The Meteoric Rise of Crypto Exchange Binance
The rise of Binance is one of the most astonishing stories in the blockchain space. Within less than a year of its launch, Binance has become the most popular crypto exchange trading over $2bn per day. Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”) joined us to discuss the extraordinary organization they built. We discussed how their strong commitment to values helped build a loyal community, and how he sees the organization evolve in the future.
Even though Changpeng Zhao often mentions luck as a factor which led to the extraordinarily quick success of Binance, it is without a doubt that his excellent management skills and value-driven leadership played a huge role in creating such a profitable business so quickly. Binance started in June 2017 and already in the past quarter its profits reached $200m — likely as the first company in history achieving this level in such a short amount of time.
Changpeng spent most of his career building software for exchanges and trading systems for brokers. His journey in the blockchain space begun in 2013 when he joined blockchain.info, a wallet app, and later on became a co-founder of a Chinese exchange OkCoin. In July 2017 he raised $15mln to start Binance, a crypto-to-crypto exchange. We started doing the right thing at the right time, when the market exploded. And there was a lot of luck! explains Changpeng.
Binance is a value-driven business, and at the core of its mission is spreading freedom — in terms of investment, exchange of value and holding different kinds of assets. Protecting users benefits is one area in which the company clearly ‘walks the talk’. One example are decisions that followed when the Chinese government shut down exchanges, changed regulation, and requested that any ICO project should return the funds to the investors soon after the Binance launch — which turned out a blessing in disguise. At that point, Changpeng decided to protect the Binance users’ interests at all costs, and the company refunded the ICO assets worth ~6mln USD to their investors at the original rate. Thanks to that, and other choices focused on putting their users first, the Binance gained one of the most supportive and loyal communities in the space. Interestingly, many people who became financially independent through buying into the Binance coin, keep supporting the company on a voluntary basis. You can’t copy that model unless you have that kind of value system, says CZ.
Regarding his outlook on regulation, Changpeng attests that Binance always adopts a stance that we will never go against any government, and the company will always operate legally in any jurisdiction. Nevertheless, they are looking for countries that have favourable regulations. We’ve gone past the point where all countries view crypto and blockchain negatively and we’ll see more positive regulatory adoption. The worry about regulations killing industry is gone, now it’s about the speed — which countries will see it as business opportunity first, claims CZ.
Changpeng expects a bright future for blockchain and crypto — he is convinced that more and more countries will adopt favourable and smarter regulations, positive for the entire industry progress as a whole. One example of such a forward-thinking country is Malta, where the government knows the importance of a healthily growing blockchain ecosystem. Changpeng is confident that other jurisdictions will soon follow that example and understand that a favourable approach, adopted to the new industries, is necessary for them to stay globally competitive.
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