I'm excited to sit down with CZ, the founder and former CEO of Binance. He probably needs no introduction, but I'm going to give one anyways. CZ, it's so great to see you and thank you for taking the time.
Well, thanks for joining our event and thanks for having me. Yeah.
For sure. I mean, this year marks 9 years of Binance and before founding Binance, you also worked at a major exchange. When you kind of look back to 2017 and the market and your life back then, what was kind of the problem that you were trying to solve that you felt no other exchange was solving well enough that made you really want to go out and create Binance?
Yeah, I think well, I've spent my entire career before that working on order execution exchange systems. So, when I look at the exchange space back in 2017, I thought the products could be better, the technology could be better, the matching engine could be a lot faster, the security could be better, the customer service can be a lot better. The exchanges then weren't really prioritizing the users. So, I thought there's definitely room to make improvements. But we got lucky that there was an ICO run and we caught that wave. Yeah.
Yeah. Do you think 2017 CZ is the same as 2026 CZ?
No, I'm not. I'm a lot older, but may or may not be wiser, but I've experienced a lot more challenges. Let's put it that way. So, I think a lot of things have happened in the last 9 years. I'm a bit mentally, physically older now, so.
That's fair. Okay, maybe if you could give yourself advice back like your current self, give your 2017 self a piece of advice, what would that be? Knowing what you know now.
Well, I think well, not obviously knowing what I know now, I would tell my younger self to say, look, spend more time on learning about legal compliance aspects. I also learn about politics. Before like now, 2017, I was just a tech guy. Right, I was focused on building a better product and protecting the users, but I think I misjudged the importance of the legal aspects of it, which is a weak area for me. So, that's one piece of advice I would give. And also, I wasn't very clear, I wasn't very knowledgeable on international laws and how different countries apply laws. Some US laws apply globally. Some and they also have a very long look back period. So, I think that's one area I would tell myself. The second area is I would actually just tell myself to go faster. There was a lot of stuff that there was a lot of areas where I hesitated about whether to push a product out or not. I think knowing what I know now, not so much with hindsight. It's just that as an entrepreneur, it's much better to push a product out early and then have market feedback. I think there was still a few things we did a little bit relatively late. For example, Binance launched futures 2 years into the journey. If I was to do it again, I would probably launch that much earlier.
Yeah. Now, that's a good point and I think a lot of times like founders, they build so much in like stealth mode and in hiding and then they launch it to market and they expect it to be like this amazing like firework experience and then like sometimes they get feedback of like, we don't like this, right? And it would have been so much better if they put it out sooner. But Binance also yeah, surpassed like dozens of exchanges and it climbed its way to the top very quickly, right? Was it within the first year or second year?
First year. Like the first 5 months we got to the world's number one exchange and then we stayed there for every single day.
So. Yeah, so what would you attribute to that then? Like ranking at number one then and holding that title for so many years cuz it's easy maybe not easy. It's possible to get to the top but then it's also very easy to fall off from the top, right?
Yeah, yeah. I think there's quite a few different factors contributing to the success of any company. The product has to be good. The customer service has to be good. And then more importantly, you have to have a mission. Our mission was to increase the freedom of money and we protected our and one of our strongest values is to protect users. All of those things are very fundamental and I think protecting the users helped us keep the lead after we became number one. And growing also like you also contribute to our growth. But we got a little bit of a lucky break in 2017 as well because that was the ICO year. And we are the new exchange. So we supported ICOs natively very quickly. And all the other exchanges, most of the other exchanges were still Bitcoin exchanges. I think some of the US exchanges only had four coins listed, all right? They didn't have Ethereum listed on the exchange. That's the largest exchange in the US at the time. So we caught that break. But we also had competition, right? So Bittrex was really big. Poloniex was really big. Those were the two biggest exchanges in the world back then. So it wasn't like there was no competition. But we caught a industry turn and there was a ICO momentum and we caught that but we had good product, good service and also we protected our users really well.
Mhm, right. And I know that something about Binance, you guys have a very strong community and we'll get into that too. And one of the themes for the anniversary for Binance is this idea of quote 'built by you'. How would you kind of describe who you really are and like the culture and community that you wanted to foster within Binance?
Sure. I think when like 9 years ago when Binance started, right? So crypto was still a pretty niche industry. It's pretty small. I think Bitcoin was like $3,000, I think we when we started Bitcoin was like $2,000. So it's a very small community of users who are very engaged. They're very loyal. So it's and the community of users are advanced users. They kind of know they're early adopters. They know their product really well. They know our product really well. So they know that we protected them really well. So they follow their heart and they follow their money. And then as the community grew bigger, Binance kept its value. Binance kept using its actions have always protected the users. So the community was organically growing and also everyone in the community kind of contributes to the Binance growth. Many we had many volunteers. Some are officially labeled Binance Angels. Some are not, some don't even have no official title. And they just help us to build the entire ecosystem really. So Binance benefited a lot from that. So it's really a user driven, community driven kind of this is what the phrase 'built by you' probably implies. That the entire community built this platform.
Yeah. On that theme I know that you've said communities are more resilient than companies sometimes. Like what does a community do that a company simply can't in that context?
So communities follow you like when you treat your community well, they follow you to the end of the earth, right? And then communities have a lot of power. A company can be under attack, especially a centralized company. And you know there are regulatory issues, there are geopolitical issues, etc. The community is much more immune to those kind of attacks. The community is just a distributed group of people and in our case they are actually all over the world. So, there's not that much that you can attack them with. So, as long as you treat your community well, the community is very immune to external attacks. In fact, the community very often defends you. And the community typically very often will also have a very strong voice. And today social media is there and the community voice is often stronger than the mainstream media now. So, I think there's now the community has a lot of power that can be harnessed. Yeah.
Yeah, 100%. What do you think it takes to make a sticky product in today's market compared to the past 9 years and something that really helps make people come back over and over and not just go through a revolving door where it's like they come in and then they leave.
Yeah. I think anytime in any industry products can be improved, right? So, nothing's perfect. I think anything like today if the fiat on-ramp off-ramp is still pretty high friction. If you can get lower friction, lower fees in more places around the world, I think that's a part of what people everywhere are looking for. If you look at stablecoins, some of the most popular stablecoins don't give user yields, right? They don't pay the user interest. And then some of the other stablecoins they pay user interest but it's hard to trade with them. So, if you have a stablecoin that pays user good interest and that people can trade with it freely, then that's another area that can be improved. You know, RWAs is still pretty new relatively speaking and then there's a lot more that can be done, right? There's only a few stocks that are really tokenized. And that's kind of US-centric, too. The rest of the world, why would any country not want to tokenize their stock market, right? Why doesn't which country not want their stock market to be accessible by the entire world? By 300 million plus people. And plus more, right? So, I think there's still a lot to be done. We're just at the beginning, really. So, many people view, you know, the market's saturated, but the penetration worldwide, crypto penetration is probably less than 1%. Well, definitely less than 1%. So, there's a lot more room to go.
Yeah. I mean, on that point about that less than 1%, we've spent years talking about onboarding the quote unquote next billion users when there's not even the first billion here yet, but what would you say is like the biggest misconception then that the industry still has about what mainstream adoption actually requires and takes to get that?
Sure. I think most people today, well, many people today view crypto as an investment asset. They don't view it as a fundamental technology. People buy Bitcoin and they talk about when do you want to exit, right? They don't view like, you know, you don't exit the internet. You don't exit AI, per se, right? So, you just use it. It's a technology. So, I think that's a common misconception I see that people just view crypto as a speculative investment asset. That's they should look through that and look at the underlying technology. Crypto blockchain is here to stay. And it's a very fundamental it's like one of the three fundamental technologies in my life, the other two being the internet and AI. Right? So, I think that's a misconception many people have. They look at this as a speculative investment opportunity and they think about exits. Whereas you should really I would recommend people to look at projects long-term. There is an element of investment in crypto, for sure. But I always recommend people to look at the long-term prospects of projects before they invest.
