CZ's Untold Story: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Binance's Founder

CZ, welcome to the All In Podcast. Thanks for having me here. It's really, really great to see you. It's a pleasure. 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 that they probably should. The part of the background that I really care about is there's parts of your early journey in Canada, which is very similar to mine. You worked at McDonald's. I worked at Burger King. Okay. But before that, your parents were able to emigrate from China right around Tiananmen Square, right? My father went to Canada to study in 1984. That's five years before Tiananmen Square. How did that come about? So your father stayed 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 teacher professor. He was a professor in China. And then he went to do an exchange program in University of Toronto first. And then a couple of years later, he moved to UBC, University of British Columbia in Vancouver. And then he was there. We were applying. Back then, it's actually very difficult to get a passport. It takes like three or four years to get a passport. We started applying in 1985-ish. It took like two, three years to get a passport. And then after you get a passport. Meaning a Chinese passport. A Chinese passport, yeah. And then it takes like another few years to get a visa. Like that's just how long the process takes back then. And then, yeah, so we got it shortly after 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 then maybe they wouldn't have approved the visa or? No, actually, after that, the visa got easier. The passports got harder. So they no longer issue new passports. Like the ratio of new passports got harder. But we were lucky. So we got the passports like, you know, like maybe a year before that. And then we're waiting for the visa. And then afterwards, the visa got easier. So in some ways, that actually kind of helped us to 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? Or no, you were what, 12? I was 12. So I think consciously, no. It didn't change me that much. But subconsciously, I think, you know, there were discussions about, you know, democracy versus. So there's some discussions. I was actually living on a university campus back then. The China Science and Technology University is one of the top four universities in China So there were a lot of discussions among the university students which were probably seven to nine years older than me So there were some discussions but I was 12 So I wasn't really clued into it, but I think subconsciously, you may have some kind of subconscious impact. I don't know. And what was it like when you moved to Vancouver? I moved to Vancouver, yeah. So you land in British Columbia in Vancouver. 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 or no? I studied English for a couple of years in high school, but I was not fluent at all. But yeah, Vancouver's great. Canada's nice greenery, open space. Everything's pretty, the living standard's high. Everything's pretty good. Everything's very clean. The fruits are bigger. So it's just a really nice environment. Did both your parents work when the family was reunited? What do they do? So my father stayed, was like assistant professor in the university. He gets like a thousand Canadian dollars per month of like, I don't know what you call it. Like a stipend. Like a stipend. Yeah. We get some like really low cost housing, the faculty housing from UBC. So we lived on campus. I think on the third day of our arrival in Canada, my mom went to a sewing factory to work, like sewing clothes. She was a math and history teacher in China, but she doesn't speak that much English. So she couldn't get the same level of jobs. And she basically can only work at a minimum wage factory. She did that for like seven, 10 years. And yeah, so she just worked there. My mom was a nurse in Sri Lanka. And when we emigrated, when we got refugee status, my father was unemployed. And my mom became a housekeeper. And that's what she did. And then she became like a nurse's aide. And then I think when I was like 14 is when I got my first job. Yeah, yeah. I got my first job at McDonald's at, I think it's 14 or 15. I think it was 15. We're the same age, so it probably would have been 14. I don't know what the, do you remember what the minimum wage was in British Columbia? I do. The minimum wage was $6, but McDonald's- Oh, that's incredible. In Ontario, it was $4.55. So, but in McDonald's, they pay $4.50. That's below minimum wage because McDonald's somehow had like a special exemption because a lot of young kids work there. Yeah. So I think it was on my 14th birthday that I applied for the job. And then a week later I was flipping burgers there And it was the first income I had You not like this precocious technical wonder kid who coding 24 and learning computer science or were you No, I wouldn't describe me as that. I think I'm a technical guy. I started computer science. I was interested in programming even in high school, but I wasn't a programming wizard. I wasn't like one of those really genius coders. I think I'm a decent coder. I think I wrote some decent code in my career. And then when I was like 28, 30-ish, I moved away from coding. I was like doing more business development, sales, et cetera. So there was like maybe, I would say, eight years of my career. 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 like both Asian and non-Asian friends. but I was actually in our school most Asians hang out with Asians but I was actually one of the exceptions that I had like Caucasian friends I had all kind of different friends my teenager years in Canada was great it was like some of the best years like I think those years are really shaped me to be a happy person I'm generally a happy person how did it feel when you weren't able to get into my alma mater University of Waterloo and so I had to settle for McGill how does that make you feel does it make you feel a student so actually I was deciding my sister went to Waterloo so I was deciding between Waterloo and McGill and maybe UT I knew I wasn't going to go to UBC I wanted a different city and actually UBC gave me an offer but I just knew I don't want to go there at the time my friend's mother who I really respect she said well you might want to become a doctor because doctors have a good living a good lifestyle I took her advice I studied biology and Waterloo is not much of a biology school. True. So I went to McGill. But then one semester later, I said, no, no more biology. I'm going to move to computer science. Was it a typical kind of college experience for you? Did you have great jobs in the summertime or were you just like an average normal university kid? How'd you pay for school, by the way? I worked every summer. 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 actually still took about Canadian dollars from my dad the second year I was still a bit short my sister gave me and then from that point on I never took money from at all I just I was self Wow. Yeah, so no student debt, very lucky. And, but I just worked every summer, every, like, yeah. You know, the best thing about Waterloo, which was a savior for me. The co-op program. Well, it's co-op program. Yeah, yeah. And I had these incredible co-op jobs. I still graduated with about $30,000 of debt. But I was also pretty prolific trader and equities. And my boss, this guy, Mike Fisher, did this incredible kindness to me where I was working at a bank and I was a driveness trader. That was my day job, but I was trading equities and I'd made him enough money. And he said, he called me Sherman, didn't call me Chamath. He said, Sherman, how much debt do you have? And I said, it's about 30. I I said, Fish, it's about $30,000, $32,000. And he said, go downstairs right now to the CIBC and pay your debt, and I'll write you a check. Wow. And he wrote me a $32,000 check. Should have said $300,000. But Canada is incredible because you can get this education, and it doesn't saddle you with this debt that you can't overcome, which is not true in the United States for many people. Yeah, even in McGill, there were people from the United States going to McGill paying international student tuition, and it was still cheaper than the U.S. I was like, that's crazy. That's crazy. So, yeah, we were lucky that the U.S., the Canadian tuition was okay. So you graduate from McGill in computer science? Yeah, in computer. Actually, I didn't graduate from McGill. I went there for four years, and on my third year, I got an internship. On my fourth year, I got my, third year, I got an internship job, and then extended, extended, extended, and I didn't go back to McGill. So I didn't graduate from McGill. And later on, I found out I still need a bachelor's degree to apply for work visas in Japan. So I went to one, this is like the doc, this is 2000. This is the doc home, like height. So I went to an online education program called the American College of Computer Science and got a degree there. Oh, my God. So you're technically a graduate from that school. Technically, yes. Okay. So which internship did you get where you started to work there? So I got an internship in Tokyo. From first year college, I always worked on a programming job. So I worked at a company called OriginalSim, writing some simulation software. And then third year, I got into a company in Japan, in Tokyo, called Fusion Systems, Japan. then they were writing order execution systems for brokers of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. But sorry, that's a Japanese company with an office in Montreal or an office in Canada? No, no, no. I went to Tokyo. You went to Tokyo. Yeah, it's actually a bunch of American guys' company that's in Tokyo. So it's like a bunch of guys who are— And you're thinking, this is an adventure. I'm going to go and live in Tokyo for a summer. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was a college student. Living in Tokyo is like a— It's a dream. It's fun. It's a dream. Yeah, it's a dream. And the first time you go there, it's cool. It's from the future. It's cool, yeah. And what kind of software did you write? Mostly order execution software. So the same software that moves orders. What drives Binance today? Pretty much, pretty much. So it's the same style. Actually, all the software I was involved with, no decision making. So when you first were exposed to this, it was 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 you just did it because it was your job? I first did it because it was my job, right? I was so young. I didn't know what all the different industries are. And actually, when I got to the company, the company was giving me a project on working on digital imaging storage systems. Basically, not iPhone photos app, but for medical imaging for Nikon. But very soon, the company's main product is the order execution system. So I was involved in that, and then that became the thing over my career. And I like it because it requires quite a lot of technical expertise. Everything is about efficiency, making it go as fast as possible, process as low latency as possible. That kind of appeals to me. I'm an efficiency kind of driven guy, like subconsciously. And just to double click on that, when you look at high frequency trading organization, the Sasquatchitas, the Jumps, they go to such a degree to basically optimize for efficiency and low latency all the way down to it's their own circuit breakers, It's their own physical fiber infrastructure. They're willing to sort of pay the price to just shave off a handful of milliseconds on either end. How does that manifest in the software? So when you're writing that kind of software, how do you actually optimize for those boundary conditions in code? Yeah, yeah. So, well, there's quite a few levels, right? The first level you do is basically you write your software to be efficient and fast, like no slowness. You want to remove all the database lookups. So you want to do everything in memory. And then you want to reduce any sort of additional computation You want to simplify the risk checks especially pre risk checks And then the more advanced versions you move on to like the FPGA, which is a network chip card that's on the network card, on what we call the Ether 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. So back then, when I was like still writing code, like maybe 10 years ago, that round trip is about 100 microseconds. Microseconds, yeah. And then by avoiding that, you'd reduce down to 20 microseconds. And then you move it to the physical infrastructure. You want a co-location, right? Why haven't these organizations, like in the AI world, for example, with Grok, our big observation, even 10 years ago when we were starting the business, was this exact idea, which is it's really inefficient to sit in a GPU, to go all the way up to HBM, to come back down. So let's just take SRAM and just do everything here on chip, right? Manage it with C2C. And that technical problem made a lot of sense. and very, very fast for the decode phase of inference. Makes a ton of sense. Why, when so much money is on the line for high-frequency trading, why did they never try their own custom silicon? I understand FPGAs, but nobody really went to the point of actually 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. So when you go to hardware, like you want to design your own chip, it's very efficient. is very fast, but when you want to change it, it takes a long time. So when you want to reprogram it, I think FPGA already offers kind of the best. Best of both worlds. Both worlds. Even FPGA, if you want to reprogram it, the programming cycle is 10 times longer than software. The company you worked at in Japan, was it successful? It's successful. That company got sold to a NASDAQ-listed company just before 2000. For a lot of money? For like $52 million back then. So that was decent money. And so is that when you said, hey, hold on, there's something here or no? Was it something else that happened? No. So at that time, I was too young. I was like 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 afterwards. So that company got sold. There was a lot of culture clashes between the parent company versus the original company. That's my first experience about how mergers may not work. Yeah. The two managements were just clashing. And then the same partners went to do a different company called Building 2 But now this partners I didn get any money but the partners got quite a bit of money now so they rented a very fancy office that company only lasted a year it means that previous success doesn't guarantee future success in fact so they spent a lot of money had a very nice office but that's zero revenue so that folded within a year and that's 2001 and so early 2001 I was looking for new jobs and then Bloomberg was hiring and this is right before 9-11 I kind of got an offer before 9-11 and then 9-11 happened. I still haven't moved. Where was this, to New York? Well, I was still in Tokyo back then. And then Bloomberg is in New York. The offer was in New York. The offer was in New York. So 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 said, yeah, okay. So I went to New York in November of 2001. Wow. What was that like? The streets were pretty quiet. Yeah. And, but, you know, I was fine. I was, you know, New York was quiet for a few months, but it became lively pretty quickly, I think. So I didn't feel too much issues. So I then went to New York and worked at Bloomberg for four years. Doing, again, the same thing. 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, so I joined as a senior developer. I was put into a team called Tradebook Futures. They just formed this team and they had a system that allowed people to trade futures on Bloomberg, but it was like spread out. So they collected that into one team. And still no inkling of like that entrepreneurial bug? Not really. Back then I was like, nah, I... Like what were you looking for? Stability? Like why Bloomberg? Being in New York? Like what was it? I was just a young guy. I was like, I think I was like 24, 24, 25. Okay. So I was just a young guy trying to get a job, you know, experience different parts of the world and just find my way through. I knew I wasn't experienced enough to do entrepreneurship myself, right? So I was, and I was working at a small company in Tokyo. The company only had like 200 people. Bloomberg at the time had about 3,000 people. So to me, that was a big company. Yeah. And 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 three times in two years. And then I was leading a team of 60 initially, and they kind of grew to about 80 people And that when I became sort of a manager I no longer wrote code and I still started to manage The worst transition The worst transition right The worst transition So that's kind of my Bloomberg experience. Yeah, so I stayed there for four years. And then you quit and moved to China? Yes. How does that happen? I think it was wrong, like beginning of 2005. Again, the same friends I had made in Japan, they were talking about starting a new company, a new fintech company. And they were in Asia, right? So they're talking about Tokyo, Shanghai, or Hong Kong. And they said, Shanghai is 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. So it was like five foreigners from a Chinese perspective, five Caucasians, four Caucasians plus a Japanese plus me. I'm the only one who speaks Chinese. And my Chinese was kind of rusty back then too. So the six of us went there to do a new IT startup in Shanghai. So all of you guys just land there. And what was the idea? So we thought, you know, we had all this Wall Street experience, Wall Street trading technology experience. I'm sorry, your other friends, had they moved to New York or no? They were still in Japan doing their own thing. Two of the friends were in New York with me. And then the other three were from Japan. They were there. They always, they were, so the six of us came together. and we wanted to do, we want, our idea was let's bring the Wall Street trading technology into China so we can service the brokers and exchanges in China. But then, so we went, they rented a very fancy office again. Wait, okay, so hold on just, so when you guys start this company, so this is now your first entrepreneurial, you're like, okay, let's do this. Pretty much. Did you know to even ask the question like, okay guys, what's our equity split? What's the cap table? Well, did you know any of these things or you're just like, great, let's go do it. I'm just assuming it's one sixth. We're equal. Like, how did it all? It wasn't one sixth. It was like the top guy had like, I don't know, 39, 40 percent. And the rest five of us split equally. So I had about 11 percent or so. OK. So I knew that. But I didn't know like, you know, all the ins and outs about, you know, shareholder rights, what terms. I didn't know any of that. Yeah. Preferred versus common. None of it. You're like, great, I got 11 percent. I'm moving to Shanghai. Yeah. So I just have 11 percent. And I didn't, I have no idea what common stock is or what it's preferred. So just went. And then, but so I was a junior partner in this group. And then once we landed in China, I started, I speak Chinese, right? So I began talking to potential clients. I went to talk to brokers. I found out we registered as a wholly foreign-owned, what we call Wolfie, wholly foreign-owned enterprise. The Chinese brokers and financial institutions are not allowed to work with Wolfie. That's right. So we found out after we started the company, while we were in Shanghai. And so the company pivoted towards doing any IT system for any company. Work for hire. Work for hire. We can be fixed. Deloitte, you became Deloitte. Not even Deloitte. We can be fixing printers or we can be writing like, you know, SAP implementations for you. We did all of that. So there's a whole spectrum of things. And so we did that for a few years and we actually made a living. For a few years? Yeah, for a few years. Like, and we made a living out of that. Yeah. We started, we had quite a number of automotive clients. The Shanghai General Motors, Shanghai Volkswagen, Shanghai First Automotive. They were all clients of ours. And then like maybe three or four years in, we started having offices in Hong Kong. And then we were dealing with a Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse. So it grew. So it was successful. The company's still around. The company's still around. So I left in 2013 after eight years, but the company's still around. So in the eight years you worked at that company, all in Shanghai? I was mostly in Shanghai, but then I spent quite a bit of time helping to set up the Hong Kong office. And then I was also doing quite a lot of work for some clients in Tokyo. How big did that company get? I think it got to about 200 people again, and it kind of stayed there as far as I know, even till now. And so as a junior partner, you just take profits and you share it? Yeah, yeah. So, well, actually, we didn't take that much profits. I actually invested most of my savings back into that company, and I actually didn't cash out a penny. But after a few years, the company was stable enough to pay the partner salaries that all of our kids go to international school. So we get a six-figure salary. At that point, you had gotten married. Yes. Yeah. So at that point, I got married when I was in New York. So like, yeah. So and then, yeah, so I took care. And you had met your ex-wife how? Yeah, I met her in Tokyo when I first went to Tokyo. So I met her in like 1999-ish when I was first in Tokyo, like doing the interns. Okay. And then she visited me in New York and then you know we got married and then we had kids Now we are separated We divorced In Shanghai I had young kids and you know it was enough salary to put the kids into international school And 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, no. Nothing? Nothing, no. I didn't know. So then 2013, 2014, how old were you then at that point? You were in your... 2013, I would be 36. Yeah, mid-30s. Yeah, yeah. So again, salary guy, junior partner at this thing. It's going well. Your kids are in private school. Yeah, yeah. So then what happens? So then I came across Bitcoin, right? So my friends tell me, look, CZ, you got to look at this thing called Bitcoin. I look into it. I was like, it took me about roughly six months to fully understand it. So that was from like roughly July 2013. And that's because you read the white paper and you said, I need to read it again and read it again? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. And then, because back then, there was the Bitcoin talk for it. Yeah. And then that's pretty much it. Did you see my Bloomberg article in 2012? Does that have any influence? Unfortunately, I read a bunch of stuff. I actually don't remember what I read. 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. Like, he was just too senior, but he knew me. He liked me. He would invite me to certain things. With Mike Bloomberg? Yeah, with Bloomberg. And then I got to know some of Mike's team. And in 2012 or so, they said, Schmuth, would you write an op-ed? And I was like, yeah. And I wrote it about Bitcoin. And I said, everybody should put 1% of their net worth into Bitcoin. And I said, it's basically Schmuck insurance. And then they published it in the Bloomberg terminal or whatever. And that's when I got red-pilled on Bitcoin, where I was like, wow, it's the most incredibly interesting technical product that I had read about. And I think the thing that captivated me, I don't know if you felt this way, It was the only white paper that I read end to end where I thought, this is one of the most elegantly written pieces of non-technical prose. Do you know what I'm trying to say? Like, it's not something that is like dense in an archive that is just meant for PhDs. You could literally give it to your sister, to your brother, to somebody non-technical, and they would understand it. And it's only nine pages. Exactly. 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, yeah, yeah. Anybody else try to rewrite that thing it be 90 pages So the friend that showed it to you was he a coworker of yours or no just a random friend in Shanghai It a friend It a random well not a random it a friend We don have any working relationships His name is Ron Cao. He runs, I guess, now Skyline Ventures. Back then, he was at Lightspeed Ventures. Of course. He was a managing director of Lightspeed Ventures in China. Okay. So we have a poker house game, like, you know, small stakes, a bunch of entrepreneurs, struggling entrepreneurs versus like VCs. So the VCs have all the money and all the time. David versus Goliath. Yeah. But, you know, it's a fun game. It's not a very serious game. So in one of the poker games, Ron said, CZ, you should look at this thing called Bitcoin. I was like, okay, Bitcoin. Okay. So we talked about it a little bit. And then Bobby Lee, who was at the time was working for Walmart, was just about to quit Walmart to join BTC China to become their CEO. And as part of that deal, Bobby said he will bring Ron in as an investor. Lightspeed into BTCC. So that's in July 2013. I was like, okay, so these two guys are pretty serious about this. So 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 will go to zero, then you lose 10%. There's a much higher chance you will go 10x, and you will double your net worth. I was like, okay, that sounds pretty serious. So that's when I started learning about reading the white paper more carefully. It took me six months. so it was till the end of 2013 I started like so I'm I'm convinced now I'm ready to go but then Bitcoin went from $70 in mid-2013 to like $1,000 by end of 2013 so you already went more than like 15x how did that make you feel? I was like I'm too late I was like I wish I got in early yeah because back then right it doesn't matter when you get into Bitcoin you always feel late yeah right because everyone you talk to in the Bitcoin industry has bought before you and did you talk to anybody while you were learning about it to say, like, you have a community in Shanghai? There's a very small community in Shanghai. And then I was basically talking to anybody in the world that's willing to talk with me. And then I had a couple of friends in Taiwan. They worked for TSMC back then. And then they were trying to do a mining chip for Bitcoin. So two of those guys left TSMC to try to do this startup. Startup never really took off, but that was one group of guys I was talking to. There was another couple, they were mostly miners. There was another guy called his nickname is Fish Silver Fish in China He like a big miner He runs the F2 pool even today Oh sure So those guys were based in Hangzhou You know, when they came to Shanghai, I talked to them, etc. So there was a group of guys that you talked to. And then the biggest thing was in December 13th, 2013-ish, there was a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas. I flew there to meet everyone in the industry was there. there was a 200 people conference Vitalik was there Matt Rosak was there Charlie Lee was there a bunch of guys were there and the same guys still today and then at the time just before that it was the Silk Road arrest of Ross Wuberich so the media was like no this Bitcoin is only used by drug lords and when you go to the conference it was like a bunch of kids a bunch of geeks and they're very nice people so you talk to Vitalik you know, he's a very nice person. Were you still working at that company while you were doing all of this, moonlighting? Yes. So this is kind of the- You tell your partners, hey guys, I'm just going to go to Vegas for a couple of days. I'll be back. Pretty much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then when I got back, I told the partners, we should do a Bitcoin payment system because BitPay was kind of the big player back then. BitPay just raised $4 million US dollars in 2013. So they was kind of the large player. Actually, the employee- Can I tell you a very funny, I have two BitPay stories. Sure. I was very focused on trying to prove the transactional capability of Bitcoin. I went to my local car dealership and I bought a car with Bitcoin using BitPay in 2012 or 13. That Range Rover is probably $90 million. And then even more stupidly, there was a real estate development in Lake Tahoe called Marta's Camp. Beautiful. And I had owned a couple of lots. And I said, you know, it would be great if I actually could prove that you could buy real estate with Bitcoin. And I called the guys at BitPay and they were like, yeah, we can facilitate this transaction. No problem. I bought a piece of land. And then again, I thought this is an interesting story. And the Wall Street Journal wrote about it. Now that piece of land is a billion dollars. But you cannot calculate this way, right? CZ, I calculated this way every day. You can't calculate it this way because it's the stupidest purchase ever. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. That's the bucket of money mentality, right? No, no, no, it's true. Right, so even if you didn't use Bitcoin, you would have used some money to buy the land. You could have used that money to buy Bitcoin. Right. So, yeah, yeah. So you're like, hey, we should do a version of BitBay. Yeah, yeah. And your partners are like, what are you talking about? Exactly. And now at this point, you still hadn't bought any Bitcoin. No, at this point, like I had like maybe one Bitcoin. Yeah. And one Bitcoin was like only a thousand bucks back then. Yeah. So, yeah. So then what happens? And then so I tell my partner, look, I think this is the biggest thing in my life. Right. So I think there's three fundamental. But back then, I realized there was like two fundamental technologies in my life. There's the internet. I was too young to do too much with it. And there was this Bitcoin thing. And I was 35, 36. I wasn't going to miss it. The next thing that's going to come along is going to be 15 years later. Did you feel old when you go to Vegas and you see all these young 22-year-old kids and you're like, I missed it? Did you think that at any point? No. 35, 36 is still okay. So it's still doable. You don't feel super old. Today, I feel that. But I thought, look, the next thing that will come will be 10, 15 years later. And that's AI, right? So today I say, like, there's three fundamental technologies in my life. But back then, like, that's the thing. So for me, it was very clear. I got to do something in this industry. Right. So I told my partners, look, I'm going to quit. And we're going to work in the Bitcoin industry. That's what it was called back then. And then I also need to buy Bitcoin. And I don't have many money. So I don't have money. So I just said, I'm going to sell my apartment in Shanghai and then buy Bitcoin. But selling the apartment takes time. So it took me like a solid few months to sell it. And it was it. It was only- You sold it where did you just got a rental apartment? I sold it at the time. Actually, my family also moved to Tokyo. So my family moved to Tokyo. We lived in a rental apartment. In Tokyo. In Tokyo. And then I was traveling in Shanghai. So that's kind of the time I started moving, started separating from the family as well. So I was spending a lot of time traveling. Right. And so I sold the apartment and for roughly $900,000, like just under a million bucks, and then started buying. And I got paid in trenches because, you know, you get a first down payment. You got paid in trenches and every trench I get, I just buy. The first trench at $800 and the Bitcoin is dropping $600, $400. It kind of averaged to about $600. Incredible. Yeah. Incredible. So now you have your Bitcoin position but you still don have a job Yeah well I was looking for a job at the same time But you were looking for a job in the Bitcoin industry or you were just looking for any job In the Bitcoin industry That was very specific It didn take me that long to get a job Like the gap was probably from the time I said I'm going to quit until I finalized the job was probably only about two to three weeks. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so who hired you? I first discussed with BTCC, Bobby. He wanted to hire me. But then Blockchain Info came along. I bought me the Roger Ver. So, and then at the time, Blockchain Info was, I was the third person to join the Blockchain Info team. That was Ben Reeves, who's the founder, and that was Nicholas Carey, who was just hired the CEO. And I was like the third guy in, so I was like VP of engineering, because Ben, we want to reserve the CTO title for Ben. So, yeah, I joined Blockchain Info and flew to York in London, like three hours north of London. I spent some time there, you know, figuring out what to do. How did that go? That didn't go very well. We expanded the team to 18 people and then Peter Smith joined as a CFO wanting to raise money for blockchain info. Coinbase just finished raising around $30 million. And that was a big one in the industry back then. Peter Smith somehow maneuvered himself into the CEO position, pushing like Nicholas Carey to the product manager kind of role. The culture kind of changed a little bit. So I left. A bunch of the developers I hired left. And then Ben Reeves sold quite a lot of his position and also left a few months later. So that was my, so that was only like a few, I think I was only there for like six, seven months. So that didn't work out too well. But I learned a lot from that experience. Yeah, you learned what not to do. No, like Blockchain Info, when I joined, Ben Reeves said, look, we have no company. We have no office. Everyone works remotely. We just pay everybody in Bitcoin. And so that's something I learned from that company. And I still, look, that's still very heavily used in Binance today. So I learned a lot. I also learned that, you know, that company, the whole marketing, at the time, Blockchain Info was the largest user platform in the industry. Right. So they had about two million wallets, more than Coinbase at the time. and the entire marketing was one thread on Bitcoin talk.org one thread the thread is 150 pages Ben Reeves just replies to that thread and that how you 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 fit for me. And then I left. And then that was when Hei hired me into OKCoin. So Hei said, look, why are you working for this wallet company? Your experience is dealing with order execution exchanges. So Hei hired me there. as a developer? As a CTO. As a CTO. Yeah. So, yeah. So, in the process, I think BTC China helped me again. So, you know, I was kind of looking for a job again, right? So, I left. And then He Ye was talking to me and Bobby Lee found out. And Bobby Lee meant, so OKCoin back then offered me 5% equity. And then, sorry, BTC China came along and offered me 10% equity. And then OKCoin matched it within three hours. And then I was debating between Shanghai and Beijing. And I decided to go to Beijing to join OKCoin back then. He Yi at that time had 1% equity. So she hired me to be like the bigger sort of partner in the business. Wow. So that's how I went to OKCoin for about eight months or so. That didn't last long either. Because? I think there were also culture differences at OKCoin. There were some stuff that I didn't agree with, both in terms of like simple examples, like how they run promotions, how they do fee discounts where you have to ask for it. Like they advertise a fee discount, but you have to ask for it to get it. It doesn't apply to everybody, even though they advertise as such. So small things like that. And then, so yeah, so that was in early 2015, I said, no, I'm going to leave. So that's kind of, so that lasted for a few months in 2015. 2014 mostly, yeah. So how do we get from there to Binance? So 2015, I, with a couple of my old colleagues said, we're going to do a Bitcoin exchange in Tokyo, in Japan, because this is a year after. After Mt. Gox and all that, yeah. Yeah, so there's a vacuum in Japan. So we got two developers that came to me. On the same day, I decided to leave OKCoin. They came to me and said, look, somehow they also quit their respective jobs. I said okay well why don the three of us do something And so we said okay so I will be the CEO and then I be the big guy with more equity and then I be responsible for fundraising And I was paying them a salary out of my own savings, and I wasn't taking anything. So the two developer person, we whipped up a demo very quickly. We downloaded an open source software for an exchange, and then we tweaked the UI to be a little bit sexier. And then we hooked up. You just forked an open source project. Like, this is our product. This is Binance? No, we didn't say it was Binance. Yeah. This is before Binance. Yeah. We didn't say. I was very transparent. I was like, we whipped this demo up in two days, or in a few days, and this is a demo that we can show you. But this is not our- The ultimate product. This is not our- It's just the proof of concept. Yeah. It's just, yeah. So it's like, yeah. And then we had a script that took Bitfinex market data. Bitfinex was like a large exchange back then. And we just kind of copied the order book, and the order book was flashing, there's trades going on. So you've got a very lively demo. And when the investors saw that, it was like, wow, this is good technology. But it's not just a demo. When they ask me questions, I can answer in very deep ways, right? When they ask me like, how do you structure this to be a fast exchange? I can talk about in-memory, matching. Analyzing database, all the stuff you've learned. Yeah, so I can go really deep when they ask questions. So my knowledge is there. So 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. I was like, okay, they have a point. So they said, why don't you sell this technology to other exchanges because most of the Japanese exchanges don't have very good technology. I was like, okay. So then I went to talk to a few of the exchanges. Literally two weeks later, we signed a contract with one of the exchanges. and then they paid $360,000 for the system. So they made a down payment of $180,000. That was enough for me not to pay salaries anymore. So I was happy with that. So we pivoted from wanting to run our own Bitcoin exchange to exchange systems for a provider. Yeah, you're selling software. We're selling software. And then in July 2015, a bunch of Chinese companies came to us saying they want systems for- Can I just say, by the way, Sorry to interrupt you, but it's really incredible because there are so many founder stories. When somebody says, I've started a company, and then somebody says, well, how much is it worth, or how successful is it? And, you know, 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 that there is some incredible origin story that is like lightning in a bottle. But so often than not, the story is more yours, which is this, it's kind of like moving along, meandering, learning things, trying some other things. This non-obvious iteration, and then all of a sudden, things kind of catalyze. But even then, you still don't get the right form because you're licensing it, really. And people just misunderstand that this is actually more what entrepreneurship is. It's the resilience and the grit to just keep grinding. For sure. For sure. I think most people idealize entrepreneurship. They just hate it and they go from there. No, it's like the Facebook story. You hack it together in college and, oh, it's now a million users. Facebook is Microsoft. Exactly. And also Google. These three are like, you know, college, garage, and they just. Exactly. But the reality, Binance or Tesla, it's like a grind. It's a grind. It's a grind. You have to like go so many different ways. And it wasn't obvious from the beginning. Yeah. Right. So I think those three are the exceptions that kind of just hit it from day one. Exactly. But then that kind of shaped the people's perception. Like 99%, 99.9% of other successful businesses are not like that. Right. Right. So if you look at now, any other successful company. Yeah. So the same here. So get us to the founding moment. So you're licensing the software. We're licensing the software. That business went pretty well. So we've had like 30 different exchange clients. Wait, no way. Like over multiple years. Over two years. In two years, we signed up. Yeah, so this is a multimillion dollar licensing business. Yeah, and it's a SaaS business, right? We call it exchange as a service business. So we charge a fixed monthly fee every month. And this is platform business is paying us. It's a very steady business. every new client increases the revenue. So every new client is like a step up. Exactly. So it's actually a very, very good business model. But then in March 2017, the Chinese government shut down most of our clients. And then by May, we were like, okay. 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. Exactly. We're the software vendor. But then our businesses, we have no clients, right? So we lost our clients. And so by May, we were like, okay, we need to pivot. By April May we were like figure out how to pivot By end of May we were like okay actually three guys who worked for me said they want to do a Polonex copycat Polonex was the biggest exchange back then And then I said, well, let me invest. We have some extra cash. Three days later, they want to do some on-chain chat trading software. I was like, no, we're not going to invest in that anymore. And then I said, well, why don't we do that? We have the exchange system already. We still need to customize it to do a crypto-to-crypto-only trading. My gosh. So in May, we said, okay, we're going to do a crypto, we're going to do an exchange again. The team said, fine, sure. How big is the team at this point? 20 people. So, and we had tech people. We don't have marketing because we're a 2B business, right? We have two sales guys, two sales guys plus me. And then we said, well, now we can run our own, let's do our own crypto to crypto exchange. So, and then, so that was the end of May. And then June 1st to June 10th, there was a guy who was a BTC co-founder, Lin Ke. He ran an ICO in China. He raised $15 million in 10 days. And then I looked at him. I was like, he only had one document and one website, no product, nothing. He raised $15 million. If he can do that, I might be able to do that too. You needed venture funding. You're like, if I get the $15 million, I can build out a team. I can invest in some marketing. I can be in the J curve and not feel the pressure. Exactly. Yeah. So originally we were going to go to the VC funding route, right? But then when I saw that, I was like, well, and everyone talking about ICOs back then. I went to a conference mid-June 2017 and everyone's talking about ICO. Everyone's like, CZ, you've got to do an ICO. You've got to do an ICO. So by mid-June, June 14th was the date. And then I said, okay, call the team, we're going to do an ICO. Write a white paper. And so did you have a name at that point, like in the Bitcoin community or in the crypto community, either in China or in Japan or somewhere? I had a little bit of a name. Even working at Blockchain Info, quite a lot of people know me. Blockchain Info was the most popular platform back then. And OKCoin was also like I was a CTO. I was quite active on social media. I was also kind of managing their international markets, non-English speaking or non-Chinese speaking markets because nobody else, I was the best English speaker on that team, even though my English is not that great. But so I had a little bit of a name. People know me in the community. Because you needed a bit of a name or some kind of pedigree to actually do an ICO at the time Yeah yeah yeah So but this is an advantage of when you get involved early in the industry like you go to a few conferences like there 200 people And by the second time you go there people know you Right. But the third time, people are like, oh, you know, you're the expert. Yeah, you're an OT already. Right. So I had a bit of a reputation. So I thought, well, Lin Ke is the guy who did the ICO in China. He's quite well known in China, but he's not known internationally. I have a little bit of both. I said, well, I can probably do an ICO and raise the same amount. So we did. 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. But are they Chinese? Are they Japanese? Are they people from all around the world that kind of knew you? Was it that your white paper was really good? Okay. So I think in terms of demographic, it's probably like 80 to 90% Chinese. And there were some international guys who bought it. And I think the data shows that there was about 20,000 people who bought in the ICO. 20,000 people. 20,000 people. And this is like a brand new brand. Some people know me in the industry, and that was it. So even though the exchanges were put out of business in China, the ICO was allowed? No, the ICO wasn't banned back then. It wasn't banned. Yeah. It was not not allowed. It was not not allowed. Exactly. So let me just make one clarification. The exchange clients that we were serving were mostly stamp culture exchanges, not crypto exchanges. Okay. Crypto exchanges were not banned in March. Crypto exchanges were banned after we started. I see. So that was in September. We're talking about like June, July, kind of from 2017. Wow, you're really threading a needle. Yeah, yeah. So we didn't know that that ban was coming. We just saw like, you know, those... How much of the company did you sell? No, we didn't have... It was just the coins. We launched the token. You had to do no equity participation. There's no equity involved. We launched a new token, BNB. It's still there today. And then we said, look, we're going to sell 60% of it for $15 million, roughly. Because we're talking Bitcoin. And what were the original tokenomics that you designed for the BNB token? Well, we said a bunch of things, but the main one that was going to be live very quickly was going to be, if you hold BNB, you receive 50% fee discounts when you trade on Binance. Eventually, the platform that gets launched. That was the main thing. But we also said, look, it's going to be a, it's going to have, eventually it's going to have its own chain, its own decentralized ecosystem. There's like three or four things. So then you guys must've been ecstatic. You're like, wow, we raised 15 million bucks. We now going to launch this exchange But then September comes around and then exchanges themselves were so then what do you do Yeah September comes around September 4th like seven different departments of Chinese government issued a memo together saying that, number one, crypto exchanges are no longer allowed in China. ICUs are no longer allowed. Mining is not allowed, crypto mining. We said, well, we're going to move. Well, we said we have to move. By then, it was clear that while at the time, China was one of the largest user base, they had like 30-something percent user base from China, but we still have like 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 we said, well, I just said, look, let's move. Let's move to Tokyo. Back to Tokyo. Back to Tokyo. You love Tokyo. I've been back in and out of Tokyo. I know it. And by the way, at that point, you speak Japanese as well? I speak very little Japanese. What I call taxi Japanese. Taxi Japanese. I can say like, no, thank you, good left, good right. In a restaurant, when I order, I say this, this, this. Not the full menu names. Sushi, I can name most of them. Okay. So that's my Japanese level. But, you know, I know Japan. I know Tokyo. It's not like a new country for me, right? So I said, like, let's move to Tokyo. And we had like 30 people then. And everybody moved? Everybody moved. Wow. Back then, eight years ago, I think maybe one or two of the people were married and nobody had kids. So it was like a very easy move for the team. So everybody just packed up and moved. I remember one girl cried, one product manager. She cried because her boyfriend is in China. So she cried, but she moved with us. And she's not married to her boyfriend. Anyway. Incredible. So we moved to Tokyo when China did that. and our platform continued to grow. So when you first launched Binance, was it an instant hit or did it take energy to find that product market fit? That first few zealous users that would tell everybody else, like how did the virality start? How did the liquidity really get built? So Binance, I would say the product was growing pretty well, but the token price went down from ICO price. It went down 30, 40%. It took about three weeks to recover. So when we launched the product, because at that time, crypto is still pretty hot. I think the product market fit was there. It wasn't a new idea. It's just a crypto to crypto exchange. So then the ICO was critical then, right? Because these people say, well, I own this token. Now I can trade at a fee discount. So that's why I'm going to choose Binance. But was it also architected better? Was it materially faster or more reliable? Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. It was. It was. So back then, when we launched, even using your eyeballs, you can see that placing an order on Binance is so much faster than on a competing platform. And so the performance of the exchange system was visible. And back then, 2017, who were the big platforms that you were competing with? There was Polonex, Bittrex were the biggest ones, and then there's a few Chinese ones, there's Huobi, OKEx, OKCoin back then. and then in the western world Coinbase was there Gemini wasn't there back then Gemini was later so Bitstamp was there Bitfenix was there now they're kind of really really small so you're now in your late 30s and this thing is working 40s now how did you internalize the success you're like what is this what's happening are you saying that to yourself or there were some really surreal moments where you were like is this real in a good way like what's her revenue I forgot the number but she said like a couple hundred bitcoins like that's crazy we can't be making them like are you sure she's like yeah I'm sure like this number can't be correct we must be off by like a magnitude and we double check double check triple check like it's correct like that's crazy and then there was also a period where three weeks in when the BNB price was recovering So BNB ICO at like about 10 cents. It dropped to like 0.0, dropped to 6 cents. And then we announced Hei joining. And then for the next two, three weeks, every time you go to sleep, wake up, the token's up 20%. You go to a meeting, come up, the token's up 20%. You go to the bathroom, come back, the token's up 20%. I mean, it must have been very quick where you're like, wait a minute, I'm rich. That came a little bit later. That came in early 2018, about six, seven, seven, eight months in. Forbes put me on the cover. That's when, like, well, I said, well. 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. I see. So with all the crypto guys. And then they already had a picture of Vitalik doing a fancy hand gesture, which is a really cool picture. So, yeah. So, yeah. So they invited us. They contacted our PR department, which maintains contact with them. which was really Hei team back then like team of four or five girls and Yi says like well Forbes want to do a special feature with you and take some photos I think you should go. I was like, I don't want to go. But they said, we're a new brand. Forbes can still help us, you know, increase the brand. With awareness, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I said, okay, fine, I'll go. So I went to do the photo shoot. That was like my first photo, like to put makeup on me. And then the first time, put makeup. CZ, what is money? is it important I mean don't take this the wrong way but you got rich old yeah so did it matter at that point what is money when you're in your 40s and you make it it still matters but money is not everything I think I was old enough that there's a couple things that happened to me number one I was older so I'm 40 something so I'm not like a young 20 year old that just you know Lambos big parties too old for that so I have also my personality is quite stable so I don't get too excited on things also the other thing not to brag but I went from like a barely financially free to like you know cover Forbes and I was like wait a second like how rich am I I don't even know like when I look at my wallet nothing changed like Forbes cover nothing changed for me but then people say look now you might be a billionaire I was like am I really a billionaire like it doesn't feel that way I was like even like a month ago like not a month at that time when we fled well when we left China to go to Japan I booked economy classes for a red-eye flight and Hei was like no, maybe we should upgrade to a business class so we can lay down sleep okay, that makes sense that's, you know so like I have those kind of habits so when you make money successively like, you know from the 1 million you become 10 million you might want to buy some fancy cars to 100 million you might want to buy some yacht or something to a billion then you have I didn't go through that stepwise process I just went from like a relatively okay kind of thing to like You're on the cover of Forbes. So I didn't develop quite a lot of those habits. What does it mean now? Now, I mean, depending on the day you're a deca-billionaire or a centi-billionaire, what does it all mean? It doesn't mean very much to me. I think money is two things. Number one, you have to take care of yourself. You have to have food, shelter. Which is very minimal amount of money. Which is 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 so I have a very I don't have a luxury life but I have a very comfortable life I think and then sorry what does that mean if you look at my 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. No, it's not... We'll just fix it whenever it leaks. So that still happens like that happened a month ago. So people think I live in a very fancy house and all this other crazies. I live in a decent-sized house, but it kind of fits all my family members. But it's not a... It's an old house that I bought third or fourth hand. But it's in the right location. It works for you. It works for me. It's in the right location. 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 just not moved by? 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 learned to deal with it. So I hope I'm not super arrogant. So 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 it was in the late teens, early 2000s. And my immediate reaction, because that's always been my struggle, It's sort of these belts of insecurity or ego. I thought, man, this guy is really calm. Yeah, I'm calm. Yeah. So I described this way. You're very well regulated, very self-aware, it seems. Yeah, other people's emotions may go like this, like happy, sad. I'll feel happy, sad, happy, sad. But my amplitude is very moderated. It's narrower. Yeah. Right. So it just allows you to manage in many ways. I mean, success is somewhat illusory. If you're like 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 say, oh, wow, look at what you have. But if you're working and you have no time to enjoy it, nobody understands that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you launch this thing. It's going bananas. But there were some hiccups. Yeah. 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, very rewarding. What was the average day for you? What were you trying to do I was basically doing like 20 plus meetings a day like scheduled calls or meetings and then plus other random stuff and then having to respond to people on Twitter and stuff But it was very rewarding because there's a sense of fulfillment that is very hard to describe. It's not the money. It's not the growth. So what was it? When you were running Binance, I don't know if you do this, but sometimes people fixate on the leading indicator. Like revenue is a lagging indicator, right? Revenue and profits are just, they're here. That's from six months ago, a year ago. Manifest today. What was 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's really daily active users. It's not trading volume. It's not revenue. Why Dow versus those other things? I think as long as you keep helping, serving more users, then you're giving them value. So I believe a product is valuable when people want to use it. So the more people who want to use it, even if your revenue is zero, you have value. So any product that people use, the more people you use, the higher value, right? So that's kind of always my philosophy. Whereas you can optimize for revenue, you can optimize for profit short-term, and you can lose the long-term growth. But I believe long-term, if you have a large number of people using your platform, that's where you create value, not just for yourself. You also create value for your users. People choose to use you because there's a value in using you, right? So that's kind of my North Star. And also knowing that, related to that was knowing that hundreds of millions of people are using us, we help them, right? So the way I view it is if they pay like, you know, a commission fee, then they're willing to pay it because we must have given them some higher value. One of the double-edged sword of the DAO is that some of those DAO are bad actors. Yep. When was the first inkling that you had that that may be a problem and that you have to take that seriously? It was like, I think. What does that first meeting look like where they're like, CZ have good news and bad news? Yeah, yeah. There's actually a very clear point. I think it was like Christmas Day, January 1st, or like New Year Day, January 1st, 2018. So this is like five months after we were kind of large, or five months after we started and we were number one exchange already. On that New Year's Eve, December 31st-ish, 2017, a U.S. Homeland Security guy reached out to me. His name, I think is Joseph. I always remember his name was Patrick or Joseph. I'm not sure which one. He wrote an email, and then I got the email and said, well, he wants our help to help track some hackers who may have moved funds of the EtherDelta hack. EtherDelta was a decentralized exchange back in 2017. They got hacked. They went down. So this guy who works for the U.S. government emailed us, and I didn't know how to deal with it. Nobody on our team knows how to deal with law enforcement. So I got a couple guys to huddle together and say, well, how do we help this guy? and then we gave the information that he requested. We verified, first of all, we had to verify who he was. And then afterwards, he thanked us. And then I said, hey, Joseph, can you recommend somebody that we could hire that can interface with law enforcement in the future? He recommended someone, but the guy was based in the U.S. And we don't have a U.S. entity. We couldn't hire anybody in the U.S. back then. So we kind of had to let that go. But that was the point. It was like New Year's Day. Where you were like, this is going to happen more. Obviously. Invariably. A lot of large numbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the day when I realized, look, we need to have somebody who has experience working with law enforcement. And so what did you do? So we eventually hired more guys. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Obviously, like, you're not looking at the transactions, so you wouldn't know. But if we fast forward a little bit, the claims that then the U.S. government under President Biden made at you was essentially that people like Hamas or people like other organizations were using Binance and you didn't do enough. Yeah. So on this point, I may have some legal restrictions on what I can say and cannot say about the plea, et cetera. So I'm not a lawyer, but I try to stay very clear from that. But overall, though, I would just say the Biden administration overall is quite hostile to crypto. I mean, they openly announced war on crypto. Yeah. Right. So 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. So I think it was, I wouldn't blame the previous administration, but I think they just didn't understand it. Why do you think that they were so hostile to it? It's fear of the new. It's as simple as that. I think they probably in their heads, there's some degree of let's not disrupt the current financial system, the banks, whoever else. There's probably a lot of lobbying from those industries as well to them. So that kind of brainwash or affect the thinking however you call it So that human nature I mean if you think about it it understandable It not ideal but it understandable So you running the exchange Things are going well Yeah. 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? So 2019, there was some news about, you know, U.S. governments, basically, in my layman words, chasing Big Macs. There was some Big Macs in the news. There were some also Bitfinex stuff in the news. I think the U.S. government froze, at least the Poland government, froze like $600 to $800 million of their assets when their market cap was only like $4 billion. That's like a large chunk. And then they got sued later on by the U.S. government saying that they don't have enough reserves. So we saw those news and we're like, okay, well, the U.S. government is looking at this industry and we better register. And, you know, again, I asked my friends, many of them have legal backgrounds, And then the sort of general consensus was, okay, we should operate in a registered fashion in the U.S. So this is 2019. So we registered Binance U.S. And it's a separate entity. It's a separate deployment. It's a separate matching engine, separate liquidity. So Binance U.S. has been regulated from day one. Yeah. 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, tell me about that. How did you meet him? Because you ended up owning a lot of the equity. Yeah, yeah. So, well, we invested in only 20% as equity at some point, and then we exited a year later. Yeah. We didn't stay there for very long. I think I first met him in January 2019 in one of the Singapore conferences, Binance Organized. I think at the time, FTX did not exist. Sam Bankerman-Fried, SBF, was running Alameda. And they hosted an after party in the Singapore aquarium on Sentosa. And they had divers in the fish tank, you know, holding a sign, etc. So they were like a VIP client. They were like a large trader on Binance. So we were friendly to them. Yeah, right. So that was in January 2019. And then a couple of months later, they came to us saying, like they want to start a futures platform. They proposed a futures platform, some kind of a JV I can remember exactly but I think they proposed 6040 in our favor We won I thought about countering We had all the users They don have anything back then I thought about counter proposing like 95-5, but I don't think that was very polite. They're still like a trader. They're still like a VIP client. So we declined that. We said no. Because they were a crucial part of the liquidity pool. Not a crucial part. They're a large trader, but, you know, Binance, they were new too. It wasn't like they were there for like many years. They were only there for like, you know, probably six months or a year. I don't know the exact dates. And then a little bit later, they came back with a better offer and said, look, like in summer, they came back with a better offer. We still said no. And then in November, they came back and said, okay, look, we're going to offer you this really, really attractive offer. But then FTX was launched. At some volume, they said, look, we're going to basically give you 20% at this price. And there was a swap of tokens BNB versus FTT tokens. So that's, we got some initial FTT tokens. At the time, BNB tokens are much more liquid and FTT tokens are less liquid. So we've done that deal. And then almost as soon as we did that deal, I keep hearing from my friends, like, you know, SBF badmouthing us in the Washington circles in the US, et cetera. I was like, come on. And then they also did some other stuff, which is kind of annoying. They pay five times salary to our VIP account managers that had access to our VIP database. And then so that girl goes working for, if we match that girl then we have to 5x everybody. So we're always like, okay, you go work for them. And then the day after the girl works for them, our VIP clients get called saying, look, they're going to get a better rate on FTX, etc. I'm like, so I called Sam and said, can you stop doing this? We're like, we're your shareholder. At the same time, he's like, look, CZ, can we do a one-to-one panel on a crypto event, right? So I'm fine. We're an investor. We want to help promote. I actually want multiple exchanges to be successful in the industry because then we won't be the ones that get targeted all the time. Yeah. But there was always like, no, I always keep hearing there was some bad mouthing, some other, this and that. So a year later, I think it was mid, early 2021, we said, and they were, they were claiming to be like raising money at, you know, 32 billion valuations. We like well why don we exit Actually so in our investment clause we had veto rights on any future rounds right So if we want to block them we could I didn want to use that to block them Oh wow So I was like, you know, why don't we just exit and we can compete, right? So, and then we talked about exit. And then we exited, I think in, if I remember correctly, it was in July. The deal was finalized and the transfer was done in July, 2021. And this is like a full year and a half before they had issues. At the time, we didn't know. Right, because there was some rumors that a lot of their issues started after you sold and they were somehow conjoined. I'm sure you've heard of that, but you can put all of that to bed. Yeah, so that's categorically not true. And also because of the competitive nature in the businesses, even though we're a shareholder, I never asked them for financial statements. Oh, wow. So I just didn't ask for it. I'm a very passive investor. So when I invest, I don't get involved in their business. Yeah. And they're also slightly competitive. We had a futures platform. They have a futures platform. So I try to stay, no, let them do their thing. So post this, the thing with the FTX thing that most people talk about are a couple of things. One was the way in which the restitution happened was suboptimal to some of the holders of FTX, people who had cash money there. The other thing that people talk about is the value of some of these investments post. What do you think in the aftermath of all of this? It says anything at all about the industry or crypto in general? Yeah. 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, but I did hear some complaints about, you know, some Chinese users are not eligible, et cetera, et cetera. But now, from what I read, because of their appreciation of crypto, now in U.S. dollar terms, they have enough. Right. Even though if people held crypto back then, they probably have gotten more. I don't know what the deal is. When did things at Binance start to get complicated for you? You mean with the U.S. governments, right? Yeah. For me, like they started asking for information, the information requests, which we always comply, right? So that was like 20, 21, 20, 22. And it was like, uh, late 2022, it was getting more hostile. Um, and then I think early 2023 was more clear that they were making, uh, they were, uh, we either reach a deal of some kind or they're going to indict us or stuff like that. There was like, it became negotiations. How do you deal with that as a person? Do you think, I can't believe this is happening? Like 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. I don't know. How does that meeting go? So, uh. Number one, I'm not a legal background, so I have 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. Like no one has experience going through this. You go through this once, you never want to touch it again, right? So no one really on the receiving end have any experience. You have a bunch of lawyers and the lawyers are – the lawyers I think are good, but how you organize lawyers actually is quite tricky. If you hire a bunch of expensive lawyers, they all have different specialties and they all have different opinions. And they all want to seem like the smartest person that's driving the decision. And also, they all want to take a lot of time to analyze. They get paid by more time they spend. I'm not saying that they're unethical. They want to do a really good job. But then they go in all kind 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, like, these are the three things you've got to focus on, this strategy. We also didn't have a strong legal team. Our team is young. our legal team didn't have this type of experience dealing with this type of issues so that was always tricky but I kind of look at when I come by the way where was the entire team at this point? we're all spread out now you're everywhere now we're everywhere we're spread out and I think 2023 I was in Dubai I was in Abu Dhabi, Dubai splitting time so yeah it was very stressful but the way I deal with stress is I just look at the best the worst case scenarios, right? So ask team, what's the best case scenario? Okay, you pay a fine, you get a, you know, you get a DPA or then this thing's over. Then, okay, so that's the best case. And then the worst case is, okay, so they were going to ask you to, they're going to try to put you in jail. Stuff like that. Was that the worst case though? Because at the time it seemed like the fact pattern was folks would get some sort of probation or. That would be the worst, worst case. But also, yeah, so before me, nobody got put in jail. But they could ask for it. Yeah right right right There actually another worst case which is you fight it And then if you can agree on a term you fight it and you stay in the UAE which is a non-extradition country. And now you have citizenship. And so there's almost a zero chance you'll get extradited. But then your travel is going to be limited. Anytime if you cross to a different country, even if that country is a non-extradition country, there can still be a chance that there's a deal being made, right? You're kind of leaving fear. Plus it also creates complexity just at government-to-government level if folks are allies. And 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 people who gave me citizenship. I don't want to be the trouble causer. Right. Right. So, but, you know, the worst case scenario is like, you know, you don't go there. They indict you and they put you on the red notice list. Stuff like that, right? So those are potential possibilities. Yeah. So how did you resolve it? It took like the negotiations, like it was basically daily calls with like 12, 20 lawyers on call for like more than a year. More than a year? More than a year. Back and forth with the President Biden DOJ. The President Biden DOJ. And the most common thing I hear from my lawyers is we have never seen them this hostile on a case like this. We have never seen this before. That's the most common phrase I've heard. At some point you just become desensitized to it or do you keep internalizing it, personalizing it? You think, why is this happening to me? No resentment or just more, how did you deal with it? I'm just- It takes successive steps and there were a couple of steps which are really hard to take. The step where you say, look, in the negotiations, right? They come to a few points where you say, look, we're just gonna have to say no. And it's like, look, we just can't agree to that deal. They wouldn't back off and I couldn't agree to that deal. So just have to say no. And then there was a couple of weeks that elapsed. You don't know what's gonna happen. Purgatory. So you could get indicted. They can indict you at any moment, right? So that's their choice. You already said no to that. There were like a couple periods like that. And then in those couple of weeks, you're mentally thinking, okay, I can't travel anywhere. So I might have to get used to this life of just living in one country and be very careful, et cetera. There might be some sealed indictment that's not public at any border that you cross. And interestingly, they come back after two weeks and they say, okay, well, can you negotiate again? And then you like what do you think is happening over there Well no I think that a now looking back that a very useful negotiation tactic For me or for anybody in my situation The silence. Yeah, the silence. 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. I mean, there could be a sealed red notice against you. And this is the life they have to deal with going forever. And they don't, like, these things can stay there for, like, decades. For them, they do this every day. This is like, this is the daily job, right? So, and, but they, I think they're smart enough that they know two weeks is about the optimum time because longer than that, you really get used to it. And when they come back to negotiate, you're going to say no, right? It's like, look, I'm already used to this. So if you leave the guy in the situation for too long. So they're very skilled in this type of mental work. Right. Whereas, yeah, so there were some really tough periods. And for this type of stuff, you don't get used to it. it's mentally challenging. How did you get yourself to a place to agree to the final terms? After a lot of negotiations, we're like, okay, basically said, okay, I evaluated a single charge of a banking secrecy evaluation, which is a registration failure, which is a federal crime. It's serious. But no one went to jail for this in history. And there's no... Sorry, that charge, that's more technical. How does that relate to the perception of what... was in the media, at least in America, which is money laundering and aiding and abetting folks and not doing KYC and not doing AML versus the actual charge. Are those two things connected and they're equal or these are sort of disjoint 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 understanding. Could be wrong. My understanding is there's a first level is like banking 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 user 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. So that's number one, right? So that's the kind of base layer. Okay. On top of that, you can say, look, you didn't have adequate KYC AML procedures. So all your procedures are not strong enough. So that's another level. which even if you're not registered, you're also supposed to have KYC, et cetera, AML procedures And those things are not those things people think that a black and white thing In reality it not It how well you do it Which systems do you use How do you do risk- How many people do you have? What's your standard operating procedures? Yeah. Yeah, so there's actually a lot of details. And then, like, quite a bit above that, in my understanding, is if you have somehow known and facilitated bad transactions. So you can have a weak AML program and 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 not robust. It's relatively naive. Yeah. But it's there. Yeah. Versus this is, I know this to be bad and I'm enabling it to happen regardless. Yeah. Right. And there's a next level which you're personally handling the transactions. Right. Right. So which is, you know, Charlie Schramm handled transactions for Silk Road, for Ross, right? So that's how, you know. So there's different levels. I don't handle any transactions at all myself. That's just not my thing. I just don't do it. And so they said, okay, Binance, number one, we didn't register. KYC ML is weak. So those are things we can find. We can agree on that. Layer one, layer two. Yeah, so we can agree on that. For those single charges, without any other additional stuff, no one ever went to jail in U.S. history, even till today. Right? So, and then the government, we couldn't agree on the two additional. The government want to add two additional charges. They call it enhancements. The three and four. The three and four. They said somehow I've personally facilitated, but they couldn't provide any evidence. They were trying to lean on the company. Somehow something happened in the company, et cetera. They were trying to use it. Were they able to point to a transaction? No, they wasn't. So these two enhancements, the court outright rejected, but we decided to, before I went to the US, we said we agreed that we will argue that in court. Right? And also based on, I don't want to get into the sort of privileged conversations, but like the understanding I went, before I went was no one went to jail. The worst guy who got punished was Arthur Hayes of BitMax. He got six months home confinement for BitMEX. And when I look at that case, he had much more direct interactions with clients, whereas I had much less direction. Basically, I don't deal with clients at Binance. I deal with users on Twitter, but not like Binance backend kind of thing. So I felt pretty confident that, you know, we should be in a fairly strong position. And that's the best thing forward. Right. So you're like, we agree with this. We agree with this. We're going to really debate this in court. Layers three and four. 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. Yeah. You go into the courtroom. Yeah. You start this process. What happens? So, yeah, there was quite a lot of details there. First of all, the first day, you go and plea, right? So the plea, the agreement I already debated. By the way, sorry, you're staying in a hotel? I was staying in a hotel, yeah. I was staying in a hotel in downtown Seattle. Is your family with you or no? My family went to join. Well, not my kids, but my sister and my mom went to join me. I didn't want my kids to go. that has school. And then my partner has a business to run. I was already like no longer running the business. So I didn't want to drag her away from that. So my sister, my mom, and my older kids were with me. And then, yeah, so that's, and then I'll stay in a hotel and then the next morning go into court. Go into court, the first part of the process is the plea, right? The judge asks you, do you understand this paragraph, this paragraph, after this paragraph, just say yes, yes, yes. The paragraphs were already negotiated out of the wazoo by the multiple Sony lawyers. Overlawyered. Overlawyered. And then the lawyers debate about the first case after the plea, they didn't debate about the charge. They debate about my bail, my bail condition. So I got a post bail. My lawyers argued I should be allowed to go back to UAE waiting for the sentence three months later. The government argued that I may not come back, so they want me to stay in the U.S. And they said they will not restrict me, my movement in the U.S. because I don't possess any harm to the community. They argued about that. The magistrate judge, the first judge, approved me leaving the U.S. to go back to the UAE for three months, which would have been great. And then the government appealed that. my lawyer says like in his 40 years he'd never seen an appeal on a bail condition. Wow. And then he said well this guy is a tone deaf because this will piss off the courts which will actually be in my favor. And guess what? Two weeks later the court ruled in the government's favor and I was kept in the US. So I was kept away from home for three months. When three months came I was free to travel in the US. I was like well I'm stuck in the US so might as well travel. I had a sister my sister have a place in the US so I was staying with my sister for a bit of the time and then I was traveling just to try to keep myself cool chill And then three months later the government requests for another three extension So now I have to stay in the U.S. for another three months, no longer waiting for it. Now were your kids at this point coming to see you at least so that they could come see you? No, I didn't ask them to come and see me. So you didn't see them for six months? Yeah. Well, actually, I didn't see them for a year. And so that government asked for another three-month extension. Then on April 30th, 2024, that's my court date. And then a week before that is when both sides submit their request, the government requests for 36 months, which is twice the maximum sentencing guideline for the worst case scenario for me. So the court said, this court had never seen a government asking the court to ignore the sentencing guideline. Did you find that out for the first time sitting there in the court? No, just a week before the court because the government had to make the submission. There's a written submission before. How did you react to that? Well, not good, right? And then my lawyer's tone changed. Before they said, oh, you can probably get home. They said the judge most likely is going to split the baby. So if the government's asking for 36 months, you're asking for probation, the government most likely picks up a number in between. So I was like, okay, that's not good. Wow. And also five days before my sentencing, on April 25th, Senator Elizabeth Warren went on TV to declare war on crypto again. So this is like five days before my sentencing. And she wrote an open letter to the DOJ saying all this stuff, which is actually most of it is not correct. so yeah so then that's and April 30th I got sentenced and then the judge the judge said a bunch of really good things about me I have all the excerpts in the book and then at some point the judge says but and then you're like okay that's not good wow yeah and then I got four 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 pretty much yeah wow yeah so the lawyers do a debate The sentencing on the April 30th, the lawyers debating court about, that's when the two hazmat got rejected by the court. Like my lawyers argue like, no, this and that. I never touched any of the transactions. I'm not aware of this. This thing's just layers three and four of the accusations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got thrown out Yeah and then they argue about what the recommended sentencing should be My lawyers of course argued for either probation or home confinement at the worst case Right. And then the government argued, like, this guy is a really bad guy. You know, this case is really big. And we should punish him really, really hard with double the punishment of any legally recommended punishment. 36 months. So the judge landed at four. How did you deal with that? It was difficult at the beginning, right? It wasn't a full month. It was, am I going to be safe? Right. So if you tell me, like, I'm going to go to this place for four months, I'm guaranteed to be safe. I'll be okay. I'll be like, okay, fine. I'll just deal with it. But the uncertain part is, like, also right after the sentencing, a bunch of the big media wrote that I'm going to be the richest person to ever go to U.S. prison. and then my lawyers plus prison consultants, they say, well, given all this coverage. What is a prison consultant? That's a whole industry of some guy who advise you what prisons is like and give you advice and stuff like that. How to live, how to... Yeah, so that's a whole big industry that's growing because of the prison population is growing in the US. So anyway, so the prison consultants, like given the high profile coverage, you're probably the biggest target for potential extortion. in prison. So your safety is going to be an issue. So that's the thing I was worried about then. I was like, so how do I deal? Like, you know, you go in and you don't have anything, right? How do I make sure that I stay safe? That's like the top consideration, right? So you're really thinking about how do you do that? So, well, you know, you talk to a lot of people who prison consultants are usually like ex-guards, ex-warders, there's another group of guys who people who have been to but those guys are in prison but they are working there they're not they're not inmates there's another group of guys who've been into prison prison like no they they were there for like as an inmate so you talk to a lot of those guys um and then you figure out what prison's like do you make friends do you not make friends you get advice on like you know if somebody comes up to you on the first day and they're really really friendly don't take anything from them because no they will ask for 10 times more favor back later on. If you don't, then they stab you and stuff like that. So I got a lot of different advice but at the end of the day you just got to go and face it face it right So what I learned is actually the U prison system is so vast two million people stay in U prison The U.S. government spends per annum more on prison than on education or schools, right? So that's how big the U.S. prison population is. And there's 50 states, and every state has a different system. There's state prisons, there's federal prisons, and each one is like a mini city. Like the prison I went in has 2,200 inmates. It's like a small city. And they each have their own rules, et cetera. So I got some advice, but many of the advice are not really useful. But when you go in, you just got to deal with it. So you get sentenced on April 30th, you said? Yeah. And when do you start? So when you get sentenced, you don't know which prison you're going to. The court makes two recommendations. and then usually you will receive a letter. You can be in the hotel or doing whatever and then you have to check in basically on some date, like you have to go. So in my case, the judge ruled that I don't need supervision, which is very unique. Then I don't have to check in. So I just have to wait for a letter that comes to my sister's place, which is the address I registered with the court. In fact, the government, the DOJ, in their request, they asked me to be pre-mended, meaning that I'll 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 he does not need supervision, which is actually a very interesting legal clause I'll learn 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's some really interesting stuff, well, interesting stuff that you learn. How was that period for you? Did anything bad happen or was it? Luckily, nothing too bad happened. It's a really bad experience overall, but nothing like no physical harm. There's no fights. There's no real extortion. What I found, like, so my prison consultants tell me, like, no, when you go in, don't join any gangs. Stay to yourself. Just, you know, just stay to yourself. Be quiet. stay out of sight. The minute I walk into the prison gate, the guard says, well, you're going to need some protection here. I hear the Pacific Islanders are hiring, so you might want to join them. Like, that's, like, this is literally, like, the minute I walked through the gate, one guard was saying this to me. Wow. I was like, what does that mean? Right? And then, you know, after the whole day, the first day was like, the first day is putting, like they take you through so many processes, strip search. I talked on CNBC, like, you know, they strip search you. And then you move to your unit, which is like, you know, 200 inmates there. It's like three rows of cells, 20 cells each facing each other, three floors. And there's a comment area in the bottom. And there's like 200 macho guys looking at you, and you walk into a cell. But what I actually found out is they organize prisons by race, so by ethnicity. So if you are a Chinese dude, they group you with the Chinese dudes. And if you're like a white guy, they group you with white guys. Black dudes, Mexican, Spanish guys, no, they put them in one group. This actually does avoid a lot of conflicts. you are more likely to get along with people of your own ethnicity in terms of culture, customs like there was one or two Arab guys that they pray they have a different schedule so they put you in groups by ethnicity and the guards actually the prison encourages because it reduces fighting and then once you're in a group if you have a problem with somebody else in some other group there's a group rep and the rep will talk about it and you know, there's like a hierarchy. So like union reps. Kind of like a union reps. And then they come together and they hash out. Yeah, they say, look, stand down. We've worked through it. So there's a system to it, but I didn't know any of this, right? So I walk in and then this half Asian looking dude comes to me and say, look, my name's Chino. Welcome to our group. He says car, welcome to our car. I was like, what? Like, should I shake his hand? Should I not? Like, am I joining this gang? This whole, like, it's, yeah. It's crazy. Yeah, and this guy is a Filipino-German mix. There's not enough Asians, so they kind of group anything that's kind of Asian, and they also group the Native Americans plus Pacific Islanders, like the Hawaiians, into the same group. So our group only has six people out of this 200 people. And I was sent to a low-security prison. I should be eligible for a minimum-security prison, which is one level lower. where most of the white collar crimes go But because I not a U citizen they put me into a low which is where all the drug laws are Wow Yeah so it 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 up? A good shower, a good meal. When you first get, so the shower is like literally like a box this big. This is like a cowboy bar door that covers the middle part. They can see your legs and see your head. But it's hard to take a shower without touching the wall. So when you get out of prison the first time, it's like taking a shower, you no longer need to touch the shower wall. That's a luxury. And also there's very limited fruits, very limited protein, like proper protein. There's a lot of carbs, a lot of like bread, flowers, fried stuff, very little veggies, very little protein, very little fruits. I haven't seen a whole fruit for like months. When I saw, when I got out and saw like a plate of fruit, I was like, wow, that's, that's a luxury I haven't seen for a few months. Wow. Yeah. Did you immediately just go back to the UAE? Yeah. Yeah. When I left prison, it took, it took me about six, 26 minutes from leaving the, the, the, the, 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 two things. Did you say that to yourself or did you say this was a total railroad and this is completely unfair and 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. So I- I'm just talking emotionally. Emotionally, I just want to be, I just want it to be over with. And remember that when I first got out, this is still the Biden administration. The election has not happened. And it wasn't clear who's going to win. It wasn't clear the US policy is still the same. You went in when? I went in on May 30th, 2024. And you got out four months later. September. September 27th is the day I fully got out. The election was in November. Right. And by the way, sorry, at that point, you had been in America for a year. You hadn't seen your kids in a year. Yeah. Yeah. So at that point I just want this whole thing to be over with And I thought if the policies continue then it will still be anti policies Or just whatever. We'll just survive however we survive. So, yeah, that was kind of the mentality. So when you get 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, so I'm actually okay with that. stepping down was really, really hard. I actually cried out of it. And the only other time I really cried was like, you know, when my father passed away a few years ago. But after a few, after coming back, you know, I was actually quite happy not to run Binance. I have a lot more free time. And then if I stepped down myself, people will say, hey, this guy ran out of stamina. But like 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, no, there are other very useful, meaningful things I can do with my life. I think overall, I'm in a very fortunate position, right? I have resources. I have enough money to do whatever I want to do in terms of enabling projects and businesses, et cetera, including like Giggle Academy, free education, stuff like that. Yeah, I want to talk about that in 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 and getting it and what you had to do. 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. Like I don't even know what the process is. So what the process is, you find a lawyer who writes your petition, who put all the arguments why you should be pardoned, why you were overly prosecuted, et cetera, et cetera, right? And why are you a good person? And a pardon, what is it for? Is it effectively to recognize over prosecution? No, pardon should erase 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. I think so. Well, based on my understanding, the Constitution grants the U.S. president to give pardon. And that's about as much detail as it says, I think. Right, okay. And then how he does it. So it's really about the social norms in that moment and then how he interprets those social norms. And then historically most presidents pardoned on the last day right Exactly And then Biden I think started pardoning in between And he also did pre Which is a bit new and also crazy. Well, it was very new, yeah. It was largely around COVID for that, but yeah, that really caught a lot of people. He also pre-pardoned his son for some period. That's right. Biden pardoned. It wasn't just the COVID stuff. It wasn't just a COVID study. It was like a period of time where nobody even talked about. That's right. It was like, why do we need it? That's right. But anyway, so the process, I believe, is there's no process. The president can do whatever they want. And then, so you submit that petition and you wait. And then there is a pardon czar in the White House. I think her name is Alice Johnson. She also went to prison for many years. She wrote a really nice book, which I read. But your lawyers, you know, your pinkers say, you need a status update, you need a status update. There's no, no, no. And then suddenly it happened. So that's kind of the extent I know about the pardon process. I don't think anybody knows. I don't think there's a fixed process. I don't think anybody knows what that is. The question that some people can kind of jump to is they think, 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 I think, look, without a pardon, it's quite hard for Binance to enter the U.S. in a proper way. Because you're the UBO. I'm the UBO. Is that why? Yeah. So I'm the UBO of Binance and Binance U.S., right? Without a pardon, Binance is severely limited to do stuff in the U.S. If 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 not be able to access the largest liquidity pool. in crypto. And also, we're also one of the largest crypto ecosystems. So, I think my guess would be that, look, the president is a pro-crypto president. You obviously, He's had his own issues like the debanking. Exactly. Where he's felt what it feels like to be targeted. Not only debanking, he got 34 criminal charges. Yeah. Right. That as well. And he got, like one of the, 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. And one of the charges was he brought some document to his bathroom to read. That's crazy. So I think the fact that he went through the Biden DOJ would probably help me a lot to get the pardon because he would 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 getting pretty busy now. So I do Giggle Academy, you know, this free education platform. I consult with many governments to help them to put in sound crypto regulatory policies. I get involved on the investment side. We invest in blockchain, AI, biotech. I'm a very active team doing investments. This is within Binance or outside of Binance? This is outside of Binance. This is part of EasyLabs. And then I also help mentor, coach a few guys, a few funders in the BNB chain ecosystem, et cetera. So being in all of those things, I'm actually pretty busy. Tell me about Giggle Academy. So I thought it's possible to fully digitize all education content. And why is that important? There's some numbers. I think 700 to 800 million adults are illiterate. two-thirds of them are women. And on top of that, there's about 500 million kids who are not in school. So if you add all of that up, that's like 1.2 billion people who are not educated. 12, 13% of the world population. Yeah. And these are all in really poor areas. There's just no schools around, or they just couldn't afford to go to school. And the schools are not very good today either. The schools average you out. You have a classroom. How is the software designed? So it's just an app on a phone or tablet. It's just an app. I believe that we have enough technology with gaming, understanding of human psychology with 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 AlphaSchool? And do you have any opinions on that? Yes, yes. I think AlphaSchool is great. AlphaSchool is really, really good. But, you know, it's high cost. High cost. Right. So it's more, I think. I think Joe's software is called Timeback. I think that's what it's called. Have you had a chance to see? I have not played with a lot. I did meet some of the funders there and some of the key executives there. They target a, they solve a very hard problem of making the existing education better. Where I solve the other end of the problem, making the education accessible, hopefully better later. And so your goal would be that this is widely proliferated. Are there schools in your view of how Giggle works or No I actually don want to do schools I want everyone to learn from one app The software is very reward Yeah. Badges. Yeah, yeah. I'm just going to ask the obvious question. When I looked at it, I was like, well, badges is like a trail of breadcrumbs to like- Tokenize. Tokenize and earn and payments. Am I just making this up or- No. So I thought really hard about this. But I will for a very long time resist issuing a token on DGO Academy. This is pros and cons. When you issue a token, you can do the rewards. You can learn to earn. Learn to earn, exactly. You can do a bunch of stuff. You can incentivize teachers. You can create content. That's good. But for me, I want to avoid the token because of me. Right? Because if I do a token, everyone wants to buy the token. And everyone on the platform. People want to speculate on the token. People want to speculate on the token. then I won't be able to tell these people, are they real kids learning or are they just farmers that are trying to farm the token? I want to, if I issue a token, if Giggle issue a token, everyone's going to- I have to be honest. I think Giggle sounds really incredible, but that was where my reptilian brain went. Everyone thinks about that. It's a very obvious thing, right? Yeah, exactly. But I want Giggle to be a real free education platform instead of a token platform, instead of some crypto thing, right? So if there's a token, then people is going to focus on the token. So your goal is that you'll just deficit finances and just continue to kind of proliferate this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was my goal. But what happened is there's a community project that donated like $12 million. 12 million? 12 million US dollars based on a meme coin. And this is not something like, and I've only spent like maybe three, $4 million on the entire project so far. Yeah. So now, you know, it's actually net, like, you know, it's hard to give money away. Yeah. So it's hard to give money away with a positive impact. With positive impact. It's very, very difficult. Very difficult. So my plan is to have a 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. Yeah. You said that AI is this third pillar of your life that you see, these big waves, right? Yeah. One of the most interesting things about AI is that when you basically get one level below the English and you start to look at the embeddings and that and the layer of embeddings what you start to see is that it this machine readable language It not English And there a richness of information there It perfect for agents It 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 of commerce and need payments. And I think you've said this, it's like probably the largest user of crypto at some point in the near future. Describe that vision for us. Yeah, I think it's fairly straightforward. I think, as you said, right, I think it's very clear. Soon, each of us is going to have like hundreds or thousands or millions of agents working for us in the background. And they will be transacting. They will be moving money around, right? So in theory, if I want to listen to this podcast, you know, people should pay a few cents to listen to it. Whatever economic model that you want you to do. More than that, CZ. Sure, of course. Sure. But there will be some economic model, right? Right. Right now, even last year, we talked about agents buying tickets for us. It's not quite there yet, but you will get there. They will book restaurants. They will pay for hotels for us. And then the agents can transact a million times more than us. And they are not going to use banks. Banks just won't be able to support them. Banks won't onboard an AML KYC agent. It doesn't even make sense. You can't do a KYC. They can't swipe a card. It doesn't make any sense. But also what agents will do is they'll transact at a transaction volume. at a rate, it'll make the traditional network's head spin. Exactly. They're just not going to be able to support it. Yeah. Right. And also, even stuff like investments and trading, right? So today, you know, you open the Binance app, you look at a chart, you have to like, you know, click on a price level and you have to type in the price and a green or red button. That shouldn't be the interface. The interface should be like, hey, look, convert 10% of my stable coins into BNB. And then you'll figure out, okay, if you have a large position, you will do it slowly over time. If you have a small position, which would be one market order. All of that stuff should be happening in the background. So 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 is anyone that's super. What crypto project today do you think comes? Oh, you mean crypto. Yeah, that agents could use theoretically. Again, it's early days. I don't want to name any specific projects. It will cause some token price fluctuations. But quite a number of people are working on it. So especially recently with a more like AI agent social network thing So it getting more and more hype Yeah And yeah so I think you get there Let me ask you about crypto in general for a second What is the role 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, if you ask me, am I 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 fungibility, which I think is problematic to get to mega scale. and then there's a lack of privacy. I agree. It's probably the biggest thing that will hold Bitcoin back from being ubiquitous. Where does privacy play as the world evolves as you see it? 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. I think when Bitcoin was designed, it was going to be pseudo anonymous. But the fact is, every transaction on the blockchain you can trace, especially now you have a centralized exchange with KYC. Exactly. And, you know, if you have like, it's actually very easy. And by the way, we go always back to the same argument, which is it always goes back to the corner case of while somebody is using this for something illicit. And I say there are those use cases, but the overwhelming majority is you buy a pack of gum, but tomorrow you may buy, you know, you may want to buy a certain movie or a video game. You may want to buy a cigarette. And it's not for me to judge. Yeah. and dollars are fungible in that sense. There's complete anonymity. We have no idea about what it was used before that I got my hands on it. Well, there are actually real applications where privacy is extremely important. If you book a certain hotel and people know that hotel address, like blockchain hotel address, the receiving address, they will know that you will be in that hotel. That's right. That's a physical security for you. That's right. So 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 review somebody, in Japan, if you review somebody's home address, that's illegal. So there are real use cases for privacy, which Bitcoin, most cryptocurrencies currently do not provide. There's a counter argument, okay, law enforcement wanted to track down bad guys. That can be done. That can be done. I'm supportive of that. But there's fundamental privacy issues. so I do think that in the future we as an industry need to figure out how to evolve the privacy features which no one no one's really focusing on right now there's a few privacy focused coins I shouldn't say no one but they are they don't have much market cap. They don't have much size. Right. 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 like catharsis or is it to make a point? Is it to tell the story? All of those things? A bit of everything. It started because I was bored. Because I started drafting when I was in prison. It was just to keep me busy because I don't want to deal with, you know, I don't want to be chatting with, it just keeps me busy in prison. So I was trying to draft it and type in on a very dumb terminal and send it to my assistant. And then once I got out, I was like, well, I have enough that if I spend a bit more time on it, I can have a book. And then, but editing a book takes so long. Every pass takes like two, three weeks if you want to edit a book. Because like, no, right now it's like 95,000 words. So it's like 300 pages. and then I'm also editing the English and Chinese version so it just takes longer but the point of the book right now I think is just to get the story out I think there's many misconceptions about who I am what I went through What are those misconceptions do you think? Well there's a lot of negative media about crypto there's a lot of negative media about CZ, Binance the entire industry and to some extent I think there's a lot of negative media about Trump, the party, etc. That part is not too heavy in my book. I just know this is as simple as we talked about on this podcast. But just for people to understand, like, you know, who I am, who to some extent, by extension, who Binance kind of is from my perspective. Is it an important story for your children? I think so. Yes. Yeah. Why? I think it important for them to understand Like no they see they of course are more on my side They know all this media is not the right stuff But they haven I didn have time to explain the story to them in this level of detail And I think it's important for them to read this. And they will understand a lot more detail than what I'm able to tell them verbally or in person, etc. Even though the book doesn't contain everything, but 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, then that's great. If they want to be artistic, et cetera, that's great. If they want to do humanitarian efforts, charity, that's also great. Whatever they figure out what they want to do, I just want to be there to support them. Yeah, that's... How similar or different is that from what you got from your parents? Pretty similar. My parents didn't have pressure on me. my parents didn't pressure me to be this and that like they're not even like normal Chinese parents where they want you to be a doctor or engineer or lawyer engineer that was my parents yeah okay my parents didn't do that with me my parents like you can do whatever you want just my parents said to me it's very un-Chinese very un-Chinese my parents said don't hurt yourself don't hurt other people right so don't do drugs don't get into like don't don't get into crime and then don't hurt other people so that's that's simple as I got from my parents. And yeah. I think there's a lot of people that probably hear this and they'll probably think that, and I think this is a real compliment, by the way, so don't take this wrong when I say this this way. That could have been me too. Yeah. I think that we glorify success in a way that makes it seem like it's impregnable. It like this very quixotic thing that happens And it not that No And the reason why I can say that is that when I spend time with you and I'm sure now the people rounding two 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, in this weird way, it's like you're just a normal guy. And it's like, there's something really valuable about working on things that you like because then the time just passes. And you kind of just 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. I think, number one, I'm a normal dude. 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's a lot of other things like principles, values, emotional quotient. 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 are in a situation where you are. You usually cannot change the situation. So what you can only do is change yourself, right? So if you just push yourself a little bit every day, you don't have to push yourself too hard. You push yourself too hard, you're going to burn out. You're not going to last long. But you want to push yourself to like 120%, 110%, 130%, somewhere in that range, however you can last long. 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 is not everything it's cracked up to be? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Money is money. So in our life, there a few I kind of picture a spider web graph right Money is only one tangent right So once you have enough it one thread It one thread Having more doesn help you In fact there health there family There's other things that can keep you happy, like your values, contribution, positive impact. Like that's 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. Sometimes you'll have more, sometimes you'll have less. then how's your health? Also there's another 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 with the people that you want to spend with? And are your family healthy? You're very lucky if your family's all healthy. That's already a huge gift. And then your mental health is also important. How do you deal with pressure, etc. I somehow am very lucky to have a very sort of 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 they 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, 20 years. They don't enjoy the time that they're spending on these things, even to get the thing that they have so much of that they don't need. Yeah, yeah. So this is also the part, like, I'm actually very grateful that I don't have to run Binance anymore and I have more time. Yeah. Whereas before, like, even though that was very enjoyable, but on my other quotients, I was not doing well. Yeah. So, yeah. Zizi, thanks for joining the All In Podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me.