CZ Blog Revisits the FTX Collapse Saga and Binance Launchpad Controversy

Editor's note: On September 25, Binance founder CZ appeared on the podcast "When Shift Happens," where he reflected on his journey from an immigrant family to founding Binance, how his team reached global No. 1 within six months, and responded to why listed projects have disappointed investors, the tweet blamed for "killing FTX," and his deepest fear while in prison. He also discussed the rise of meme coins, the future of trading platforms, and the life transformation AI might bring. Below is the original podcast content:

If I told you the biggest shift in your life hasn't happened yet, what do you think it would be

I don't know what it would be. But I believe the opportunities in the future are always greater than those in the past. The pace of change and transformation is accelerating, and the scale is growing. Before the internet, it was hard to change the entire world at once; now information flows more freely, we have a network for money — blockchain — and now we have AI. So I think there will be quite a lot of major shifts in the future, I just can't say exactly what they'll be. I think AI will bring massive efficiency gains, which will further accelerate these shifts.

Let's start from the very beginning — who are you

I guess I'm a "crypto guy," that's what President Trump calls me. I'm a firm believer in blockchain technology, and my biggest contribution has probably been in this area, and I'll continue to devote most of my energy here. I frequently visit different countries to advise them on crypto regulatory frameworks, so people usually see me as a "crypto salesman."

Many of our guests share one thing in common: a childhood trauma that gave them a defiant drive. What happened in your life that explains how you became one of the 20 richest people in the world before turning 50

First, I don't think my ranking is correct. I might be outside the top 100, or around 500. There are many people who aren't on this list at all, and a large portion of my assets are concentrated at peak values (note: referring to the high volatility of token holdings).

As for why the list says that, I have no idea. I think they just want to sell news — putting a crypto person near the top probably attracts more attention. I also heard a rumor that one of our Chinese competitors paid some journalists to rank me higher so I'd be scrutinized more closely. But I can't confirm that.

So where does that drive come from

I can't recall any traumatic childhood experiences, but my family was quite poor when I was young. We immigrated to Canada as a family, and both my parents worked near-minimum-wage jobs. Some of my friends came from wealthy investment immigrant families from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. So there was definitely some pressure growing up. But overall there was no trauma — I have many great Taiwanese friends, and they and their families have always been good to me. There was just inevitably some comparison.

I consider myself very lucky to stand on my parents' shoulders. They immigrated to Canada for me and my sister. I'm a second-generation immigrant. People often say that second-generation immigrants watch their parents work hard — first-generation immigrants, because of poor English, usually do near-minimum-wage labor — and it's the second generation who sees that hardship and wants to push forward. I think that environment drives me. By the third and fourth generations, it usually degrades.

You mentioned your sister — what does she do

She's also in tech. She used to work at a startup in Tokyo, then went to Morgan Stanley, where she became a managing director at a young age — Morgan Stanley has only about 400 managing directors globally out of 100,000 employees, so she was extremely successful professionally. She was at a big company and retired around age 42. She had postpartum depression after having a child, and a year later she resigned and retired, and she's now fully recovered. So now she counsels people going through depression.

You said the third and fourth generations degrade — how do you prevent that from happening to your children and your children's children

I'm not sure, I don't have the answer yet, and I don't know what really works. Also, I don't count — I have children, but my children don't have children yet, so I can put this question off a bit longer. I think about it occasionally, but I really don't know what the solution is. I think education is key, but it's hard, really hard.

There's a famous video from 1999 of Jack Ma pitching Alibaba to 17 co-founders in his living room. Take us back to Binance's first day — if someone were in your living room then, what would they see

Binance's start was a bit different. At the time we already had a team of 15 to 20 people working at a company called BJ Tech, selling trading systems to other trading platforms. About 80 to 90 percent of our clients weren't crypto trading platforms but traditional markets — stamp trading, jade trading, things like that — but they used order books to trade. I had led this team for two years, and the business was stable.

Then in May 2017, I called everyone into a meeting room and said: now might be a good time for us to build a crypto trading platform. I said, if we don't do it, this thought will keep coming back to me again and again; if I don't do it in this lifetime, I'll probably still end up doing it. And I felt we had everything we needed — the product, the system, the team. What we lacked were a few things: a marketing team and customer service. BJ Tech was a B2B business; we had sales and account managers, but no customer service. Anyway, I called everyone into the meeting room, and everyone said yes, let's do it. Then we discussed domain names — I had two options — and ultimately chose Binance. It was that moment. That meeting room was even smaller than this one.

If I were a fly on the wall in that meeting room, what would I see that other trading platforms' meeting rooms didn't have, that let you go from zero to global No. 1 in six months

I don't know about other trading platforms, but there was nothing particularly magical in ours. Just a very hardworking, very pragmatic team with almost no ego, very humble, strong execution, and very much in sync with each other. Everyone on the team trusted me and was basically willing to follow me to the ends of the earth. I said we're going to do this, and everyone followed.

There's a bit of Asian culture in this. In the West, to do something you first have to discuss it, and everyone has to share their perspective; in Asian culture, once people follow a leader, they follow almost blindly, and sometimes it's actually hard to get feedback from them. The upside of this culture is that as long as the direction is right, execution is extremely strong; the downside is that if the leader's direction is wrong, it's usually a disaster. We were lucky — the direction was right.

What does "hard work" mean to you

"Hard work" means different things to different people. But I believe producing results and having impact is more important than long hours. Many people work long hours but produce nothing. Making high-quality products that people love while also working long hours — that's what truly matters. Usually people with passion — you measure them not by hours but by how much they love it and how quickly they can produce high-quality results. But to do that, you need a group of extremely passionate people, and they do have to work quite hard and quite long hours. It's just that because they genuinely love it, they don't feel like they're suffering. That's how people outcompete others.

Especially in finance, people don't really count hours. There's something that needs to get done, sometimes starting at 9 p.m. after putting the kids to bed, finishing before midnight, sometimes even staying up until morning. That's how things get done.

What's the biggest misconception people have about Binance

There are quite a few misconceptions. Some people think it's a Chinese company, but it's not — we have many Chinese employees. Others think centralized exchanges are bad, are evil, but we've actually been pushing decentralization all along. It's just that today most people — most people in crypto — prefer using centralized exchanges, preferring email passwords and customer service over wallet addresses. But I believe the future is decentralized, so we'll invest very heavily in that direction.

Why do so many projects listed on Binance ultimately disappoint investors

In any market, any industry, by project count, most projects will fail. Look at the internet — there might have been millions of internet companies back then, and today only a few dozen or a few hundred succeed. Only a handful become truly big. AI companies will be the same — most will die, but the survivors will be extremely successful.

The difference is that tokens are public, anyone can invest, so anyone can get burned. In the internet era, not everyone could invest. Put another way — wouldn't you want to have invested in Anthropic when it was still small? In any new industry, most companies will fail, but the industry itself usually survives, and a small group of companies will do extremely well.

As for whether investors should be allowed in earlier, that's another topic, a whole other debate. I personally don't agree with the "accredited investor protection" logic — using that kind of protection to keep you out of early investments ultimately just makes everyone poorer.

From many economics books, you can see that most Americans became wealthy because they could access the stock market, and because there was a good stock market. If you take that away, many people would be much poorer. Today in many countries outside the US, stock markets aren't as strong, and investors in those markets get lower returns, and these people often can't access the US stock market. So should we give more people equal access to investment opportunities, or "protect" them by keeping them out? It's debatable, and I don't know the standard answer. But my philosophy is usually: give people opportunities, give people education, let people decide for themselves. That's also why we do tokens, and now asset tokenization.

If project teams have to pay for market makers, pay for launchpads, pay for exchanges, can retail investors still win

Yes. The short answer is "yes." But there's obviously a lot of delicate balance here. Take advertising — you can do it well or you can do it badly. If you make false promises in advertising, then of course people will get hurt. But between false and true, it's not always black and white — it's a gradient scale. You can overhype, you can use ambiguous wording that's easily misinterpreted, and there's a lot of room to operate in that gray zone.

We certainly encourage everyone to do the right thing, to do things the proper way. How? I think it's a whole combination: encourage founders to do the right thing; educate users to pick good projects, teach them how to evaluate projects, not just look at hype and marketing but at fundamentals; plus regulatory frameworks — most countries have disclosure requirements for stock markets, while the crypto market is still very underdeveloped in this regard. So combining these things is important.

But overall, in the long run, in any new industry there will be people who are good at over-packaging and over-marketing, and some of them can gain short-term benefits at the expense of users, but in the long run they can't survive. The platforms or projects that survive are definitely built solidly and sustainably. So the market has a self-screening mechanism — let the market decide.

Can you explain four meme to my mom

I don't know if your mom understands memes. Let me put it this way: there's a fairly active group of people who will trade any token as long as there's some culture, some joke, some meme behind it. The four meme crowd will look for anything fun with a bit of viral potential.

Four meme evolved gradually. The original "4" came from a tweet I posted in 2023, which was a New Year's resolution. I said in the new year I'd do less and focus on three positive things: education, regulatory compliance, and product. The fourth thing was to ignore FUD, ignore fake news and negative narratives. Then I said, whenever I see FUD from now on, I'll just post a "4," and you all help explain what that means. The community loved this idea.

Sure enough, within 24 hours a negative article came out, I posted a "4," and everyone was happy — not everyone, but a lot of people jumped in to play along, and it became a trend. Later a community member posted a selfie holding up four fingers, I thought it was cool and people liked it, so a few weeks later I posted one too, which made it even more popular. Then it gradually evolved. Two years later today, my meme is very popular, with probably a thousand "4" memes circulating. That's its origin — a long-winded answer.

You turned a single number into one of the most influential memes in crypto. But every founder has scars — was there ever a time you posted "4" while thinking: "Damn, they might actually be right"

I think most of the time I post "4" because I know there's something inaccurate in that news. So I don't think I've ever gone too far, but others might have.

That tweet that "ended FTX"

As part of Binance's exit from its equity investment in FTX, we received approximately $2.1 billion equivalent in cash (BUSD and FTT). Given the recent revelations, we decided to liquidate the remaining FTT on our books. — This was your tweet from November 6, 2022, and it quickly ended FTX. One of your biggest competitors, FTX co-founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, said your tweet killed FTX. Is there any part of you that thinks he's right?

Absolutely not. Why? If a competitor posting one tweet can kill your company, then you don't really have a company. If he had been running a company from the start that I could kill with one tweet, he never would have had that company. It doesn't make logical sense. I can tweet about any company, and it won't collapse.

FTX collapsed for multiple reasons. I don't know exactly what they were, but no company collapses because of a competitor's tweet, no matter how big that competitor is. Today if you build a strong AI chip company, and Jensen Huang tweets that they're going to sell shares, sell your token — as long as your product is good, you have real customers, and you manage cash well, your company won't collapse. The stock price might fluctuate, but the company won't collapse. It's that simple. Anyone with basic logic will understand that no company collapses because someone posted a tweet.

So you completely didn't expect it, or you underestimated the impact a single tweet could have

I don't think my tweet played that big a role. It was just one link in a chain of events. For example, CoinDesk published an article three or four days earlier saying they might already be insolvent. The fact is they lied to their own customers, misappropriated customer funds, said the money was all there when they had actually used it to buy other things, and they had no liquidity. Honestly, I didn't know these things at the time.

I just said: we exited five years ago, but we still hold FTT tokens, and I said we plan to sell them. I felt it would be better for us, for Binance Group, to be clear and transparent about disposing of the tokens. So it was more like a public disclosure tweet, and I didn't expect it to have any impact. And I said in the tweet that we would sell in batches over several months to avoid impacting the market price. I never know how the market will react, and I truly didn't anticipate the market volatility that followed.

But you know, Alameda's CEO — Caroline Ellison — also tweeted 20 minutes after my tweet. Many people said her tweet revealed more information than mine. Who knows.

In the FTX collapse, is there anything that no one has figured out to this day

I don't know of any other inside story. My understanding is simply: they misappropriated customer funds, took billions of dollars of customer money to buy other things, and then when the market turned, customers couldn't withdraw. That's it.

What was the hardest period of your life

There have been several difficult periods. I mentioned in my book that right after Binance launched, we did a BNB ICO, and BNB started trading as soon as the platform went live, but it fell below the ICO price and stayed there for about two and a half weeks. That was a very hard period in my life. The psychological pressure was enormous — tens of thousands of people bought this token, essentially investing in us, and they were losing money at the time. Fortunately it only lasted two and a half weeks.

Later, going to the US and dealing with the US government was also very agonizing — that lasted a year and a half, two years. Those things were all very stressful.

What belief did you carry with you when you went to prison, and what did you let go of when you came out

Rather than a belief, it was more a fear. I was very worried at the time that I would be locked up there permanently — that they would add another charge, then another, turning into endless charges. Fortunately they didn't; it ended there. That was my biggest concern.

It looks like Andrew Tate is going through that kind of thing right now. I don't know much about his case, and I try not to comment on other people's legal cases. In my case, no one in American history had ever gone to prison for a single violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, and that remains true today. Most people wouldn't even be prosecuted, and the vast majority of bank executives aren't prosecuted either — some just get a deferred prosecution agreement. From