CZ's Latest Interview: Now Is the Best Era for Entrepreneurship—Being a Stable Cog Is the Most Dangerous Illusion

Compiled & Translated by: TechFlow (深潮)

TechFlow Introduction: In a globally exclusive interview with PIVOT, a renowned Japanese business and financial media outlet, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), founder of Binance, sat down for an in-depth, long-form conversation with PIVOT's Chief Global Editor, Ryuichiro Takeshita. As the iconic figure at the helm of the world's largest crypto trading platform, CZ for the first time systematically reviewed Binance's early and deep-rooted ties with Japan, candidly recounted his true inner journey through the 2023–2024 compliance storm, stepping down as CEO, and serving four months in prison, and fully unveiled the lifelong mission he has thrown himself into: Giggle Academy, a zero-cost platform aimed at eliminating the global education gap.

When discussing future tech trends, CZ stated unequivocally: AI's explosive scale-up will inevitably come with an absolute hard requirement for blockchain and Crypto-Native digital currencies. In the future, billions of autonomously collaborating AI agents will be unable to rely on traditional banking systems to settle micro-payments—cryptocurrency is the only native bloodstream of the machine economy era. Facing a global economic and technological inflection point, he issued a penetrating call to the younger generation: break free from the mediocre framework of traditional lifetime employment, confront uncertainty head-on, boldly enter the arena and start a business, and embrace the boundless opportunities of this era.

Guest: Changpeng Zhao / CZ (Founder of Binance, Initiator of Giggle Academy)

Host: Ryuichiro Takeshita (Chief Global Editor, PIVOT)

Podcast Source: PIVOT 公式チャンネル (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hmlgUN-42E)

Original Title: 【日本独占インタビュー：バイナンス創業者CZ】"AI×ブロックチェーン"の革命とは？／服役後の億万長者が次に賭けるもの／5年以内に来る変化／日本企業が今すぐ備えるべきこと【PIVOT GLOBAL】

Air Date: October 24, 2026

Key Takeaways

• The Japanese DNA of Binance's Core Matching Engine: CZ's first software engineering job after graduation was in Tokyo, developing order routing and matching systems for the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). That hardcore geek experience of manually managing low-level memory allocation and pointers in C++ laid the absolute foundation for Binance years later to build a high-performance architecture capable of supporting millions of transactions per second.
• Crisis Management and Full Compensation Worth 40% of the Treasury: In 2017, the Binance team relocated to Tokyo due to domestic regulatory policy changes and reached global No. 1 within just five months. Facing user panic triggered by industry upheaval, Binance voluntarily paid $6 million out of its own pocket (40% of the platform's total reserves at the time) to fully compensate affected users—even though it bore no legal liability—thereby establishing an unbreakable moat of user trust.
• Tax Relief and the Wave of Tokenizing Everything (RWA): Japan plans to cut the tax rate on crypto asset gains from a maximum of 55% to 20%, treating them on par with traditional stocks, which will powerfully reactivate domestic market liquidity. CZ pointed out that the future financial competition among sovereign nations lies not only in stablecoins but also in the tokenization of all assets (covering government bonds, stocks, real estate, and even natural assets such as transnational water resources), which will restructure the high-speed circulation pathways of global capital.
• Facing the Cost of Compliance Calmly—Stepping Down as a Gift of Life: Having served four months in the U.S. for a single violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, CZ emphatically stressed that there was no fraud and no victims in the case. Despite the painful twists and turns in life, he views stepping down as CEO as a liberation bestowed by fate: at 49, full of energy and with vast resources at his disposal, he was completely freed from the endless daily chores of running an exchange, allowing him to freely choose a new path capable of creating the greatest social good.
• Lifelong Mission Giggle Academy: Building Perpetually Free Education: Faced with 700 million illiterate adults and 500 million out-of-school children worldwide, as well as the flaw of traditional schooling molding students into homogenized mediocrity, CZ invests $5 million annually to maintain a 50-person R&D team building a zero-cost education app based on AI and gamification mechanisms. The platform has grown from zero to 2 million children in two years, aims to reach hundreds of millions of children in the future, and explores forming a century-spanning, self-sustaining positive-cycle ecosystem through the voluntary giving back of assisted students later in life.
• The AI Agent Economy Must Have Cryptocurrency as Its Bloodstream: In the future, every human user will have hundreds or thousands of autonomous AI agents executing tasks on their behalf. AI agents cannot open accounts at traditional banks or swipe credit cards; only permissionless, second-level-confirmation crypto can support massive, high-frequency micro-payments on demand. The deep integration of AI and blockchain will, within five years, increase the velocity of asset and transaction circulation across society by a thousandfold to a millionfold.
• Hardcore Advice to Young People: End the Salaryman Fantasy and Boldly Pursue Entrepreneurship: The current era is the golden window in the history of human commerce with the lowest barriers, strongest empowerment, and highest probability of success for founding startups. CZ strongly advises young people to master the new tools of AI and blockchain as early as possible, break free from the shackles of Japan's traditional lifetime employment iron rice bowl, and courageously embrace the entrepreneurial path that is full of challenges but also extremely high returns.

II. Highlights

• "Binance's original underlying system actually originated from the days and nights twenty years ago when I was in Tokyo writing C++ code for a stock exchange. Technology tools keep evolving, but the relentless pursuit of underlying performance and stability has never changed."
• "In 2017, we paid out $6 million to compensate users—that money accounted for 40% of Binance's entire treasury reserves at the time. We could have chosen not to do it, but protecting users is always the core secret behind Binance's ability to grow into the industry's No. 1."
• "In the future fintech contest among sovereign nations, there are only two core watersheds: one is the regulation of exchanges and stablecoins, and the other is the tokenization of all assets. Whoever can tokenize their own stocks, government bonds, and even infrastructure and sell them to the world will win global capital liquidity."
• "In the entire history of American justice, no one before had ever been jailed solely for a single compliance lapse in violation of the Bank Secrecy Act. But I never complain about injustice—the world has never been equal. Rather than dwelling on the past, it's better to devote all my energy and resources to doing things that truly benefit humanity."
• "Being forced to step down as CEO is a blessing. If I had resigned voluntarily, people would say CZ lost his fighting spirit; but now, at 49, in the prime of my life, financially free, and with vast resources, I can finally devote myself wholeheartedly to education—the cause that can create the greatest positive impact."
• "AI agents will never queue up at a bank to open an account, nor will they swipe traditional credit cards. When thousands of AI agents conduct automated buying and selling, editing, marketing, and micro-payments on behalf of humans, cryptocurrency is their only native bloodstream."
• "Japan's old culture of lifetime employment and salaried workers is being phased out by the times. I strongly advise all young people to choose entrepreneurship. Starting a business is certainly full of enormous uncertainty and pain, but it can give you unprecedented freedom, profound positive impact, and generous returns that transcend class."

III. Main Text

1. From the Tokyo Stock Exchange to Binance: The Japanese Origins of the Underlying System

Host: CZ, it's a great honor to have you on PIVOT GLOBAL. We know you frequently travel around the world—where are you connecting with us from today?

CZ: I'm in Abu Dhabi right now. Actually, I'm constantly on the move around the globe, and Japan is a place I visit often. I love Tokyo, and I love Hokkaido too—whenever winter comes, I go snowboarding in Niseko almost every year. Japan occupies a very important place in both my personal life and my career journey.

Host: When I was reading your new book, what surprised Japanese readers most was that Japan played such a crucial role in your entire life trajectory. For our audience, how would you describe Japan's place in your life?

CZ: Japan is indeed a very colorful part of my life. My first full-time job after university graduation was in Japan—I worked in Tokyo for a tech company that specialized in developing matching software for the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). It was during those years in Tokyo that I first systematically encountered and learned the design of trading matching systems, order execution systems, and the underlying architecture of large exchanges. All told, I lived and worked in Japan for about six to seven years. For peers familiar with low-level technology, we were using C++ at the time, and programmers had to manually manage pointer allocation and memory cleanup. That rigorous training in extreme performance, millisecond-level latency, and system robustness, through years of iterative evolution, ultimately crystallized into the prototype of today's Binance trading system.

Host: So the original seed of the towering tree that is Binance was actually planted back in Tokyo. And then in 2017, Japan once again became a key turning point in Binance's fate—what exactly happened then?

CZ: In July 2017, we had just founded Binance in Shanghai. Only six weeks later, China completely halted ICOs, crypto exchanges, and virtual currency mining in September 2017. But in the same time window, the Japanese government showed tremendous foresight: as early as April 2017, Japan had officially recognized Bitcoin's legal status as a means of payment at the legal level, and between September and October began issuing formal licenses to crypto exchanges, approving about 16 institutions in the first batch.

At the time, we were a lean team of just 30 people. Although the product had only been live for six weeks, we had already very clearly validated product-market fit (PMF): users were spontaneously flooding in to register, and trading volume and activity were growing explosively. Since domestic policy had tightened while Japan offered an extremely legal and well-regulated compliance path—and overseas markets accounted for 70% to 80% of global potential trading volume—we unhesitatingly moved the entire team to Meguro, Tokyo, rented an office, and quickly began renovation. Those days of fighting side by side in Tokyo were the most critical chapter in Binance's global expansion.

2. Binance's Road to Global No. 1: Responsibility in Crisis and Institutional Reflection

Host: Looking back at 2017, the market was already dominated by many mature, established exchanges. Yet starting from an office in Meguro, Tokyo, Binance rose to become the world's No. 1 trading platform by volume in just five months. Looking back at that legendary journey, what exactly enabled Binance to crush all competitors at such an incredible speed?

CZ: On December 17, 2017, less than five months after its founding, Binance's single-day trading volume officially climbed to No. 1 globally. On the surface it took us only five months, but in reality, before that, I had already spent a solid 17 years deeply immersed in the financial trading systems field. Although our team was only 30 people, every single one was a top expert in the industry.

Objectively speaking, we did catch the tide of history. 2017 was a year of explosive ICO growth, with countless new innovative tokens emerging, and Binance was an international platform focused on supporting diverse innovative assets. By contrast, Japan's domestic exchanges at the time, constrained by early whitelist mechanisms, basically only allowed 10 to 20 mainstream core tokens to be listed. In early 2017, about five of the world's top ten exchanges were Japanese institutions, but precisely because asset diversity was strictly constrained, they quickly lost competitiveness in the face of diverse global user demand. Binance seized this wave, but to remain on the global No. 1 throne for nine consecutive years after reaching the top, we relied on the team's extreme hard work and perseverance day after day.

Host: Beyond system architecture and timing, the responsibility you showed toward users at critical moments is also extremely rare in the industry. When facing sudden regulatory and market turmoil, how do you weigh interests against reputation?

CZ: In the Wild West era of 2017, the system architectures of mainstream crypto platforms were generally fragile. If your withdrawal got stuck and you submitted a ticket to customer service, waiting two months without a single reply was commonplace—while Binance reshaped industry standards from day one with extremely high service responsiveness. More critically, when our team decided to leave Shanghai for Tokyo, in the face of asset volatility triggered by domestic regulatory policy changes, Binance voluntarily launched a full voluntary compensation plan.

From a legal standpoint, volatility caused by regulation was not the platform's responsibility at all—we had no obligation to pay out of our own pocket. But we resolutely took out $6 million in real money to fully compensate all affected users. Many people don't know that $6 million was equivalent to 40% of Binance's entire treasury funds at the time. It was a life-or-death sum, but it was precisely this resolute action of putting user interests first at a critical moment that completely won the supreme trust of crypto users worldwide.

Later, in early 2018, because Japanese regulatory rules were incompatible with the compliance framework for hundreds of innovative assets, we had to regretfully withdraw from the Japanese market. But just a few months later, in July 2018, western Japan was hit by catastrophic floods that killed 81 people. Although we had just suffered the setback of withdrawing from Japan commercially, I did not hesitate to donate $1 million in disaster relief funds to the affected areas in Binance's name. Business is business, and friendship is friendship—I have countless old friends and former colleagues here, and I deeply love this land. That $1 million donation was also the first time the global crypto industry donated such a massive sum to a real-world humanitarian crisis, and it became the starting point for the birth of Binance Charity.

3. Japan's Tax Relief and a New Era of Asset Tokenization (RWA)

Host: Speaking of Japan, we can't help but focus on the major financial reforms Japan is currently pushing forward. Japan plans to amend its laws to significantly reduce the capital gains tax on crypto assets from a miscellaneous income tax rate of up to 55% to a separate taxation rate of around 20%, putting it on par with the traditional stock market. From the perspective of a global investor and industry leader, how do you assess this policy shift?

CZ: Cutting the tax rate directly to 20% and treating crypto assets as equivalent to traditional stocks in tax law status is absolutely an extremely wise and far-reaching major move. The previous punitive high rate of 55% severely hindered the accumulation of capital and talent in Japan, while a 20% capital gains tax rate on par with mainstream financial assets is highly attractive on a global scale. This change will undoubtedly draw massive amounts of capital and trading volume back to Japan's domestic market.

Of course, in the long run, the actual application scenarios of crypto assets are far broader than stocks—they also involve daily payments, cross-border settlements, and other diverse functions. I hope that in the future, as payment scenarios become more widespread, Japan can also offer more flexible preferential policies on micro-level taxes such as consumption tax on transactions. But at this stage, this tax cut reform has already taken an extremely beautiful step for Japan to reclaim its voice in Web3.