Returning to the Hurun Global Rich List 100, CZ’s crypto journey

Original author: Mlixy

Original source: W3C DAO

Returning to the 100th place on the Hurun Global Rich List, CZ’s crypto journey Hurun Research Institute released the "2024 Hurun Global Rich List" on March 25 (the deadline for wealth calculation is January 15, 2024), 52 years old Elon Musk has regained the title of richest man with a wealth of 1.67 trillion yuan ($231 billion).

Furthermore, Hurun Research Institute writes that cryptocurrencies appear to have moved forward since the FTX crash. Although Binance was fined more than $4 billion by the U.S. Department of Justice for money laundering, its former CEO Changpeng Zhao's wealth grew to 130 billion yuan ($18 billion) as interest in cryptocurrencies surged, ranking him at No. 1 on the list 100 people.

The man who sold his house and entered the cryptocurrency industry

Changpeng Zhao (alias CZ) was born in Jiangsu in 1977. He immigrated to Canada with his parents when he was 12 years old. He majored in computer science at university and started his programming career.

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

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

Li Qiyuan didn’t hear about BTC until 2013 through his good friend Bobby Lee, the former co-founder and CEO of BTCC and BTC China, so he started to get in touch with the blockchain. Bobby LEE once said this to CZ:

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

Because of this sentence, CZ became very interested in blockchain; then CZ began to be involved in blockchain projects and joined Blockchain.info as the third founding employee and worked there for 8 months. During the process, he had frequent contact with BTC evangelists Roger Ver and Ben Reeves, and under the influence of some industry giants, his confidence was strengthened.

It was not until June 2014 that he became the CTO of OKcoin at the invitation of He Yi (known as the first sister in the currency circle, now the co-founder and CMO of Binance).

At this time, CZ sold his house in Shanghai and invested all his funds in BTC. He had no other assets except his mobile phone. Therefore, he was also considered by Crypto believers to be the first person to hold his assets in Crypto. 99% of people.

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

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

Founding Binance

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

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

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

As the price of BTC soared from September to December 2017, with the price rising from US$3,000 to US$20,000, an astonishing increase, people began to rush to enter Crypto exchanges.

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

And don’t forget, in the currency circle, where there is Binance, there must be something else. This chief customer service officer has been active on the front line of work. Binance owes most of the credit for its current market share and ecological environment. All thanks to this "No. 1 Sister in the Currency Circle".

rapid development

In 2017, Zhao Changpeng founded Binance. At that time, He Yi's two-year non-competition period at OKcoin ended, so Zhao Changpeng invited He Yi to join Binance as co-founder and chief marketing officer (CMO).

He Yi, who has returned to the cryptocurrency industry, is indeed “the best marketer in the crypto industry.” With her skillful series of marketing activities, Binance has ranked No. 1 in global crypto asset trading volume in less than half a year. 1 position, with transaction volume exceeding US$3 billion.

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

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

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

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

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

However, the number of Binance user registrations has since experienced explosive growth, from 1 million registered users to 7 million in three months from December 2017 to February 2018, making Binance the world’s largest A digital asset trading platform, due to the rapid development of Binance, CZ was also on the cover of Forbes magazine at that time, with a net worth of US$2 billion, ranking third on the rich list.

Looking back

CZ mentioned in his handwritten letter on Binance’s sixth anniversary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we've remained profitable ever since.

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

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

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

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

CZ today

Recently, Zhao Changpeng, who is still in the United States due to litigation, has not stopped moving forward. After founding the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, today he officially announced his next entrepreneurial project "Giggle Academy".

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

Looking around the world, there are many excellent education projects focusing on adult education, primary school to university, and even early childhood education. These Internet education play an important role in universal basic education for mankind, eliminating the differences in geographical location and race in various regions around the world. , religion, belief, economy, culture and other factors. As long as you have a mobile phone and can be connected to the Internet, the ocean of knowledge will be at your fingertips.

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

write at the end

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

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

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

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

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