage trading software. I was like, “No, we're not going to invest in that anymore.” Then I said, “Well, why don't we do that? We have the exchange system already. We still need to customize it to do crypto-to-crypto-only trading.”

My gosh. So in May you said, “Okay, we're going to do a crypto exchange again.”

The team said, “Fine, sure.” We said, “Now we can run our own. Let's do our own crypto-to-crypto exchange.” That was the end of May.

How big is the team at this point?

Twenty people. We had tech people. We didn't have marketing because we were a B2B business, right? We had 2 sales guys, plus me. We said, “Now we can run our own. Let's do our own crypto-to-crypto exchange.”

From June 1 to June 10, there was a guy who was a BTC investor, Li Xiaolai. He ran an ICO in China and raised $15 million in 10 days. He only had a white paper and 1 website—no product, nothing. I was like, “If he can do that, I might be able to do that too.”

You needed venture funding. You're like, “If I get the $1 million, I can build out a team, invest in some marketing, be in the J-curve, and not feel the pressure.”

Exactly. Originally, we were going to go the VC-funding route, right? But when I saw that, I was like, well—and everyone was talking about ICOs back then.

I went to a conference in mid-June 2017, and everyone was talking about ICOs. Everyone was saying, “CZ, you’ve got to do an ICO.” So, by mid-June—June 14 was the date—I called the team and said, “We’re going to do an ICO. Write a white paper.”

Did you have a name at that point in the Bitcoin community or the crypto community, either in China, Japan, or somewhere else?

I had a little bit of a name. Even from working at Blockchain.info, quite a lot of people knew me. Blockchain.info was the most popular platform back then. At OKCoin, I was the CTO, and I was quite active on social media. I was also managing their international, non-Chinese-speaking markets because nobody else was. I was the best English speaker on that team, even though my English isn’t that great. So I had a little bit of a name. People knew me in the community.

Because you needed a bit of a name or some kind of pedigree to actually do an ICO at this point.

Yeah. This is an advantage of getting involved early in the industry. You go to a few conferences where there are 200 people, and by the second time you go, people know you.

But by the third time, people are like, “Oh, you know—you’re the expert already,” right?

I had a bit of a reputation, so I thought, Li Xiaolai, the guy who did the ICO in China, was quite well-known in China, but he wasn’t known internationally. I had a little bit of both, so I said, “Well, I can probably do an ICO and raise the same amount.”

So who were the buyers of the Binance ICO?

To be honest, even to this day, I don’t know.

Even to this day, you don’t know?

Right. I think—

But were they Chinese? Were they Japanese? Were they people from all around the world who knew you? Was it that your white paper was really good?

In terms of demographics, probably 80% to 90% of the ICO purchases were Chinese. There were some international people who bought it, and I think the data shows that about 20,000 people bought into the ICO.

20,000 people.

20,000 people. This was a brand-new brand. Some people knew me in the industry, and that was it.

So even though the exchanges were put out of business in China—

Yeah.

—the ICO was allowed?

No, the ICO wasn’t banned back then.

Wasn’t banned?

Yeah.

It was not not allowed.

It was not not allowed. Exactly. Let me make one clarification. The exchange clients we were serving were mostly stock exchanges, not crypto exchanges.

Crypto exchanges were not banned in March. Crypto exchanges were banned after you started.

I see.

So that was in September. We’re talking about June and July 2017.

Wow. You’re really threading a needle.

Yeah. We didn’t know that was coming. We just thought—

How much of the company did you sell?

No, we didn’t have equity. We just sold the coins. We launched the token. There was no equity participation; there was no equity involved. We launched a new token, BNB, which is still there today, and we said, “Look, we’re going to sell 60% of it for $15 million.”

Roughly, right? So, because you were tokenizing BNB, what were the original tokenomics that you designed for the BNB token?

We said a bunch of things, but the main one that was going to be live very quickly was that if you held BNB, you would receive a 50% fee discount when you traded on Binance, the platform that was eventually going to launch. That was the main thing. But we also said, “Look, eventually it’s going to have its own chain and its own decentralized ecosystem.” There were 3 or 4 things.

So you must have been ecstatic. You’re like, “Wow, we raised $15 million. We’re now going to launch this exchange.” But then September comes around, and the exchanges themselves—

Yeah. On September 4, 7 different departments of the Chinese government issued a memo together saying that, number 1, crypto exchanges were no longer allowed in China; ICOs were no longer allowed; and crypto mining was not allowed. We said, “Well, we’re going to move. We have to move.”

By then, it was clear that even though China was one of the largest user bases at the time—we had something like 30-something% of our user base from China—we still had 70% from the rest of the world. We said, “Look, if we cut off that 30%, we can still survive. We can actually survive pretty well.” So I said, “Let’s move to Tokyo.”

Back to Tokyo.

Back to Tokyo, right?

You love Tokyo.

I’ve been back and forth to Tokyo. I know it.

And by the way, at that point, did you speak Japanese as well?

I speak very little Japanese—what I call taxi Japanese. I can say, “No, thank you. Go left, go right.” In a restaurant, when I order, I say, “This, this, this,” not the full menu names.

Yeah.

Sushi, I can name most of them.

Okay.

That’s my Japanese level. But I know Japan; I know Tokyo. It wasn’t a new country for me, right? So I said, “Let’s move to Tokyo.” We had about 30 people then.

And everybody moved?

Everybody moved.

Wow.

Back then, 8 years ago, maybe 1 or 2 people were married, and nobody had kids. It was a very easy move for the team.

Yeah, so everybody just packed up and moved.

I remember 1 girl cried—1 product manager—because her boyfriend was in China. She cried, but she moved with us, and she wasn’t married to her boyfriend. Anyway—

Incredible.

So we moved to Tokyo when China did that, and our platform continued to grow.

When you first launched Binance, was it an instant hit, or did it take time and energy to find product-market fit? Were there a few zealous users at first who told everybody else? How did the virality start? How did the liquidity really get built?

Binance, I would say, was growing pretty well, but the token price went down 30% to 40% from the ICO price. It took about 3 weeks to recover. When we launched the product, crypto was still pretty hot, and I think the product-market fit was there. It wasn’t a new idea; it was just a crypto-to-crypto exchange.

So the ICO was critical then, right? Because these people said, “Well, I own this token now. I can trade at a fee discount.”

Yeah.

So that’s why I’m going to choose Binance.

Yeah.

But was it also architected better? Was it materially faster or more reliable?

Yeah, for sure it was. Back then, when we launched, even using your eyes, you could see that placing an order on Binance was so much faster than on competing platforms.

And so the performance of the exchange system was visible. Back in 2017, who were the big platforms you were competing with?

Poloniex and Bittrex were the biggest ones, and then there were a few Chinese ones. There was Huobi, OKX, and OKCoin back then. In the Western world, Coinbase was there. Gemini wasn’t there back then; Gemini came later. Bitstamp was there, and Bitfinex was there. Now they’re really, really small.

So you’re now in your late 30s.

40s now.

40s, sorry—40s. How did you internalize the success? Were you like, “What is this? What’s happening?” Were you saying that to yourself?

Yeah, there were some really surreal moments when you were like, “Is this real?”

Yeah.

In a good way. I said, “What’s our revenue?” I forgot the number, but she said, “A couple hundred bitcoins.” I said, “That’s crazy. We can’t be making a couple hundred bitcoins. Are you sure?” She said, “Yeah, we’re sure.” I said, “This number can’t be correct. We must be off by an order of magnitude.” We double-checked, double-checked, triple-checked, and it was correct. I was like, “That’s crazy.”

There was also a period, about 3 weeks in, when the BNB price was recovering. BNB ICOed at about 10 cents. It dropped to 6 cents, and then we announced another listing. For the next 2 or 3 weeks, every time you went to sleep, you woke up and the token was up 20%. You went to a meeting, came back, and the token was up 20%. You went to the bathroom, came back, and the token was up 20%.

It must have been very quick when you were like, “Wait a minute, I’m rich.”

That came a little bit later. That came in early 2018, about 6 or 7 months in. Forbes put me on the cover.

How did they even know to find you at that time to put you on the cover?

I actually don’t know, but Forbes was doing a crypto edition with all the crypto guys. They already had a picture of Vitalik doing a fancy hand gesture, which was a really cool picture.

So, yeah, they invited us. They contacted our PR department, which maintained contact with them. It was really a team back then—a team of 4 or 5 girls. She said, “Well, Forbes wants to do a special feature with you and take some photos. I think you should go.”

I said, “I don’t want to go.” But I thought, “We’re a new brand. Forbes can still help us increase brand awareness.” So I said, “Okay, fine. I’ll go.” I went to do the photo shoot. That was my first photo shoot where they put makeup on me, and it was the first time I had makeup put on me.

CZ, what is money? Well, is it important? I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but you got rich late. So, did it matter at that point? What is money when you’re in your 40s and you make it?

Yeah. Yeah. It still mattered, but money is not everything. I think I was old enough that a couple of things happened to me. Number 1, I was older, like 40-something. So, I’m not a young 20-year-old who just wants Lamborghinis and big parties.

Too old for that.

I also have a personality that’s quite stable, so I don’t get too excited about things. Also, not to brag, but I went from being barely financially free to being on the cover of Forbes, and I was like, “Wait a second. How rich am I? I don’t even know.” When I look at my wallet, nothing changed. The Forbes cover—nothing changed for me.

But then people said, “Look, now you might be a billionaire.” I was like, “Am I really a billionaire?” It didn’t feel that way. Even when we fled—well, when we left China to go to Japan—I booked economy class for a red-eye flight, and he was like, “No, maybe we should upgrade to business class so we can lie down and sleep.” I thought, “Okay, that makes sense.” Those were still my habits.

When you make money successively, from $1 million to $10 million, you might want to buy some fancy cars. From $10 million to $100 million, you might want to buy a yacht or something. Then, at $1 billion, you have—I didn’t go through that stepwise process. I just went from a relatively okay kind of thing to, like, being on the cover of Forbes.

What does it mean now? Now, I mean, depending on the day,

Yeah.

you’re a decabillionaire or a centibillionaire. What does it all mean?

It doesn’t mean very much to me. I think money is 2 things. Number 1, you have to take care of yourself. You have to have food and shelter.

Which is a very minimal amount of money.

Very minimal. You don’t need that much for that. People can confuse themselves and create all kinds of complexity, but it doesn’t take much.

It doesn’t take much.

So, that I for sure have. I have a very—I don’t have a luxury life, but I have a very comfortable life, I think. And then the other—

Sorry, what does that mean?

If you look at my house, my house—the living room—water leaks every month or so because the house is too old. But that’s the house that’s the right size for me right now. We just fix it whenever it leaks. That still happens. It happened a month ago.

People think I live in a very fancy house, with all this other crazy stuff, but it kind of fits all my family members. It’s not a fancy house. It’s an old house that I bought third- or fourth-hand, but it’s in the right location. It works for me. It’s functional. Things break once in a while. It’s fine.

Would you say it’s because you’re practical, or is it just because you’re not moved by it?

I’m function-driven.

You’re function-driven.

If it functions, I’m okay. I don’t care about the fanciness. I don’t care about style. I don’t care about colors. I don’t care about glittering gold. If it’s functional, I’m okay.

Right. So, if it solves the problem, I’m good. Do you ever have bouts of insecurity?

Not really. I know my weaknesses, and I’ve learned to deal with them. I hope I’m not super arrogant. I don’t think I’m arrogant.

I’ve only gotten to know you in the last couple of years. I saw videos of you, I think, from the late teens and early 2020s, and my immediate reaction—because that’s always been my struggle, these bouts of insecurity and ego—was, “Man, this guy’s really calm.”

Yeah. I’m calm.

Yeah. So, I describe it this way: very well-regulated, very self-aware, it seems.

Yeah. Other people’s emotions may go like this: happy, sad, happy, sad. I’ll feel happy, sad, happy, sad, but my amplitude—

The amplitude is very moderated.

—is narrower. Yeah.

So, it just allows you to manage things in many ways. I mean, success is somewhat illusory. If you’re working on a problem, nobody knows the toil.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nobody really wants to hear about the toil. They want to have a very simple way of pointing to something and saying, “Oh, wow. Look at what you have.” But if you’re working and you have no time to enjoy it, nobody understands that.

Okay. So, you launched this thing, and it’s going bananas, but there were some hiccups.

Yep.

Do you think that you got too addicted to the growth at any point?

I wouldn’t say I was addicted to the growth, but I was addicted to the work. The work was actually very satisfying and very rewarding.

Okay. What was the average day for you? What were you trying to do?

I was basically doing 20-plus meetings a day—scheduled calls or meetings—plus other random stuff, and then having to respond to people on Twitter and other things. It was very rewarding because there’s a sense of fulfillment that’s very hard to describe. It’s not the money. It’s not the growth.

What was it when you were running Binance? I don’t know if you do this, but sometimes people fixate on the leading indicator. Revenue is a lagging indicator, right? Revenue and profits are just from 6 months ago or a year ago manifesting today. What were your leading indicators? What were the north stars that you really cared about that said, “This is the health of the system”?

Yeah. Yeah. I think it was really daily active users. It wasn’t trading volume. It wasn’t revenue. Why DAU versus those other things? As long as you keep serving more users, then you give them value. I believe a product is valuable when people want to use it.

The more people who want to use it—even if your revenue is $0—you have value. Any product that people use, the more people use it, the higher the value, right? That’s always been my philosophy. Whereas you can optimize for revenue, you can optimize for profit in the short term, and you can lose the long-term growth. But I believe that, in the long term, if you have a large number of people using your platform, that’s where you create value—not just for yourself, but also for your users. People choose to use you because there’s value in using you, right? That was my north star.

Also, related to that, knowing that hundreds of millions of people were using us and that we were helping them mattered. The way I viewed it was, if they paid a commission fee that they were willing to pay, we must have given them some higher value.

One of the double-edged swords of the DAUs is that some of those DAUs are bad actors.

Yep.

When was the first inkling that you had that that might be a problem and that you had to take it seriously? What did that first meeting look like, where they were like, “CZ, I have good news and bad news”?

Yeah. Yeah. There’s actually a very clear point. I think it was Christmas Day, January 1st—or New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2018. This was 5 months after we started, and we were kind of large. We were already the number 1 exchange on New Year’s Eve, December 31st-ish, 2017.

A US Homeland Security guy reached out to me. His name, I think, was Joseph. I always remember his name as Patrick or Joseph. I’m not sure which one. He wrote an email saying that he wanted our help tracking some hackers who may have moved funds from the EtherDelta hack. EtherDelta was a decentralized exchange back in 2017 that got hacked and went down.

This guy who worked for the US government emailed us, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Nobody on our team knew how to deal with law enforcement. So, I got a couple of guys to huddle up together and say, “How do we help this guy?” We gave him the information he requested. First, we had to verify who he was.

Afterward, he thanked us, and I said, “Hey, Joseph, can you recommend someone we could hire who can interface with law enforcement in the future?” He recommended someone, but the guy was based in the US, and we didn’t have a US entity. We couldn’t hire anybody in the US back then, so we had to let that go.

But that was the point. It was New Year’s Day. I actually remember—

where you were like, “This is going to happen more,” obviously, invariably, with large numbers.

Yeah. So that’s the day when I realized, okay, look, we need to have somebody who has experience working with law enforcement.

And so what did you do?

We eventually hired more guys.

Okay. Yeah. Obviously, you’re not looking at the transactions, so you wouldn’t know. But if we fast-forward a little bit, the claims that the U.S. government under President Biden made against you were essentially that people like Hamas or other organizations were using Binance, and you didn’t do enough.

Yeah. On this point, I may have some legal restrictions on what I can and cannot say about the plea, et cetera. I’m not a lawyer, but I try to stay very clear of that. Overall, though, I would just say the Biden administration was quite hostile to crypto. I mean, they openly announced war on crypto. Yeah, right.

It’s good to see this new administration change 180 degrees. I think this is good for America.

Yeah.

This is good for the world.

Yeah.

I wouldn’t blame the previous administration, but I think they just didn’t understand.

Why do you think they were so hostile to it?

It’s fear of the new, as simple as that. I think, in their heads, there was some degree of, “Let’s not disrupt the current financial system—the banks, whoever else.” There was probably a lot of lobbying from those industries as well. So that kind of brainwashed or affected the thinking, however you call it.

That’s human nature. I mean, if you think about it, it’s understandable. It’s not ideal, but it’s understandable. So you’re running the exchange, and things are going well from 2018, 2019, 2020. It’s kind of like you’re really coming into your own.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You eventually opened a U.S. entity.

Yeah, in 2019. Yeah.

And why did you feel the need to do that?

In 2019, there was some news about the U.S. government, in my layman’s words, chasing BitMEX. BitMEX was in the news. There was also some Bitfinex stuff in the news. I think the Polish government froze at least $600 million to $800 million of their assets when their market cap was only about $4 billion. That’s a large chunk. And then they got sued later on by the U.S. government, saying that they didn’t have enough reserves.

Yeah.

So we saw that news and were like, okay, well, the U.S. government is looking at this industry, and we better register. Again, I asked my friends—many of them have legal backgrounds—and the general consensus was, okay, we should operate in a registered fashion in the U.S.

So this is 2019. We registered Binance.US, and it’s a separate entity. It’s a separate deployment, a separate matching engine, and separate liquidity. Binance.US has been regulated from day 1.

2019, 2020, 2021—things are just generally working.

Generally. Generally. Yeah. Yeah.

Then you start to see some of these other folks start to pick up steam. SBF and FTX start to really pick up steam. Tell me about that. How did you meet him? Because you ended up owning a lot of the equity.

Yeah. So we invested in them. We owned 20% of the equity at some point, and then we exited a year later. We didn’t stay there for very long.

I think I first met him in January 2019, at one of the Singapore conferences Binance organized. At the time, FTX did not exist. Sam Bankman-Fried was running Alameda, and they hosted an after-party at the S.E.A. Aquarium in Singapore, on Sentosa. They had divers in the fish tank holding a sign, et cetera. They were a VIP client—a large trader on Binance—so we were friendly to them.

Yeah. Right.

That was in January 2019. A couple months later, they came to us saying, “Look, they want to start a futures platform.” They proposed a futures platform, some kind of joint venture—I can’t remember exactly—but I think they proposed 60/40 in our favor.

We had all the users; they didn’t have anything back then. I thought about counterproposing 95/5, but I don’t think that was very polite. They were still a trader and a VIP client.

Because they were a crucial part of the liquidity pool.

Not a crucial part. They were a large trader, but Binance was new too. It wasn’t like they had been there for many years. They were only there for probably 6 months or a year. I don’t know the exact dates.

Okay.

And then, a little bit later, they came back with a better offer. In the summer, they came back with a better offer. We still said no.

Then, in November, they came back and said, “Okay, look, we’re going to offer you this really, really attractive offer.” By then, FTX was launched and had some volume. They said, “We’re going to give you 20% at this price,” and there was a swap of tokens—BNB versus FTT tokens. We got some initial FTT tokens. At the time, BNB tokens were much more liquid, and FTT tokens were less liquid, so we did that deal.

Almost as soon as we did that deal, I kept hearing from my friends that SBF was bad-mouthing us in Washington circles in the U.S., et cetera. I was like, “Come on.” They also did some other stuff that was kind of annoying. They paid 5 times the salary to one of our VIP account managers who had access to our VIP database.

Then that girl went to work for them. If we matched that girl, then we would have to 5x everybody. So we said, “Okay, you go work for them.”

The day after the girl went to work for them, our VIP clients got called and were told, “Look, they’re going to get a better rate on FTX,” et cetera. So I called Sam and said, “Can you stop doing this? We’re your shareholder at the same time.”

He said, “Look, can we do a 1-to-1 panel on a crypto event?” So, fine. We’re an investor, and we wanted to help promote it. I actually wanted multiple exchanges to be successful in the industry, because then we wouldn’t be the ones that got targeted all the time.

Yeah.

But I kept hearing there was some bad-mouthing, this and that. A year later—I think it was early or mid-2021—they were claiming to be raising money at a $32 billion valuation. We thought, “Why don’t we exit?”

In our investment clause, we had veto rights on any future rounds. If we wanted to block them, we could. I didn’t want to use that to block them. I thought, “Even if—why don’t we just exit and compete?”

Oh, wow.

So we talked about the exit, and then we exited. If I remember correctly, the deal was finalized and the transfer was done in July 2021. This was a full year and a half before they had issues. At the time, we didn’t know.

Right, because there were some rumors that a lot of their issues started after you sold and that you were somehow conjoined. I’m sure you’ve heard that, but you can put all of that to bed.

Yeah, that’s categorically not true. Also, because of the competitive nature of the businesses, even though we were a shareholder, I never really asked them for financial statements. I was a very passive investor. When I invest, I don’t get involved in their business.

Yeah.

They were also slightly competitive. We had a futures platform; they had a futures platform. So I tried to stay out and let them do their thing.

So, post-FTX, the things that most people talk about are a couple of things. One was the way in which the distribution happened, which was suboptimal for some of the holders of FTX—people who had cash there. The other thing people talk about is the value of some of these investments post-FTX.

What do you think, in the aftermath of all of this, it says, if anything, about the industry?

I don’t understand the whole bankruptcy process, whether that’s fair or not. I read a lot of different things online. Also, just to be transparent, there’s an ongoing lawsuit between the state and us. They want to try to claw back some of the money that we got, like, a year and a half before.

Right?

So there’s probably limited stuff I can comment on that. Yeah, but again, I’m not an expert there. I did hear some complaints about some Chinese users not being eligible, et cetera, et cetera. But from what I read, because of the appreciation of crypto, now in U.S. dollar terms, they have enough.

When did things at Binance start to get complicated for you?

You mean with the U.S. government, right?

Yeah.

For me, they started asking for information—the information requests—which we always complied with. That was around 2021 or 2022. By late 2022, it was getting more hostile. In early 2023, it became clearer that they were saying we either had to reach a deal of some kind, or they were going to indict us, or something like that. It became negotiations.

How do you deal with that as a person? Do you think, “I can’t believe this is happening”? When you’re in this meeting and your lawyers, or whoever it is, are telling you, “Hey, CZ, I think there’s going to be an indictment.”

Yeah.

How does that meeting go?

Number one, I don’t have a legal background, so I had to rely on a lot of other people’s advice. That’s generally the harder part for me because I don’t have experience there. No one has experience going through this; you go through this once, and you never want to touch it again. No one on the receiving end really has any experience.

You have a bunch of lawyers, and I think the lawyers are good, but how you organize lawyers is actually quite tricky. If you hire a bunch of expensive lawyers, they all have different specialties and different opinions.

They all want to seem like the smartest person who’s driving the decision.

They also all want to take a lot of time to analyze. They get paid by the more time they spend. I’m not saying they’re unethical; they want to do a really good job. But then they go off in all kinds of different tangents, so you get dragged in a lot of different places. That was the most troublesome part for me. If somebody told me, “These are the 3 things you have to focus on, and this is the strategy,” that would have been much easier.

We also didn’t have a strong legal team. Our team was young, and our legal team didn’t have experience dealing with this type of issue. So that was always tricky.

By the way, where was the entire team at this point? Were you all still—

We were all spread out.

Now you’re everywhere.

We’re now everywhere. We’re spread out. In 2023, I was in Dubai. I split my time between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. It was very stressful, but the way I deal with stress is I look at the best- and worst-case scenarios.

I asked the team, “What’s the best-case scenario?” They said, “You pay a fine, you get a deferred prosecution agreement, and then this thing is over.” That’s the best case. Then I asked, “What’s the worst case?” They said, “They’re going to try to put you in jail,” and stuff like that.

Was that the worst case, though? Because at the time, it seemed like the fact pattern was that folks would get some sort of probation, or—

That would be the worst-worst case. So far, nobody got put in jail, but they could ask for it.

Yeah. Right.

There’s actually another worst case, which is that you fight it. If you can’t agree on a term, you fight it and stay in the UAE, which is a non-extradition country. Now you have citizenship, so there’s almost zero chance you’ll get extradited. But your travel is going to be limited. Any time you cross into a different country, even if that country is a non-extradition country, there can still be a chance that a deal is being made. It’s kind of living in fear.

Plus, it also creates complexity at the government-to-government level if the countries are allies. It just creates a lot of noise.

It creates a lot of noise. It also creates a lot of pressure for the UAE government, potentially. I don’t want to trouble the people who gave me citizenship.

I don’t want to be the trouble causer.

Right.

Right. So the worst-case scenario is that you don’t go there, they indict you, and then they put you on the Red Notice list, or stuff like that. Those are potential possibilities.

Yeah. So how did you resolve it? Did the negotiations take—

The negotiations were basically daily calls, with 12 to 20 lawyers on the call, for more than a year.

More than a year.

More than a year of back-and-forth with the Biden DOJ. The most common thing I heard from my lawyers was, “We have never seen them this hostile on a case like this.”

Right. “We have never seen this before.” At some point, do you just become desensitized to it, or do you keep internalizing it and personalizing it? Do you think, “Why is this happening to me?” Is there resentment, or how did you deal with it?

It takes successive steps, and there were a couple of steps that were really hard to take. In the negotiations, there were a few points where you say, “Look, we’re just going to have to say no. We just can’t agree to that deal.” They wouldn’t back off, and I couldn’t agree to that deal, so we just had to say no.

Then a couple of weeks lapsed, and you didn’t know what was going to happen.

Purgatory.

You could get indicted; they could indict you at any moment. You had already said no to that deal. There were a couple of periods like that, and during those couple of weeks, you’re mentally thinking, “Okay, I can’t travel anywhere. I might have to get used to this life of just living in one country and being very careful.”

There might be a sealed indictment that’s not public, and that could be an issue at any border that you cross. Interestingly, they come back after 2 weeks and say, “Okay, we can negotiate again.” Then you’re thinking, “What do you think is happening over there?”

Looking back, was that a useful negotiation tactic? The silence?

I think that’s a very useful negotiation tactic for me, or for anybody in my situation—for anybody who’s going through this on the receiving end. You only go through this once; you’re not experienced. This is your life. There could be a sealed Red Notice against you, and this is the life you have to deal with forever.

They don’t like these things. They can stay there for decades. For them, they do this every day. This is their daily job. But I think they’re smart enough to know that 2 weeks is about the optimum time, because if it’s longer than that, you really get used to it. When they come back to negotiate, you’re going to say no. You’re already used to this.

Right. If you leave someone in that situation for too long—

Interesting. So they’re very skilled in this type of mental work.

Right. Whereas—yeah.

There were some really tough periods. You don’t get used to this type of stuff. It’s mentally challenging.

How did you get yourself to a place where you could agree to the final terms?

After a lot of negotiations, we basically said, “Okay.” I pleaded guilty to a single charge of a Bank Secrecy Act violation, which was a registration failure. It’s a federal crime, and it’s serious, but no one had gone to jail for this in history.

Sorry, that charge is more technical. How does that relate to the perception of what was in the media, at least in America—which was money laundering, aiding and abetting folks, and not doing KYC and AML—versus the actual charge? Are those two things connected and equal, or are they disjointed: perception versus the actual specifics?

Sure. I can try to explain my understanding. I’m not a lawyer, so I want to make a small disclaimer here. This is my layman’s understanding, and it could be wrong.

My understanding is that there’s a first level: a Bank Secrecy Act violation, which is a failure to register. Basically, we serviced U.S. users without registering as a financial services company in the U.S.

So that’s a “you” thing that has nothing to do with the users themselves doing anything nefarious or bad.

No, you did not register with the proper authorities to say, “I’m going to take on U.S. customers.” That’s number 1. That’s the base layer.

On top of that, you can say, “Look, you didn’t have adequate KYC and AML procedures, so all your procedures are not strong enough.” Even if you’re not registered, you’re also supposed to have good KYC and AML procedures. People think those things are black and white, but in reality they’re not. It’s about how well you do it, which systems you use, and how you do it.

How many people do you have? What are your standard operating procedures?

Yeah. There are actually a lot of details. Then, quite a bit above that, in my understanding, is if you have knowingly facilitated bad transactions. You can have a weak AML program that didn’t catch all the bad players, but you don’t know that.

Right. So it’s not like you’re intentionally facilitating that. It’s not robust.

It’s relatively naive, but it’s there. Versus, “I know this to be bad, and I’m enabling it to happen regardless.”

Yeah, right. Then there’s the next level, which is that you’re personally handling the transactions.

Right. Charlie Shrem handled transactions for Silk Road for Ross, right?

Right. There are different levels. I don’t handle any transactions myself. That’s just not my thing. I don’t do it. So they said, “Okay, Binance: number 1, we didn’t register, and KYC and AML are weak.”

Layer 1, layer 2.

Yeah. We can agree on those single charges without any additional stuff.

No one ever went to jail in U.S. history, even to this day. We couldn’t agree on the 2 additional charges the government wanted to add; they called them enhancements, 3 and 4. They said that I had somehow personally facilitated them, but they couldn’t provide any evidence. They were trying to lean on the company—something happened in the company, et cetera—and use that.

Were they able to point to a transaction or something?

No, they weren’t. The court outright rejected those 2 enhancements, but before I went to the U.S., we decided that we would argue that in court. Without getting into privileged conversations, the understanding before I went was that no one went to jail. The worst guy who got punished was Arthur Hayes of BitMEX. He got 6 months of home confinement for running BitMEX, and when I look at that case, he had much more direct interactions with clients, whereas I had much less direct interaction.

I basically didn’t deal with clients at Binance. I dealt with users on Twitter, but not with the Binance back end kind of thing. I felt pretty confident that we should be in a fairly strong position, and that was the best way forward.

So you’re like, “We agree with this. We agree with this. We’re going to debate this in court—counts 3 and 4. I’m going to come to the U.S.”

Yeah.

And we’re going to hash it out in court.

Yeah.

So you land in America, go into the courtroom, and start this process. What happens?

There were quite a lot of details. First of all, on the first day, you go and plead, right? The plea agreement had already been debated.

By the way, where were you staying? In a hotel?

I was staying in a hotel in downtown Seattle.

Was your family with you or no?

My family went to join me, but not my kids. My sister and my mom went to join me. I didn’t want my kids to go; they had school, and my partner had a business to run. I was already no longer running the business, so I didn’t want to drag her away from that.

Yeah.

My sister, my mom, and my older kids were with me. I stayed in a hotel, and the next morning I went to court. The first part of the process is the plea. The judge asks you, “Do you understand this paragraph, this paragraph, this paragraph?” You just say, “Yes, yes, yes.” The paragraphs had already been negotiated out of the wazoo by multiple—so many lawyers.

Overlawyered.

Overlawyered. And then the lawyers debated the bail condition. After the plea, they didn’t debate the charge; they debated my bail condition. I was granted bail, and my lawyers argued that I should be allowed to go back to the UAE while waiting for the sentence 3 months later. The government argued that I might not come back, so they wanted me to stay in the U.S. They said they wouldn’t restrict my movement in the U.S. because I didn’t pose any harm to the community.

The magistrate judge, the first judge, approved me leaving the U.S. and going back to the UAE for 3 months, which would have been great. Then the government appealed that. My lawyer said that in his 40 years, he had never seen an appeal on a bail condition.

Wow.

He said, “Well, this is tone-deaf, because this will piss off the courts, which will actually be in my favor.” And guess what? 2 weeks later, the court ruled in the government’s favor, and I was kept in the U.S. I was kept away from home for 3 months.

That hotel?

I was free to travel in the U.S. I thought, “Well, I’m stuck in the U.S., so I might as well travel.” My sister had a place in the U.S., so I stayed with my sister for part of the time, and then I traveled just to try to keep myself cool and chill.

3 months later, the government requested another 3-month extension. So now I had to stay in the U.S. for another 3 months, waiting for sentencing.

Now, were your kids coming to see you at this point, at least? Could they come see you?

No, I didn’t ask them to come and see me.

So you didn’t see them for 6 months?

Yeah, and, well, actually, I didn’t see them for that year.

The government asked for another 3-month extension. On April 30, 2024—that was my court date—a week before that was when both sides submitted their requests. The government requested 36 months, which was twice the maximum sentencing guideline for the worst-case scenario for me. The court had never seen a government asking the court to ignore the sentencing guidelines.

Did you find that out for the first time sitting there in court?

No, I found out just a week before the court date, because the government had to make a written submission.

How did you react to that?

Not well. My lawyers had previously told me, “You can probably get home.” Then they changed and said, “Look, the judge is most likely going to split the baby. If the government is asking for 36 months and you’re asking for probation, the government will most likely pick some number in between.” I thought, “Okay, that’s not good.”

Wow.

Yeah. Also, 5 days before my sentencing, on April 25, Senator Elizabeth Warren went on TV to declare war on crypto again. She wrote an open letter to the DOJ saying all this stuff, most of which is not correct.

On April 30, I got sentenced. The judge said a bunch of really good things about me. I have all the excerpts in the book, but then at some point the judge says, “But…” and you’re like, “Okay, that’s not good.”

Wow.

And then I got 4 months.

That’s how they start the sentencing. They’re like, “He’s telling you all the good things,” and then he gets to the “but,” and you’re like, “Oh, my God.”

Pretty much. Yeah.

Wow.

The lawyers still debated the sentencing in court on April 30. That’s when the 2 enhancements got rejected by the court. My lawyers argued, “No, this and that. I never touched any of these transactions. I’m not aware of these things.”

The counts 3 and 4 of the accusations got thrown out.

Yeah. They argued about what the recommended sentence should be. My lawyers argued for either probation or, in the worst case, home confinement. The government argued, “This guy’s a really bad guy. This case is really big, and we should punish him really hard”—with double the punishment of any legally recommended punishment: 36 months.

How did you deal with that?

It was difficult at the beginning. It wasn’t about the 4 months; it was, “Am I going to be safe?” If you tell me, “You’re going to go to this place for 4 months, and you’re guaranteed to be safe—you’ll be okay,” I’d be like, “Okay, fine. I’ll just deal with it.” But the uncertain part was whether I would be safe.

Right after the sentencing, a bunch of the big media outlets wrote that I was going to be the richest person to ever go to a U.S. prison. My lawyers and the prison consultants said, “Well, given all this coverage, you’re probably the biggest target for potential extortion in prison.” So your safety was going to be an issue. That was the thing I was worried about. You go in and you don’t have anything, so how do you make sure that you stay safe? That was the top consideration.

What is a prison consultant?

That’s a whole industry of people who advise you about what prison is like and give you advice about how to live. It’s a big industry that’s growing because the prison population is growing in the U.S.

The prison consultants said, “Given the high-profile coverage, you’re probably the biggest target for potential extortion in prison.” So your safety was going to be an issue. You talk to a lot of people. Prison consultants are usually ex-guards or ex-wardens. There’s another group of people who have been to prison, but those guys are working there; they’re not inmates. There’s another group of people who have been in prison as inmates.

You talk to a lot of those guys, and you figure out what prison is like. Do you make friends? Do you not make friends? You get advice like, “If somebody comes up to you on the first day and they’re really friendly, don’t take anything from them, because they’ll ask for 10 times more in favors later. If you don’t, then they’ll stab you,” and stuff like that.

I got a lot of different advice, but at the end of the day, you have to go and face it. What I learned is that the U.S. prison system is actually so vast. 2 million people are in U.S. prisons. The U.S. government spends far more on prisons than on education, on schools. That’s how big the U.S. prison population is.

And because there are 50 states, every state has a different system. There are state prisons and federal prisons, and each one is like a mini-city. The prison I went to has 2,200 inmates; it’s like a small city. They each have their own rules, et cetera. I got some advice, but much of it wasn’t really useful. When you go in, you just have to deal with it.

So, you were sentenced on April 30, you said.

Yeah.

And when do you start?

When you get sentenced, you don’t know where you’re going. We don’t know which prison you’re going to. The court makes 2 recommendations. Usually, you can be in the hotel or doing whatever, and then you have to check in on some date—you have to go.

In my case, the judge ruled that I don’t need supervision, which is very unique. Then I don’t have to check in. I just have to wait for a letter that comes to my sister’s place, which is an address I registered with the court. In fact, the DOJ, in its request, asked me to be remanded, meaning I would be taken away in handcuffs.

I think they really wanted that photo for PR reasons, but the judge said, “Look, he’s not a risk. He’s not a flight risk. He’s not a risk to society. I’m not going to do that.”

In fact, the judge added one sentence that said I don’t need supervision, which is actually a very interesting legal clause I learned later. This is why, when I finish my sentence, I don’t have probation. There’s no parole. I don’t need supervision.

Oh, wow. So, there are some really interesting things—well, interesting things that you learned. How was that period for you? Did anything bad happen?

Luckily, nothing too bad happened. It’s a really bad experience overall, but there was no physical harm. There were no fights, and there was no real extortion. My prison consultants told me, “When you go in, don’t join any gang. Stay to yourself. Be quiet. Stay out of sight.”

The minute I walked into the prison gate, the guard said, “Well, you’re going to need some protection here. I hear the Pacific Islanders are hiring, so you might want to join them.” This was literally the minute I walked through the gate.

Wow.

I was like, “What does that mean?” The first day was pretty intense. They take you through so many processes. They strip-search you. I talked about it on CNBC: they strip-search you, and then you move to your unit, which has about 200 inmates.

It’s like 3 rows of cells, 20 cells each, facing each other, 3 floors, and there’s a common area at the bottom. There are about 200 macho guys looking at you, and you walk into a cell.

What I actually found out was that they organize prisons by race, by ethnicity. If you’re a Chinese dude, they group you with Chinese dudes. If you’re white, they group you with white guys. Black dudes, Mexicans, Spanish guys—they put them in one group.

This actually avoids a lot of conflicts. You’re more likely to get along with people of your own ethnicity in terms of culture and customs. There were 1 or 2 Arab guys who prayed; they had a different schedule. They put you in groups by ethnicity, and the guards actually encourage it because it reduces fighting.

Oh, wow.

Once you’re in your group, if you have a problem with somebody from another group, there’s a group representative. The representative will talk about it, and there’s a hierarchy and union representatives.

Kind of like union representatives.

Yeah. Then they come together and hash it out.

Yeah. They say, “Look, stand down. We worked through it.”

So, there’s a system to it, but I didn’t know any of this. I walked in, and this half-Chinese, half-Asian-looking dude came to me and said, “My name is Chino. Welcome to our group.” He said, “Welcome to our car.” I was like, “What? Should I shake his hand? Should I not? Am I joining this gang?”

That’s crazy.

Yeah, and this guy is a Filipino-German mix. There aren’t enough Asians, so they kind of group anything that’s kind of Asian. They also group Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, like Hawaiians, into the same group. Our group only has 6 people out of those 200 people.

I was sent to a low-security prison. I should have been eligible for a minimum-security prison, which is 1 level lower, where most of the white-collar crimes go. But because I’m not a US citizen, they put me in a low-security prison, which is where all the drug offenders are.

Wow.

Yeah, it’s a crazy experience. I have quite a lot of details about this part in my upcoming book.

What was the first thing you did when you got out?

A good shower. A good meal.

When you first get out, the shower is literally like a box this big. There’s a cowboy-bar door that covers the middle part. They can see your legs and your head, but it’s hard to take a shower without touching the wall. When you get out of prison the first time, taking a shower where you no longer need to touch the shower wall is a luxury.

There’s also very limited fruit and very limited protein—proper protein. There are a lot of carbs, bread, flour, and fried stuff. There are very few vegetables, very little protein, and very little fruit. I hadn’t seen a whole fruit for months. When I got out and saw a plate of fruit, I was like, “Wow, that’s a luxury I haven’t seen for a few months.”

Wow. Did you immediately just go back to the UAE?

Yeah. When I left prison, it took me about 6 hours and 26 minutes from leaving the prison door to getting on the airplane and flying out.

What were you thinking? Were you saying to yourself, “I understand where they were coming from, and I was at least vindicated on the parts that I felt were overreach. I can see where they were coming from with these first 2 things”? Did you say that to yourself, or did you say, “This was a total railroad, and this is completely unfair. How did this happen to me? Why did this happen to me?” What were you saying to yourself?

I have some restrictions on what I can say about the agreement, the plea, et cetera.

I’m just talking emotionally.

Emotionally, I just wanted it to be over with. Remember, when I first got out, this was still the Biden administration. The election had not happened, and it wasn’t clear who was going to win. It wasn’t clear whether US policy was still the same.

You went in when?

I went in on May 30, 2024.

And you got out 4 months later.

September 27 was the day I fully got out. The election was in November.

Right. And by the way, at that point, you had been in America for a year. You hadn’t seen your kids in a year.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At that point, I just wanted this whole thing to be over with. I thought they would continue. I thought if the policies continued, there would still be anti-crypto policies. We’d—whatever—we’d survive however we survived. That was kind of the mentality.

So, when you got back, had you come to terms as well with the fact that you couldn’t run Binance, per se, and that that was part of the plea?

Yeah, I’m actually okay with that. Stepping down was really hard. I actually cried over it, and the only other time I really cried was when my father passed away a few years ago. But after coming back, I was actually quite happy not to run Binance. I have a lot more free time.

If I stepped down myself, people would say, “Hey, this guy ran out of stamina.” But now I can’t run Binance, so it’s not my fault. It’s not your problem. It’s not my choice.

Right.

But after a while, I was like, there are other very useful, meaningful things I can do with my life. I think overall, I’m in a very fortunate position. I have resources. I have enough money to do whatever I want to do in terms of funding projects and businesses, et cetera, including Giggle Academy, free education, stuff like that.

Yeah, I wanted to talk about that and AI.

Yeah.

Yeah. But before I do that, let’s just do a little bit of the final coda here. Tell me about the process to start getting a pardon, getting it, what you had to do, and—

Yeah. So, on the pardon, I don’t think anybody knows what the pardon process is.

It doesn’t seem like there’s a process.

I don’t even know what the process is. The process is, you find a lawyer who writes you a petition, who puts all the arguments for why you should be pardoned, why you were overprosecuted, et cetera, et cetera, and why you’re a good person.

And a pardon—what is it for? Is it effectively to recognize overprosecution?

No. A pardon erases everything you had before.

So you're now a very normal person.

But the reason to be considered for it can be anything.

It can be anything.

It's really just the discretion of the president reading the petition. Well, based on my understanding, the Constitution grants the U.S. government, or the U.S. president, the power to give pardons, and that's about as much detail as it says, I think.

Right. Okay. So it's really about the social norms in that moment and how the president interprets those social norms.

I think so.

Historically, most presidents pardon on the last day, right?

Exactly.

And then Biden, I think, started pardoning some people in between, and he also did pre-pardons.

Which is new, and also crazy.

Well, it was very new.

Yeah. I was largely around for that, but it really caught a lot of people off guard. He also pre-pardoned his son for some period.

That's right.

Biden prayed.

It wasn't just the COVID stuff. It was a period of time that nobody even talked about. It was like, why do we need it?

That's right.

That's right.

But anyway, I believe the process is that there's no process. The president can do whatever they want. You petition and wait, and then there's a pardon czar in the White House. I think her name is Alice Johnson. She also went to prison for many years, and she wrote a really nice book, which I read. Your lawyers ping her and say they need a status update, and then suddenly it happened. That's the extent of what I know about the pardon process. I don't think that's a fixed process. I don't think anybody knows what it is.

The question that some people might jump to is: What must CZ have done to try to get it? Do you want to put that to bed?

Well, I didn't do much. I didn't do anything. But without the pardon, it's quite hard for Binance to enter the U.S. in a proper way, I think.

Because you're the UBO.

I'm the UBO, yeah. I'm the UBO of Binance and Binance.US, right?

Without a pardon, Binance is severely limited in what it can do in the U.S.

Right.

If the U.S. wants to become the capital of crypto in the world, you cannot not have the largest player. You cannot have U.S. people unable to access the largest liquidity pool in crypto. We're also one of the largest crypto ecosystems.

Yeah. He's had his own issues, like debanking. He knows what it feels like to be targeted.

Not only debanking—he got 34 criminal charges.

Yeah, right. I don't know all the other charges, but that as well.

When I was in prison, I saw on the prison TV that he got 34 criminal charges. One of the charges was that he brought a document into his bathroom to read.

That's crazy, right?

I think the fact that he went through that, and that it was the Biden DOJ, probably helped me a lot in getting the pardon because he can sympathize. He knows how aggressive that DOJ was, right? So that probably helped me in some way.

So how do you spend your time now?

I'm still pretty busy. I work on Giggle Academy, this free education platform. I consult with many governments to help them put in sound crypto regulatory policies. I get involved on the investment side. We invest in blockchain, AI, and biotech, and we have a very active team doing investments. This is outside of Binance; it's part of YZi Labs. I also help mentor and coach a few founders in the BNB Chain ecosystem. Between all of those things, I'm actually pretty busy.

Tell me about Giggle Academy.

I thought it's possible to fully digitize all education content. Why is that important? There are some numbers: 700 million to 800 million adults are illiterate. Two-thirds of them are women, and on top of that, there are about 500 million kids who are not in school. If you add all of that up, that's like 1.2 billion people—12% to 13% of the world's population—who are not educated.

Yeah.

These are all in really poor areas. There are just no schools around, or they couldn't afford to go to school. The schools are not very good today, either. Schools are like—you know, they average you out.

How is the software designed?

It's just an app on a phone or tablet. I believe that with enough technology, an understanding of gaming and human psychology, and AI, a single app can deliver all the education content you need, and we can do that for free.

Have you looked at versions of this, like Alpha School, and do you have any opinions on that?

Yes, I think Alpha School is great. Alpha School is really, really good, but it's high-cost.

High-cost.

Right. So it's more, I think—

I think the software is called TimeBack. That's what it's called. Have you had a chance to see it?

I have not played with it a lot. I did meet some of the founders and some of the key executives there. They solve a very hard problem: making the existing education better, whereas I solve the other end of the problem—making education accessible.

Right.

Hopefully better later, too.

In your view of how Giggle works, are there schools, or—?

No, I actually don't want to do schools. I want everyone to learn from one app.

The software is very reward-oriented—badges.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm just going to ask the obvious question. When I looked at it, I thought, well, badges are like a trail of breadcrumbs to tokenize and earn and make payments. Am I just making this up?

No. I thought really hard about this, but I will, for a very long time, resist issuing a token on Giggle Academy. This has pros and cons. When you issue a token, you can do rewards. You can earn—learn to earn, exactly. You can do a bunch of stuff. You can incentivize teachers to create content. That's good. But for me, I want to avoid the token because if I do a token, everyone wants to buy the token and everyone on the platform wants to speculate on it.

People want to speculate on the token. Then I won't be able to tell whether people are real kids learning or just farmers trying to farm the token.

I want Giggle to be a real free education platform instead of a token platform, instead of some crypto thing.

Right. If there's a token, people are going to focus on the token. I have to be honest: I think Giggle sounds really incredible, but that was where my reptilian brain went.

Everyone thinks about that obvious thing, right? Exactly. But I want Giggle to be a real free education platform instead of a token platform, instead of some crypto thing.

So your goal is that you'll just deficit-finance this and continue to proliferate it?

Yeah. That was my goal. But what happened is there's a community project that donated like $12 million based on a memecoin. I've only spent maybe $3 million or $4 million on the entire project so far.

Yeah.

So now it's actually net positive. It's hard to give money away with a positive impact.

With a positive impact, it's very, very difficult.

Very difficult. So my plan is to fund it for as long as it needs to reach that goal of fully digitized delivery of education in a gamified, sticky way.

Let me ask an AI question for a second. You said that AI is this third pillar of your life, and that you see these big waves, right?

Yep.

One of the most interesting things about AI is that when you get one level below English and start to look at the embeddings—the layer of embeddings—what you start to see is that it's a machine-readable language. It's not English.

Yeah.

There's a richness of information there. It's perfect for agents. They can traverse it. You can cipher query it. You can do all this stuff that allows you to make really incredible leaps in productivity and otherwise. It stands to reason that agents are also participants in commerce and need payments. I think you've said this is probably the largest use of crypto at some point in the near future. Describe that vision for us.

Yeah, I think it's fairly straightforward. As you said, it's very clear that soon each of us is going to have hundreds, thousands, or millions of agents working for us in the background, and they will be transacting. They will be moving money around. In theory, if I want to listen to this podcast, your people should pay a few cents to listen to it, or whatever economic model you want.

More than that, CZ.

Sure, of course. But there would be some economic model. Right now, even last year, we talked about agents buying tickets for us.

It’s not quite there yet, but you will get there, right? They will book restaurants. They’ll pay for hotels for us, and the agents can transact a million times more than us.

Yeah.

And they’re not going to use banks. Banks just won’t be able to—

Well, banks won’t onboard and AML/KYC an agent. It doesn’t even make sense.

You can’t do a KYC. They—

It doesn’t make any sense, right?

But also what agents will do is transact at a volume and a rate that will make the traditional networks’ heads spin.

Exactly. They’re just not going to be able to support it.

Yeah.

Right. Also, even with investments or trading, today you open the Binance app, look at a chart, click on a price level, type in the price, and click a green or red button. That shouldn’t be the interface. The interface should be, “Hey, look, convert 10% of my stablecoins into BNB.”

Then you figure out that if you have a large position, you’ll do it slowly over time. If you have a small position, it might be one market order. All of that should just happen in the background. The agent can do this for us. Soon, you will be able to.

What is the most viable payment system today that agents could rely on?

I’m actually not too sure. I don’t think there’s any one that’s super—

What crypto project today do you think comes closest?

Oh, you mean crypto?

Yeah, that agents could use theoretically.

Again, it’s early days. I don’t want to speculate, and I don’t want to name any specific projects. It’ll cause some token price fluctuations.

Quite a number of people are working on it, especially recently with more of an AI-agent social network thing. It’s getting more and more hype. I think you’ll get there.

Let me ask you about crypto in general for a second. When you see a lot of stuff around free speech, what is the role of privacy in crypto? One of the things that I struggle with is this: If you ask me whether I’m a Bitcoin maximalist, I would say no. Even though I was early, I think my biggest issue with it is that there’s a lack of fungeability, which I think is problematic for getting to megascale, and then there’s a lack of privacy.

I agree. It’s probably the biggest thing that will hold Bitcoin back from being ubiquitous. I think privacy plays a very fundamental role in our society. But right now, as you said, I also think that Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies do not have enough privacy features.

Yeah. I think when Bitcoin was designed, it was going to be pseudonymous, but the fact is that every transaction on the blockchain can be traced, especially now that you have a centralized exchange with KYC.

Exactly.

And it’s actually very easy. By the way, we always go back to the same argument, which is the corner case of, “Well, somebody’s using this for something illicit.” I say there are those use cases, but the overwhelming majority is that you buy a pack of gum. Tomorrow, you may want to buy a certain movie or a video game, or you may want to buy cigarettes. It’s not for me to judge.

Yeah.

And dollars are fungible in that sense. There’s complete anonymity; we have no idea what they were used for before I got my hands on them.

Yeah. Well, there are actually real applications where privacy is extremely important. If you book a certain hotel and people know that hotel’s address—the blockchain hotel’s receiving address—they will know that you’ll be in that hotel. That’s a physical security issue for you.

That’s right.

Right. There are real use cases where privacy is very important. This is why people don’t publicize their home addresses online. In many countries, if you reveal somebody’s home address—in Japan, that’s illegal. So there are real use cases for privacy, which Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies currently do not provide.

Yeah.

There’s a counterargument: Law enforcement wants to track down bad guys. That can be done even with no privacy. I’m supportive of that, but there are fundamental privacy issues.

In the future, as an industry, we need to figure out how to evolve the privacy features, which no one is really focusing on right now. There are a few privacy-focused coins—I was going to say no one—but they don’t have much market cap or size.

Yeah. Tell me about the book. It’s coming along.

It’s always a longer project than I anticipate, right?

What was the point of it? Was it catharsis, to make a point, to tell the story—all of those things?

A bit of everything. It started because I was bored. I started drafting it when I was in prison, just to keep me busy. I didn’t want to be chatting with people; it was just something to keep me busy in prison.

I started drafting and typing on a very dumb terminal and sending it to my assistant. Once I got out, I thought, “Well, I have enough that if I spend a bit more time on it, I can have a book.”

But editing a book takes so long. Every pass takes 2 or 3 weeks if you want to edit a book. Right now, it’s about 95,000 words, so it’s around 300 pages. I’m also editing the English and Chinese versions, so it just takes longer.

The point of the book right now is just to get the story out. I think there are many misconceptions about who I am and what I went through.

What are those misconceptions, do you think?

There’s a lot of negative media about crypto, about CZ and Binance, and about the entire industry. To some extent, I think there’s also a lot of negative media about Trump, the party, and so on. That part is not too heavy in my book.

It’s as simple as what we talked about on this podcast, but I want people to understand who I am and, by extension, what Binance kind of is from my perspective.

Is it an important story for your children?

I think so. Yes.

Why?

I think it’s important for them to understand. They are, of course, more on my side, and they know that a lot of the media coverage isn’t the right stuff. But I haven’t had time to explain the story to them in this level of detail.

I think it’s important for them to read this, and they’ll understand a lot more detail than what I’m able to tell them verbally or in person. Even though the book doesn’t contain everything, it’s as much as I can put in.

What do you want for your kids?

I want them to live a healthy and happy life, however they define it. If they’re happy just being a normal person, then that’s good for me. If they want to do startups and build companies, that’s great.

If they want to be artistic, that’s great. If they want to do humanitarian efforts or charity, that’s also great. Whatever they figure out they want to do, I just want to be there to support them.

How similar or different is that from what you got from your parents?

Pretty similar. My parents didn’t pressure me to be this or that. They weren’t even like normal Chinese parents who want you to be a doctor, engineer, or—

Lawyer, engineer. Those were my parents. Yeah, okay.

My parents didn’t do that with me. My parents said, “You can do whatever you want.” They just said to me, “Don’t hurt yourself. Don’t hurt other people.”

So, don’t do drugs, don’t get into crime, and don’t hurt other people. That’s basically what I got from my parents.

There are a lot of people who probably hear this and think—and I think this is a real compliment, so don’t take it the wrong way—“That could have been me, too.” I think we glorify success in a way that makes it seem impenetrable. It’s like this very exotic thing that happens, and it’s not that.

No.

Yeah. The reason I can say that is that when I spend time with you—and I’m sure now that people have spent around 2 hours with you—they’ll think, “Man, this guy is really normal.”

I’m a normal dude.

Exactly. A lot of people say that to me as well. There’s something really valuable about working on things that you like, because then the time just passes. You put your head up and you’re like, “Wow, okay, there’s something new to try. Let’s go try that. Let’s go learn something.”

I want to give you a chance to speak to all these people who are probably thinking to themselves, “Wow, that could be me.”

Absolutely. Number 1, I’m a normal dude. I don’t think—I know—I’m not super-smart. But you don’t need to be super-smart to be successful. You can’t be too dumb, but you don’t need to be super-smart.

There are a lot of other things, like principles, values, emotional quotient, and a lot of those things come into play.

I think there’s a lot of luck as well. But I think for most people, you’re in a situation where you usually cannot change the situation. So what you can do is change yourself, right? If you push yourself a little bit every day, you don’t have to push yourself too hard. If you push yourself too hard, you’re going to burn out and you’re not going to last long. But you want to push yourself to, like, 120%—110% to 130%, somewhere in that range—while still being able to last long.

Yeah.

And if you do that for, like, 30 years and you get lucky, you will most likely be relatively successful. You might not be a billionaire, but you’ll have a very comfortable life. Do—

You think that it’s important to maybe dispel the myth that being a billionaire isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Money is money. In our life, if I picture a spiderweb graph, money is only one tangent.

Yeah.

Right. So once you have enough—

One thread.

It’s one thread. Having more doesn’t help you. In fact, there’s health, there’s family, and there are other things that can keep you happy, like your values, contribution, and positive impact. Those are intrinsic, internal rewards that you feel very happy about. A lot of those things are extremely important. So once you have enough money on this graph, more doesn’t make you happy.

Yeah.

Sometimes you have more, sometimes you have less. Then how’s your health? Also, there’s another dimension: time. How much time do you have? Can you use your time the way you want? Are you working on the stuff you want? Are you spending time with the people you want to spend time with?

Yeah.

And is your family healthy? You’ll be very lucky if your family is all healthy. That’s already a huge gift.

Your mental health is also important: how you deal with pressure, et cetera. I somehow am very lucky to have a very stable mind. So I think all of those things are extremely important, and all of those things you can improve on instead of just money. A lot of people only chase money but sacrifice everything else.

They work really, really hard. They don’t have free time. They’re not spending time with their family. Their health deteriorates after 10 or 20 years.

They don’t enjoy the time that they’re spending on these things, even though they’re trying to get the thing that they already have so much of and don’t need.

Yeah. Yeah. So this is also the part. I’m actually very grateful that I don’t have to run Binance anymore. Now I have more time.

Yeah. Whereas before, even though that was very enjoyable, on my other dimensions I was not doing well.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah. CZ, thanks for joining the All-In podcast.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m going all in.