Some of you may already know the name Changpeng Zhao or CZ as he likes to go by. He's almost universally known in the tech and finance worlds as crypto's richest man. Forbes calculated his net worth as greater than 110 billion, which puts him ahead of Bill Gates, though CZ denies the Forbes estimate. He amassed this wealth by founding Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, transforming it from a startup in 2017 into one of the most powerful companies in finance. Then things took a turn. In November 2023, CZ pled guilty to violating the US Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program. He stepped down as CEO, personally paid a $50 million fine, while Binance paid a $4.3 billion fine. When I asked him about this charge, he acknowledged that Binance's earlier compliance program was weak and that Binance could have done better. In all, the case led to a 4-month sentence at a correctional facility in Long Beach, California, where he taught fellow inmates and even some guards about cryptocurrency. He also spent his time writing his newly released memoir, Freedom of Money, a memoir of protecting users, resilience, and the founding of Binance. In our conversation, I asked him about this DOJ case against him and Binance, and the controversy surrounding his pardon, which was issued by President Trump about a year later, and the alleged business dealings with the Trump family. I asked what he thinks about President Trump profiting from crypto ventures, whether he thinks it's ethical for an incoming president to launch a memecoin, and if he thinks Sam Bankman-Fried, whose firm Binance once invested in, was treated fairly in US courts. I also get into why terrorist organizations and criminal networks are drawn to cryptocurrency and whether there's really an effective way to prevent that kind of illegal activity. We ended by discussing the possibility of a Binance IPO, who he believes Satoshi Nakamoto really is, and why CZ describes himself as pretty happy growing up in rural China in a home with a dirt floor and no running water. As I was reading the book, he seems just as happy in that phase of his life as he is today. I learned so much from this conversation, and I think you will, too. Stay with us.
CZ, thank you so much for being here.
Well, thank you for having me.
You were born in rural China and now you have more money than Bill Gates. And what's so interesting about all of this is that a lot of people don't even know who you are. People who aren't crypto heads, for example. And so I want to start at the very beginning. Tell us a little bit more about the family that you were born into.
Yeah. Well, first of all, I don't think I'm richer than Bill Gates. I think the calculations by Forbes is wrong. But anyway, I was born in a small village and my mom is a math teacher, high school teacher, and then my dad is an electrician. I grew up in a village environment in China before I was 10. We have like dirt floors, no running water, no electricity. I did some of my elementary homework under oil lamp. So and then I moved to a slightly bigger city called Hu and then at 12 I went to Vancouver. And then I did college in Montreal. And then I worked in Tokyo, then New York, then Shanghai, and then 2013 I found Bitcoin and then four years later we launched Binance and we got lucky. Binance grew pretty big.
To recap what you just said, you moved from rural China to Shanghai to Vancouver. One thing you didn't mention that I learned in the book is that you worked at a McDonald's, you worked at a gas station, you end up on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Wall Street. That's already an evolution in and of itself. But then in 2013, your life really changed when you discovered crypto. What was it about crypto that made you want to basically turn your life upside down to pursue this budding industry?
Yeah, for me crypto was like the technology that increases the freedom of money, right? So if internet increased the freedom of information, and I know when internet happened I was just in college out of college around 2000. So I was too young to take advantage of it and then I thought you know this is crypto blockchain is the same order of magnitude of technology shift as internet. So I was like okay I'm not going to miss this. I want to get in early. So I sold my house, sold my little apartment, quit my job and then went all in on crypto. So yeah so I just understood as a fundamental technology that would change everything. Similar to AI today, at the time like this is what in 2013, 13 years ago I thought you know the next technology that comes along maybe 15 years later you know now it's AI right so I think these three internet, blockchain and AI are the three fundamental technologies in my adult life so far.
So at 40 you found Binance. It made you a billionaire. It became the world's largest crypto exchange. Big picture, tell us what it was about you and your team that made Binance so successful.
Yeah. So I think basically fundamentally what we did different is we protected users really really well. I think before us there were many many crypto exchanges. Even afterwards us there were many many crypto exchanges. But because we're in the crypto industry, we deal with money. That's a lot of quick money. So many people but many people are kind of attracted by the short-term returns and they try to keep money for themselves and they sometimes don't protect users as well as we do. So we do many many things in benefit of our users sometimes at the short-term cost to us. But we earn enough fees so that we are sufficiently funded and then we just grow really big because we actually make less money because we make less money per transaction and we protect our users in a lot of instances where we have to put up the money and but we grown really big in terms of user base and when the user base run really big we benefited from the scale. So I think many people just didn't have this equation in their head. They're always trying to get a little bit more from each transaction and we're like look let's get a little less from each transaction and then have scale. So I think that was one of the biggest things. There's many other things where we got a bit lucky on. We started in the sort of ICO boom year in 2017 and then we had a strong team that worked really really hard and they executed well.
And ICO for listeners it's like an IPO but for a coin. I just say that because a lot of people that listen aren't super familiar with crypto terms and things. But and it is true like in reading your book, I was fascinated by some of the anecdotes of like, you know, typically if people send crypto to the wrong address, it's gone for them. And I thought it was really interesting to read about how your team took bespoke care to try to help people even though it was so expensive and did nothing for your business. So, some of those anecdotes I thought were really interesting. I want to get into some of the most interesting parts of the book. And I think one element of the book that will, you know, have a light bulb moment for people who don't follow crypto so closely are some of your anecdotes in and around Sam Bankman-Fried. Of course, Sam Bankman-Fried founded FTX, which was another exchange, an exchange that competed with Binance. And you met Sam Bankman-Fried in 2019. In January 2022, my understanding is that FTX was valued around 32 billion. By November of that same year, it was on a path to insolvency. And he calls you asking for a couple billion dollars, really casual. He suggests selling you FTX. Ultimately, you don't buy it. This exchange crashes. I think people will remember how shocking that was. And he's charged with fraud and now he serves 25 years in jail. And I'm wondering, you know, what's interesting to me in all of this is that 25 years, do you think the law was fair on Sam Bankman-Fried or do you think it took too far?
This is a very hard one for me to comment based on public information that I know. He took somewhere between 4 to 8 billion of user money and made investment, use that to buy tokens himself. And he did not disclose that to the public. I only learned that much much much later right so how you classify that and then he lost most of the money and then you know there was a liquidity crunch he people could not withdraw so I yeah so I'm not in a position to comment on whether the sentencing was fair or not etc. Yeah so it is what it is.
It is what it is. I think some people wonder about it because it's like my understanding is no one lost money and most of the investors were not American and so it sort of just questions like you know was it overreach?
So yeah well on this point I think the statement that no one lost money is actually not necessarily true. I think based on US dollar terms using crypto prices at the 2022 prices no one lost money but back then Bitcoin was what 16,000, 20,000. If people have held those crypto, if my understanding is that they're compensating people based on 2022 crypto prices, if they're compensating people based on today's crypto prices know 70,000, $75,000 or at the high point, you know, it was up to 100, $125,000 per bitcoin. My understanding is that's not the case what they're doing, right? So if you had crypto on FTX, you have one bitcoin. Now they gave you the bitcoin at the 2022 price instead of today's price which is 75k. So to say that nobody lost money depending how you calculate it. Yeah.
People lost the potential to make because of the misappropriation is sort of what you're saying.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if people held their own bitcoin still today they would have had a lot more money yeah.
Than what they're getting from FTX. And also some international users I don't know the details of this but I read on Twitter that many of the Chinese users for example were not compensated because they said I don't know. So this I think there's still quite a lot of people who lost money.
That's a good point. As most people know, you had some legal issues of your own in November 2023. Binance pled guilty to violating anti-money laundering laws which allegedly allowed money to flow to terrorists and cyber criminals. And you know, it's been almost 3 years since that chapter. You know, what do you think Binance looking back actually did wrong or could have done differently three years later?
So, both Binance and myself, we pled guilty to a federal charge the banking secrecy act. So, but for Binance, I think there were more discussions about you know compliance program etc. And even though I was the CEO of Binance at the time and I handled some of the case negotiations. But my case was Binance violated the BSA which is a law in the US which basically says if you run a financial platform you need to register in the US and you need to have a proper KYC program. So Binance didn't, binance.com the global entity did not register in the US and there's a separate arm called Binance US that registered in the US but Binance the global entity when they first started before I think between 2017 and early 2019ish they did have US users so this is a fact right so for this part they said like you know you're violating the BSA law and then at the time the compliance program is not strong enough. So but there were a lot of trying talks trying to say look Binance facilitated terrorist financing that never happened right so Binance never actively intentionally facilitated terrorist financing now having a weak compliance program that some you got to understand that no compliance program in the world is 100%. Even like the top banks they will have some transactions that will be viewed as illicit or associated with bad actors etc. Right? So there's no police force in the world that's 100% effective. And then that's the part that was being debated or argued etc. But there was no active well they were and there are no active intentional facilitation of terrorist financing etc. I think that's just a lot of the media trying to misquote some of the there were allegations of it but they were never approved. In fact, the court in my case, the court completely rejected the government's claim, saying that there was no evidence for that charge.
I don't think you I don't think anyone of Binance would want, you know, terrorists to get money, but should there have been more oversight, I think is like maybe some of the question that people have. And I wonder if you could go back in time if you would have done things differently in terms of building out or thinking about, you know, the oversight structure that was at Binance.
Sure. Sure. No, I think look we agreed that our earlier compliance program was weak, right? We started as a technology company in Shanghai and then two months later, six weeks later, we had to move out of Shanghai and then we were moving around different places. And we started as a technology platform, right? So and the platform grew really really really quickly. So our initial compliance program which we did have from the early day from the very very early days we had KYC programs we used sums up we used Jumio to do KYC but how strong they are we were not perfect so but at the same time though people need to understand that there's no standard to say look your compliance there's no it's not a binary thing there's no standard saying your compliance program is good enough right it's all subjective So at the time we were inexperienced. We thought we were good. Later on we said, "Well, we could have done better." So that's kind of the situation. Yeah.
You know, this sort of is tied up in this other conversation around some of the taboos around crypto. And I think some people ask like, is there really a good way to prevent this type of illegal activity? You know, because some might say, you know, one of the points of cryptocurrency is that it's designed to facilitate decentralized transactions.
The traditional media like to portray crypto as you know this where all this illicit transactions happen but there's both percentage wise percentage wise like there's a 100 times less transactions in crypto less illicit transactions in crypto by volume and then there's like probably 10,000 times less amount wise so that's a very common misconception and I can tell you why crypto is very easy to trace and people are very good at tracing crypto is a one single public blockchain, right? Bitcoin. So it's very and it's permanent. It's always there. So anybody can look at it. People say it's pseudo anonymous, but if you tie a KYC information from large exchanges, you can pretty much know every address. So people are very good at labeling those addresses now. So it's actually extremely hard to do list of transactions in crypto and without people knowing.
My follow-up question, you know, someone might say then why would the IRGC want payments from boats passing through the Strait of Hormuz to be in crypto or why would people choose crypto to send money to Hamas? Like if it's, you know, like why is crypto their choice of their vehicle to move money?
So crypto is very easy to trace but if you run your own crypto wallet, it's hard to block. So you can see it but you may not be able to block it, right? So the IRGC, the Iranian situation is like there's an open war. They said, "Look, we're just going to receive Bitcoin." I can tell you that the US government is tracking every single transaction to IRGC. So whereas if they do it through banks, they actually can't see it, right? So they have just a pinote to get information. There's a lot of different banks in the world. It's actually hard to get that information. Whereas on the blockchain, it's very very easy to trace. But if you run bitcoin, if you have your own self custody wallet and somebody else is sending from their own self custody wallet, the network will not reject your transaction. And there's no way for other people to block it. So you have sovereignty in that sense, but it's very traceable.
So it's very traceable, but who has the power to block it?
Actually for Bitcoin, if you don't use a centralized exchange, then no one on the centralized exchange, then each platform does have the power to block it. But if you just use native Bitcoin then no one can block it.
This opens up a really interesting philosophical question that I was thinking about which is you know on one hand people say it enables these black market transactions everything that we've been talking about and people don't like that at the same time there's sort of this interesting contradiction which is that you know one core philosophy I think you'll correct me if I'm wrong of crypto is that no government or intermediary should get to decide who is allowed to participate you know and I think maybe some people have tension with this idea of someone coming in to block even if you know that payment you know would go to someone like the IRGC or like a terrorist organization regardless of their sanctioning. And I wonder how you think about that sort of contradiction between the ethos of you know maybe some of the early founders of crypto and some of like the what centralized exchanges might be incentivized to do.
There is a balance here. Certain times we want law enforcement to be able to freeze funds to chase bad actors etc. In the other extreme I'm not sure if you want government there are cases where bad actors even in the law enforcement space or governments freezing people's funds unilaterally without good reason. And also if you think about it right you work very hard to make your own money but the government can make you poor arbitrarily by printing more money right so let's say there's $100 in circulation if the government prints another $100 and put that in circulation you just become poor by 50%. without doing anything, right? So, you work really hard for your money, you pay your taxes, and suddenly somebody makes you 50% poor. In some developed countries, this quantitative easing inflation, printing some money is sometimes useful is not always bad, but excessive doing that excessively is bad, right? So, there's many different governments in the world. Some governments do it very very aggressively. Some governments don't. So whether that's good or not everybody can decide for themselves. But with crypto with Bitcoin no there's it's a fixed supply. So number one no one's going to print more of that at will. Right? So no one has the power. If you want to print more of that you can go buy mining machines and there less and less of that coming out. There's only less than a million bitcoins left out of 21 million total supplies, right? So there's maximum 5% more and we know the speed of that coming out. So that protects you against dilution or inflation right so do you want that or not then it's for people to decide the ability to transact with anyone in the world that you wish to again we the technology gives you control as the owner of your bitcoin and whether you think that government should have ability to freeze your money at will it's up to you right so different countries have different laws I think we as platform operators the platform operators should follow laws in every country where they operate. As an individual, I think if countries if you live in a country that has a law that prevents you from owning your own assets with that level of control. If your country blocks you, says it's illegal to own your Bitcoin, then you shouldn't touch Bitcoin. If you live in a country that says holding Bitcoin is perfectly legal, then you can hold your Bitcoin and you can use Bitcoin's properties. So that's kind of how the way I view it is there's a philosophical component to it. There's a legal component to it to what you can do in your own country and that's what you choose to do within those frameworks.
But I guess like do you think blocking certain entities based on politics, you know, cuts against some of like the very OG crypto ethos?
The hardcore crypto guys says, look, you should have your control over your wealth and you should have control over your money and who you transact with. At the government political level, like you know what you talked about is basically sanctions, right? So sanctions are implemented in a lot of different places says look you can't do business with this country you can't do business with this individual etc. Those have been there for a while whether there are good or bad it's really up to each individual some countries have very extensive sanction programs and namely the US and Europe and those are very strong laws that everyone need to follow there are countries without those sort of sanctioned rules and then you know people are more free to transact. So yeah, so I wouldn't be able to comment on which laws make sense, which doesn't. It's just how the world works. Basically, look, the strong country says, "Look, because we're so strong, if you want to do business with us, if you want to be friends with us, you can't be friends with others. Whether that's good or bad, it's up to everyone's own judgment."
Well, ultimately, you know, you had to pay 50 million. Binance had to pay 4.3 billion. It's a lot of money. You stepped down as CEO. You served four months in prison. Interestingly, you were the wealthiest inmate in US history. And I heard you had prison consultants, which I thought were only in movies, but apparently not. What were the most valuable lessons that you learned from them?
So, in the US alone, there's about 2 million people in prison, and it's growing every year. It's like growing at double digit percentages, right? So it's an industry that grows and the people who service those industries want the industry to grow, want the number inmates numbers to grow because like you know you think about it if you're a supplier of food for prison. There's no customer feedback, right? Like there's no customer satisfaction you got to worry about. No, it's just food for prisoners. It's a very good business, very stated, fairly large as well. So there are people who are incentivized to make the prison population bigger at the expense of the government's spendings, right? So that's one thing. The prison consultant is a big industry too.
So they taught me some useful things like no so I had a four month sentence right. So one thing is like look you can calculate the number of days you got to spend there. If you calculate your last day to be Sunday then you get released on Friday which means you stay two days less in prison. So that thing I didn't know about. They also there's a lot of rules that are up for interpretation. Right. So, which kind of prison do I go to? Do I go to a low security prison or a minimum security prison? Minimum security prison is what they call a camp, right? How do you apply for it? What kind of rules qualify me or not disqualify me for that? Because I'm not a US citizen. Can I get a exception? The exceptions are not unusual. They're actually quite common, but I didn't get one. But there was a lot of attempts in getting one.
You didn't go to, even though you were white collar, you didn't go to a minimum security because you're not a US citizen. So, you actually you had to go to a rung up, which is like arguably more dangerous and so forth.
Yeah. No, I appreciate you pointing that out. So, and then like how do I get to so most people with less than six to 18 months on their prison sentence, they get transferred to home confinement, right? So, how do I like with a four month sentence, when do I apply? How do I get it? So there's a lot of discussions about that. And also like even little things like in prison like you know how do you act in prison like what do you expect right what's the prison etiquette like never cut in line don't piss people off do you join a group quickly or do you stay alone so if you stay alone then you're a loner many people may take advantage of you if you join a group then you may have to satisfy sort of the group requirements which may I don't know how do you avoid extortion so there's a lot of topics that's being discussed what's interesting thing is the US population is so large no one knows everything. The prison consultants don't even know everything. The prison consultants are typically ex wardens or ex guards that worked in a prison but then they were never inmates in a prison. And each prison is different. So out of two million people in prison, each prison houses about two to three thousand people. They're like mini city of their own, but there still are thousands of prisons in the US and every state has different laws. So it's a very very complex thing. Most people think oh you go to prison you just go to prison and then you know good behavior you get a third time less and you get out. But there was so much details in that. So most people don't even know about that. Yeah.
People will have to read the book because there's a lot of very interesting details here. Like one that I remember is you know they obviously self-segregate prisons because they think that'll be less violent. So they put you with Asians but like there weren't enough Asians so they put the indigenous with you guys. Like there's just a lot of like very interesting detail here. And people will have to buy and read the book for all of that.
You know, obviously you do these four months, you're released in September 2024. About a year later, you're pardoned. And you know, one of the things here is when you were pardoned, Wall Street Journal and a bunch of others claimed that it was because Binance had done a series of transactions to help the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and their stablecoin, USD1. And the allegation was that, you know, these sort of friendly dealings and this relationship ultimately led to your pardon. And so I want to just give you a chance to respond to those allegations and say why you think you were pardoned.
So first of all the media started covering about my pardon even before I applied for a pardon. So they Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg wrote my part like I'm wrote I'm trying to get a pardon in January, February and March of 2025. I only applied for a pardon in April 2025. So it was like actually because of those articles saying that no I am probably getting a pardon. I was like well maybe I should apply. So I got a lawyer and you know we filed a petition in April 2025. And also to give the listener the context three days into Trump's administration. No, he declares his pro crypto, right? Three days into his administration, he pardons Ross Ulbricht which is the Silk Road founder who was sentenced for double life back to back, right? For operating Silk Road. Silk Road sold like I don't know drugs, other crazy stuff. Binance did not, right? So and then in March 2025 President Trump also pardoned Arthur Hayes who was the owner of BitMEX which is a crypto futures exchange and Arthur pleaded to a single violation of a banking secrecy act. He never went to jail. He done home confinement and then he was pardoned. So I was like okay so there are two cases where you know the president is looking at crypto cases. So my case I think compared to Arthur like if those guys get pardoned then I should be very eligible for it. So that's one thing and then to address the sort of the transaction side there has been no transactions between me and President Trump or his families right so that just doesn't exist. So and then also on the stable coin side USD1 is the second largest GENIUS compliant stable coin. Binance is the largest exchange. So Binance basically have to list it, right? So if Binance doesn't list it, then Binance will lose market share. So it's actually in Binance's benefit to list it. And also actually inquired about the terms a little bit. Binance for us for USD1 stable coin listing on Binance. Binance gets much more favorable terms than any other stable coin. So Binance benefits from this transaction more than the Trump families by the industry standard. So there's a lot of misconception out there. There's no transactions. It's just that you know the Trump families are pretty heavy into crypto and Binance is one of the largest crypto platforms. Yes, they listed the USD1 but no that's to the extent of it really.
I guess people who, you know, might not be following us closely, you know, they look from the outside and they say, okay, this like Abu Dhabi firm wants to put $2 billion into Binance and they could have done it with any established coin. They could have done it with US dollar and they did it with USD1, which, you know, benefited the president's family. So I guess do you see why some people might think that that middle step might like people might say like oh like you know like I can see why okay they accepted it in USD1 and like maybe there wasn't an official business thing but like that friendliness could have led to the pardon. Like do you see why people might think that?
I heard that argument before but it's nonsense to be honest. It's like look if we accept US dollars does that benefit President Trump? Yes, in some way because that benefits America and what benefits America benefits Mr. Trump too. If you accept and also we as a exchange platform we are happy to accept any major cryptocurrencies and the choice of that specific stable coin was actually chosen by our investor right so we typically like we run an exchange right so any money we receive we can convert it and we don't hold all of that $2 billion always right once we receive it we can convert it however we like so just by receiving a transaction say look you pay me $100 US yeah $100 US benefits America in some way because that increases US dollar dominance. But then once after I receive it, I don't have to hold that all the time. I can change it. So in this case, we just receiving a transaction in USD1, which is a you know, GENIUS compliant stable coin. And so from the Abu Dhabi side, I don't know what the relationships are with, you know, the Trump families or Liberty Finance, but there are relationships, I'm sure. Right. So they choose that so we're the receiver. We're the receiver and we don't have to always we did not always hold it. We hold it for only a short period of time.
Yeah. So just to clarify MGX this Emirati firm chose USD1.
Okay. Okay. One just like thing that I guess I will push you respectfully on is you know the president doesn't make personal money if the transaction is in US dollar. But because USD1 is the stable coin of World Liberty and the Trump family owns 38% of World Liberty, you know, and there's a one to one, their reserve is traded and 4% in treasuries. Like I guess that's the only thing that I'm like there is a little bit of a difference between do you know what I mean?
Yeah. So yeah. No, I think it's good you challenge that. I actually didn't know about the 38% until this minute. So I don't know the sort of those that structure on that side. But also my understanding is most World Liberty USD1 my understanding is they pretty much give most of the interest away to their holders to the users means that means the holders or the family I don't know how much the family makes but the amount of revenue generated for the company for Liberty Finance based on stable coins I'm not sure how much revenue goes to them just by people holding the stable coin I think the holders actually get the interest from the treasury yields So, it's not revenue that directly goes to the Trump families. That's my understanding. Number two is when this for us is like no, this is just a short-term transaction medium. It's not like no, we are holding this and we're giving up the reinvest rate on $2 billion to the Trump family. That's not what we did. And I think the interest generated from the bank for this money actually gets distributed to the holders indirectly anyway. So, that's my understanding. Look, we could have accepted any stable coin. An investor chose one and it was a very high quality stable coin and we accepted it and then we converted to other things very fairly quickly. Yeah.
There was an interesting moment after all of this. You know, there's obviously a lobbying campaign to get you the pardon. That's not uncommon. But you know, Trump sits down with Norah O'Donnell and Trump says when asked about this, he goes, "I don't even know who CZ is." What did you think when he said that?
I think he meant he didn't know me personally. I'm sure at that point he's read about my name and he's heard about my file, my application. There's probably discussions etc. I don't know what the process is on that side. He does not know me personally. We have never met in person. We have never messaged each other. We have never had a phone call. We have never had a discussion. So he doesn't know me.
Personally, whereas the closest I've known him is in Davos afterwards. In Davos, he was on stage at the World Economic Forum. I was in the audience. I didn't even get a chance to say hi to him. I really wanted to say thank you in person, but I haven't had the chance. So he and I don't know each other personally.
In the interview, it sounded like he was saying he didn't know who you were at all, but that's okay. If that's true that he doesn't know who you are, who do you think in his administration made the decision or pushed your pardon? Do you have any sense?
I have no idea. The pardon process is like a black box. You submit a petition. I think there is a White House pardon czar, her name is Alice Johnson. She went to prison, she wrote a book, and her book is really good too. My understanding is my lawyer talked to her to get the status update, but she was like, no, it's in the pipeline. Other than that, there's really not a whole lot of other information that's available. Also, after receiving your pardon, it still feels like a complete black box. My understanding is the US Constitution gives the president the power to do pardons, but it did not specify how. So it's up to the president to say how they want to do it. And also, I think President Trump, every president does it differently, and President Trump is a very unique character. He does a bunch of things differently. So no one really knows, I don't know who discussed it, etc. And President Trump referred to me as a crypto guy when people ask, that crypto guy, right? So he probably doesn't even know how to pronounce my full name properly. So I'm sure that no, hey, look at the file. People, there was a discussion, I would assume. I don't know who's pushing, who's not pushing, but yeah, I'm just very thankful for being able to receive the pardon.
I have one question that's a little bit more about your feelings in all of this, which is, does it bother you when people say that you bought your pardon?
So I don't get bothered by what other people say. There are many supporters of Binance. Like I have 10 million followers on Twitter, they're mostly supporters, and there's actually some haters in there probably too, but it's a very small percentage. And also, I understand the logic on why some people like to spread the misinformation. We have competitors in the US that are very afraid of Binance entering the US, so they lobby very heavily to spread misinformation. Also...
Tell us, who do you think is spreading misinformation about you and Binance?
I would not name it right now. I think it will just cause more scare, etc. And I don't know 100% for sure. All of this is secondhand, gossip, rumor, information type of information, right? Number two is, the US has two parties. The Democrats hate everything the Republicans do, right? So the Democrats want to attack President Trump, and the Democrats also are openly at war on crypto. They're anti-crypto, right? So they don't like Trump, they don't like crypto, they don't like Binance, they don't like CZ. So there's at least two possible motives for people to spread misinformation, or at least negative information, negative spins about me, about the pardon process. So I understand the logic behind it. Once you see through that, there's always going to be some negative voices there. I know 100% there was no transaction related to the pardon. My lawyers told me specifically. Even before I started the process, I said, look, this is a very tough, this is a very black or white one. You don't want to get into more trouble. Even if you don't get a pardon, you are fine. Getting the pardon is great, but you should not get into more trouble to get the pardon. So that part is very clear to me. So I'm not bothered by some guys with their own motives, which kind of logical to them is not great. It's not the way I would do business, but I kind of understand the logic. So it doesn't bother me that much.
You know, zooming out, the Trump family's made 5 billion in one day after its crypto venture launched the cryptocurrency WLFI. Forbes calculated that Trump's wealth grew 3 billion in the year after his election, mostly through crypto. And you know, people look at this and wonder, does it cloud his ability to oversee the industry soundly? And I just wonder how you think about that.
Look, well, so of course my view is very positively biased towards President Trump. I'm very thankful for what he did for me. Also, look, the president has a very powerful position, right? And he's pro-crypto. So everything he does is going to benefit the crypto industry. Well, not everything, most of the things, most of his policies will be for the benefit of growing the crypto industry. And also, look, most of his policies will be for benefiting the US economy. The president also holds stocks in different companies. Is that a self-conflicting interest? Like nobody seems to have a problem with that, right? So why is it only in crypto that his family, his sons may have some holdings in crypto companies, that when he makes a positive policy for crypto that benefits everyone in crypto all around the world, that is a conflict of interest for him, right? So he holds US dollars, he holds US company stocks. Every decision that he makes is going to impact the US dollar, is going to impact the US economy, right? So I'm not a person to judge where the line should be in terms of potential conflict of interest, etc. But I think, look, he can't avoid making good decisions for America and making good decisions for crypto in America, right? And also, lastly, I forgot the name you mentioned, whoever estimated his net worth, I don't know if it's Forbes or Fortune. I've been on the receiving end of high estimates from Forbes. They try to make narratives to sell news. So Forbes estimates there. When you say 5 billion, I would take it with a grain of salt.
Outside of the question of conflict of interest, there's just one other thing people are worried about, which is that, you know, if people think that Trump uses his position to make money on crypto, people will think it's an inside game and that could hurt the whole industry. And I wonder if you worry about even just that perception, perception of conflict of interest or perception of it being an insider game.
I think it's pretty hard to do insider games in crypto. I mean, look, you can launch a token, do whatever you want with your own token. It's pretty hard to get insider information on Bitcoin. You know, Bitcoin is out there. It's traded on thousands of exchanges. Nobody really owns the whole thing. So it's a very decentralized community. And there's many, many different cryptocurrencies in the space, right? So I think it's pretty hard for that to happen. The president, the most powerful person on the planet, he's going to make a lot of impactful decisions from tariffs to wars to geopolitics. There's a lot of big decisions that will have both positive and negative impact, and those decisions do sometimes positively push the stock price up and also push the price down, both in stocks and in crypto. So people hate him for whenever the price goes down, right? So people blame him for whenever price goes down. So there's going to be a lot of hate and there's going to be a lot of blame. But when you're in a powerful position like that, you have to continue to make decisions that are really important and that impacts everyone in the world. So I think there's a lot of misattribution of responsibility. Well, there's a lot of unnecessary hate because of that. But you know, he's made decisions that pushed prices up and down both ways. And my understanding is he's a much more aggressive negotiator than any other previous US president, and he's much more vocal about it, like on Twitter, etc. So yeah, so he has more impact, and then he also gathers a lot more vocal hate, but he also has many strong supporters though.
Okay, I want to do some questions that I think will just be good for the listener because most people don't understand crypto and don't know how crypto is going to affect them in the future. Right now, it seems like the best use case is to move large sums of money across borders with ease, less transaction fees, and just more timely. Do you think people will ever use crypto to buy everyday items?
Yes, I think so. For example, there's a Binance card, it's a Mastercard actually. When you swipe the Mastercard, the merchants get US dollars. The merchant doesn't even know it's a crypto transaction from the user. Your crypto gets deducted from your Binance account in real time. So you can pay for coffee, and Binance doesn't make any fees on it. So it's zero fee. The exchange rate is at real time. It's a very, very good rate. So people are doing that already. Granted, it's a small number of people, but I think it's growing pretty quickly.
Right now, do you see crypto though as a payment or something to invest in?
Right now, to be very frank, it's more of a speculative asset that people view as an investment asset. But not that many people are using crypto for payments, but it is increasing. In 2021, when Binance first launched the Binance card in Europe, they issued more than 2 million cards. And then in 2023, when the US SEC sued Binance, Binance lost the banking partner. So they had to cut off 2 million cards. But now, you know, they're issuing cards again and it's growing very quickly.
El Salvador was sort of billed as the first crypto nation. It hasn't exactly panned out, is my understanding. You know, another country example is Bhutan, which reportedly has sold 70% of its Bitcoin in 18 months. Where do you see country adoption going based on those two examples and just what you're seeing globally?
Okay. So, I think they are still growing quite quickly. El Salvador, I think, they were being laughed at for buying crypto, and then crypto price dropped, but then crypto prices came back, and the price they bought at was much, much lower than crypto prices today, so they did really well on their crypto investments and they saved the country a lot of money. Same with Bhutan. Bhutan is also making a lot of investments and to build more mining power, so they have to sell some existing crypto to fund the future expansion. So they are not holding when you mine their own crypto using hydro power because they're in the mountains. So it's very clean energy. They have excess clean energy. If they don't get into Bitcoin, they have to transfer that energy to India to sell. It's a very complicated process. So it makes a lot of sense for them. Some recent adoptions, like Pakistan is a country of 260 million people, the sixth most populous country in the world, is adopting crypto. You know, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, UAE, many countries in Africa. I'm talking to about a dozen country leaders on a fairly deep level around the world. So from my perspective, countries adopting crypto are just increasing very dramatically. And Thailand, for example, in Asia. Thailand's like 90 million population. Singapore, Binance recently got a license there. I think that's 120 million population. So there's many, many countries still moving forward very aggressively on crypto.
And when you say adopting, do you mean it's like the country is going to make it a legal tender as in people can pay dues and debts and everything through traditional streams but with crypto? Is that what you're saying? I just want to make sure I'm understanding.
So yeah, there's usually quite a number of different aspects. There's the making a legal tender or not. Having proper crypto regulations for exchanges or not. Stablecoin regulations, do you allow stablecoins or not? Do you build a national crypto reserve like a treasury? Does a country actually buy bitcoins and hold it or buy other cryptocurrencies and hold it? So there's a combination of things. Not every country is doing everything at the same time, and usually they do one or two things and then they try to expand.
What is the biggest risk to these countries?
I think the biggest risk is actually just political risk. Look, crypto is new, right? So if you're the country leader, let's say you're a politician that's elected and you adopt crypto and crypto prices go down, and the next election might be harder for you, right? And whereas if you don't do anything, you say, look, I did. So this is like same to people who work at a large company. If you don't do anything, you actually might be safer than doing something new. When you do something new, then if something goes wrong, then your career may be jeopardized. Whereas, you know, if you stay off the risk and just do nothing, stay the status quo, sometimes you keep, you know, slowly inch up. So I think that's probably the biggest risk career-wise for some of these people. But at the same time, this high price volatility in crypto, so, you know, people get blamed for it, but at the same time, if you don't adopt this technology, you're going to be left out in the future finance world, right? So if you imagine if you don't adopt the internet, if you don't adopt AI, later this industry develops in other countries, then you're going to be blamed. The same thing with the blockchain industry. If you don't adopt this new technology and the rest of the world moves ahead of you, then you're going to be left behind in the future fintech world.
