CZ on "Freedom of Money" and Future of Crypto: Unfiltered AMA with Binance

Okay. Yeah. Well, you're very welcome for the mention. I think for people who don't know, Speak is the one who actually created the four-hand sign. So he was the one that first tweeted the picture and then I retweeted. So we have a long history. Well, we have a few years of history with the four sign now. And Speak has always been a very good, very strong supporter of our ecosystem. Speaking of funding, currently I'm kind of in a nice state where I advise projects, I help other project founders, we're a passive investor in many of them. So I kind of enjoy that phase. And also Binance.com has strong leaders. The business is doing well. The platform is doing well. Normally when there's a high risk when the founder CEO steps away, but Binance has weathered that even with a lot of political pressure, even with two monitors in the company, etc. So they have done really well. So I currently have no plans to go back and I have no plans to do another startup. I am monitoring and learning about the AI space. I'm spending quite a lot of time there. Also EasyLabs invests quite heavily in AI, robotics, biotech, plus crypto of course. So, currently no plans, but I think I'm also kind of older. I'm not as young as like 10 years ago. So, currently no plans, but I wouldn't rule out anything in the future. People change over time, like, you know, five years, 10 years from now, I might get bored. Who knows? But starting a company requires a lot of stamina. It's a very physically demanding job. So I'm not sure in a few years I will still have that physical stamina to do it, but I encourage all other people who want to do it to do it as early as possible and then to control the risk. And I would love to help some of the stronger founders.

Now thanks for that. Let's move to the next one. I don't know if Ju is okay now. Maybe not. Let's go to Randy then. I think Randy is a BTC baby or something. A BTC teen.

Okay. Still pretty young. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Great question. Even when I was really young, I was involved in a couple different small startups. I was like a developer to some of the guys who were doing startups. So I had exposure to entrepreneurship when I was quite young and I worked in a bunch of small companies. Even Fusion Systems Japan was like, when they were sold there was like I don't know, 200-300 people company. So those are not big companies. And then I worked in one large company, Bloomberg. I think at the time they had 3,000 people and then by the time I left four years later they were like 5,000-6,000 people-ish. That was like a big bureaucracy kind of for me and I kind of understood that I probably would not thrive in a big company. It's just that my personality, I'm not really fit for a nine-to-five job for 20 years. I just couldn't see that in myself. So I tried many different startups. So I think people who want stability, they can work in a large company, there's nothing wrong with it, you can do very very well there, but it's a much more structured, much more fixated structure. Whereas for me, I always kind of more enjoyed the more freedom, less structure, more kind of dynamic environment in smaller teams and startups. So I've always kind of spent time in those areas and then in those areas sooner or later you're going to want to do your own startup. I have many failed startups before. So my advice to people who want to do it is to control the risk so that when you fail you don't lose a lot of money and you're not heavily in debt. Ideally when you get investments as a startup you want those to be investments and not loans. So you don't want to be obligated to pay, but I actually paid all my investors out of my failed startups. I made everybody whole. But I also took small investments. So there's a slow progression of buildups and to be very frank at multiple times like I questioned am I going to make it or no or I'm just going to struggle along. But all the time I knew I couldn't go back to a large company. If I go back to a large company I can do it for a few years but then I would be bored. So you slowly build it up and then for me I had a slow build up. I first built up my technical skills and then I started building and then I was a junior partner in Fusion System Shanghai where I did a lot of business development. So more like sales skills and then afterwards it was okay. I tried, I stepped into crypto, I worked in a few companies kind of got a feel for the landscape which was quite raw and then the ICO came. I was like, 'Okay, maybe I can do an ICO. It would be successful.' I can raise at, you know, 10-15 million dollars. And then at that time, I slowly built a team around me. And then we got pretty lucky. We were able to catch the ICO wave in 2017. And then we continued to grow as we protected our users. So, it was a combination of things. Everybody will have a different journey. And most founders have very different journeys and very different personalities too. So you just got to find out what fits you and what interests you, what's best for you and what's valuable for the world. If you can provide value to other people, to the world, then you can realize a portion of it. Then you'll likely do well. So yeah, that's kind of a summary. There's really no magic bullet there. It just kind of happened for me. It just kind of happened organically through multiple decades. Like basically I spent 17 years working before I founded Binance. So I'm not one of those genius, you know, garage college dropout founders, but those are very few. They make headlines, but those are very few. So yeah, so that's my journey.

No worries. Thanks. Thanks for the support.

Okay. Let me translate that to English a little bit and then answer it. So the question was, one of the phrases I had in my book was, in life when you're at the bottom of a valley, what do you do, right? And then you just keep walking. So that's what I actually learned when I was really young. I learned that before Binance, before probably even before crypto. And in my life, every time there's a stressful situation, there's something bad happening, etc., you're kind of at a low. In my life, usually if you wait for a couple days, things usually turn better. Either you mentally get used to it and or things change. It's usually not as bad as it seems. I can recall a few vivid instances where that happened. Even when I was really young, in between jobs, there was one time in between jobs I took a consulting gig when I was like really young. So I was basically a freelance consultant by myself. I did that for a couple of months but the contract renews every month. This is actually not in the book. The contract renews every month and then at the end of the month I wasn't sure if the client's going to renew next month and then at that time if I don't get it next month then my finances would be impacted. I was like literally two years out of college or so, like a few years out of college. There was one period where I was in between jobs and the pressure was quite high at that point and that's when I learned about this phrase. Luckily a few days later the client did renew for another month and then I decided to look for a more permanent job at that time. So there are situations like this and also like for example when I was dealing with the court sentencing in 2024, you know it's stressful. After the Binance go live, I wrote this in the book very clearly, that was a very stressful period. But the question is like how do you know which direction, if you keep walking how do you know which direction you're walking? Are you, if you go the wrong direction are you going to be stuck there forever or are you gonna keep going? Now I think most of the time in life you can figure out the direction, you know what you're doing is working or not. If it's not working then yeah you have to pivot, you have to change directions a bit. There are some people who get stuck in a situation that they couldn't get out of. Then you need to change your circumstance or habits. It's usually because you're either spending too much money, you're spending more money than you can earn or you have some habit or you have some situation that if you just keep doing the same thing it wouldn't work. Then in those cases you have to change something. Like I don't know, of course everybody has a different situation but the most common one is people overspend, right? So people just get a habit of spending a certain amount and then they struggle to meet that demand and then they're kind of always in a struggle. What you want to do is, I come from a Chinese culture in this instance, my parents always say savings no matter how little you earn. I believe that in today most people can have some savings and then you just look, you can cut out beer, you can cut out going to the bar, you can cut out going to restaurants, you can cut out a lot of things and you can still, I think to feed yourself is not that hard. And then you can spend a bit of time to learn something every day. Improve yourself a little bit every day. Learn a new skill every day. Read a book every day or read a part of a book every day. If you change some of those habits and continue to have that mindset, I can't imagine you can't get out of your current situation. Like I have nothing against some of the blue collar workers etc. But I think look if you're a construction worker, if you're waiting tables at a restaurant, if you're washing dishes at a restaurant, which I've done, you can still squeeze out some time to improve yourself a little bit every day. If you consistently do that and control your expenses so that you have a little bit of savings every day, then you'll regain control of your life and you'll slowly improve. It may take a long time to get to like financial freedom, right? But it may take multiple years, multiple decades, but if you improve every day, people feel happy when they see improvement but many people don't think about it and they just continue to overspend and then they're always in debt and then they don't learn. They just know, I mean they get tired after working but they don't go home and read a book, they just go home and watch TV and they spend too much time on social media, chatting with friends, nothing that helps them in the long run. Some of those things give them short-term dopamine, but if you're not improving yourself in the long term, then you're going to get stuck. So, it's a fairly long-winded answer, but I strongly believe that everyone can get out of their or can improve their lives or should improve their lives over time. So, that's just how I view it. I may have an optimistic view. Some people may have a pessimistic view but I also think that having an optimistic view is very important in life. If you have an optimistic view you tend to improve over time. Yeah. So I don't know if that helps.

Let's move on to... Yeah. Thanks for your support as always. Yeah. Okay, let's move on to Yan.

Okay, I think well, the three parts, number one is finishing the book. Number one, it feels like a... it's just a long project. Okay, let's mute. Yeah, it's just a very long project. It takes a lot of time to write, edit, review, and then there were a lot of discussions about whether we go with a publisher or not. How do we get an ISBN, like the book numbers? Do we self-publish etc. How do we design the cover? There was just a lot of details in publishing a book. So I'm just very happy that we got it out. There's a second part of it is I actually read a lot of other memoirs and also read a few like how to write memoirs from other famous authors. I think Lena and Lemon wrote a number of books, memoirs. She's quite funny. And through that experience I learned that your first draft, they call the first shitty draft, the first draft is always going to be bad. So you're just going to write whatever you have in your mind and then you keep editing and you have to edit it like I don't know 10-20 times which I kind of did and each iteration is like two-three weeks right if you're editing like a 300-page document. And then other people pitch in, they make the edits, you have to review so it's just a long process. And then the other thing is when you write a memoir you're almost guaranteed to offend people because if you want to be honest about it and it's just not a glowing book everywhere, everything is really happy, everything's really good. You're going to have to talk about the problems that you face. So, I talked in a lot of detail about the problems I faced. And when you talk about the problems you face, you kind of have to talk about some of the things you feel, right? Including people. And of course, you're going to piss off people and we may have different... So they say writing a memoir is a really good way to offend many friends. Which is true. And so, you have to live with that. And then you're also going to be picked apart. People attack, people pick a part of your life and attack you etc. So I think I got to a place in my life I feel comfortable being picked apart. I'm usually pretty public anyway. So but just that using social media you publish like 70 or 140 characters at a time. Whereas a book gives a much more comprehensive view of what you went through and you can tell your story, I can tell my story using my own voice, my own narrative, my own views which is quite helpful especially I believe for me, for crypto, and for Binance we kind of always on the receiving end of negative narratives with negative spins. So I think that's a really important thing to get out. So I really want people to understand from my at least from my subjective perspective what we went through, how some of the decisions were made and how I view some of the mistakes we made etc. I don't intend the book to be like educational or like a coaching etc. But it's just I think that my story, the stuff I went through is crazy enough that it kind of makes an interesting story by itself. I don't need to exaggerate anything. In fact, I took a lot of juicy stuff out of the book. So, if I write this book 10 years later, I can probably put some of that back in in a second edition. There will be a lot more juicy stuff that I couldn't write about today because either they're too new, they're too recent or there's ongoing discussions or there's ongoing lawsuits, litigations, and stuff like that that I just couldn't put in the book. So I would have a lot more to put in but I think the fundamental message I want to get out is just for people to understand how we got here and who we are. I think there's just a lot of misconception about who Binance is, who I am, what crypto is, what crypto companies do, what crypto exchanges do. And so I just put it out there and then yeah so that's kind of all I wanted.

Yeah, thanks Yan as always. Thanks for the support. So, let's go to Ley Torren.

Ah okay. Okay. So, yeah. So the question is really when I started Binance, I talked to a bunch of VC friends and none of them invested and they may regret it. And how when I do investments today, how do I avoid that today and what do I look for in founders and projects? I think to be frank, it's bound to happen. Many, especially early stage projects, like there's an idea, there's a founder with some experience but the project hasn't launched yet, it's very hard to judge if that project's going to be successful or not. You can bet on the founder, you can pretty much only bet on the founder at that point. So I'm not, to be honest, if I was a VC investor at that time I might pass on it too. And there's probably many good projects or founders that we pass today that may become strong projects. I think it just happens in VC investing you won't be able to get into 100% of the projects. You could if you invest in every project that comes to you but then 99.999% of them will fail and if that percentage is high enough you're going to lose money in the long run even if you have a few successes. So ideally you want to get to a point where your failure rate is like somewhere between 70 to 80% and hopefully 10% of the projects you invest in are going to be successful and they're going to go up more than 100x. So you're net positive from an investment return, from ROI perspective. For me I look for founders that are mission-driven. So there are founders who talk about potential market etc. how much money they're going to make. And the mission-focused founders sometimes you can see, this is why I actually like to invest in bear markets. In bear markets like look if crypto is crashing down and this guy is still launching something, some protocol, most likely the guy's going to be there for a while, the guy will be there during the next bear market too. In bull markets there's many projects with very high valuations, they're overexcited but it's very hard to tell which one's going to last, right? Who's going to be around when there's a bear market and how do they survive that. So I actually personally like to invest in mission-driven founders in bear markets. So I don't know if that's a strategy you can call that a strategy or not. I don't control when the bear markets happen. But we just try to be more active when the market is not good. When the market is good, the valuations are too high. I don't like to invest in projects that have huge valuations compared to that stage. I mean look, if you got 100 million users, you can yes you can command a high valuation. But if you have no product, no users and you want a $100 million valuation for me that's just too crazy. So yeah so I look for founders who are more down to earth, who are more mission-driven and we also look at other fundamentals. Ideally if they have a product already, if they have a demo already etc. Today with AI you can mock up a prototype very very quickly so I like to see teams that can execute quickly, that don't get stuck in one stage. So yeah so that's kind of what I look for. There's a lot more to it obviously. The EasyLabs team does much more thorough due diligence, investigations etc. That's their job. I just get a feel for the founder. So yeah hope that helps. Yeah and also the interesting point is my Chinese is not so good and in the Chinese version but most people expect that I do speak Chinese to a proficient level. So when they were editing the book for the Chinese version, like putting a lot of fancy words in Chinese that I don't even know how to read. I'm like I cannot have words in my book in Chinese that I don't know how to read. If it's a language I cannot read completely that's fine. So I actually had to change quite a lot of the Chinese edits to be very simple so that I can read it. So that's why both the English and Chinese version are very simple. The other languages I can't proofread them. So we'll see how they go. Yeah. All right. Moving on. So yeah thanks for the support.

Yellow pen. Yeah.

Good question. I'm not sure how there is a conclusive way. There are multiple little ways to tell. Well, number one is if a project's been around for a while and has been under active development for multiple cycles, then most likely that project will stay. I think GitHub activity is probably one of the clearest metrics to tell. If there's a lot of commits, there's a lot of coding, there's a lot of developers contributing to it. Then that's usually an active project that's being developed and continue to evolve. I think that's basically the project has a heartbeat. That's probably one of the important signals to have for a project. Many projects will make a splash. They will have a good marketing effort. They will launch a version but then you see a fall in the GitHub activities before the price. So the GitHub activities is probably one strong way. The longevity of the project, like projects that have been through multiple cycles are usually going to continue to be developed during the next bear cycle. There are some notable projects that was hyped in one cycle and they kind of dropped off. Again with the risk of pissing some people off, like Quantum was really hot in 2017 and they kind of dropped off. I don't hear about them at all. Neo was a top 10 token in 2017. I think they're still being developed but the amount of activity is much lower now. And the founder did multiple other projects, all of which are also like one pump and then the activities go away. So I look at coding activity on GitHub a lot more than the price. And then newer projects it's very hard to tell. Newer projects also you can look at the founder history. I mean the founder, you know, every two years works on a different project, then the expected life, the life expectancy of a new project by that founder is probably also going to be two years. Of course there are going to be special cases. The founder may have something that lasts for a very long time. And then so there are multiple indications. And you can also talk to the founder but most founders will say oh they're committed to the project for the long term but you got to look at the history, you got to look at the team etc. For me it's really GitHub commits and multiple cycles history. So yeah so that's kind of what I look at.