Original title: The making of Binance's CZ: An exclusive look at the forces that shaped crypto's most powerful founder

Compilation of the original text: Guo Qianwen, Lin Qi, Gu Yu

CZ is sitting in front of a bookshelf in his home in Dubai, which, like Paris, he calls home. In the video, he is affable, gentle, even humble. It's the exact opposite of what his rivals are most familiar with: the ambitious man who built Binance into the world's largest and most influential cryptocurrency exchange.

He is used to dealing with others with a different face. “If Americans deal with me, they think I’m Asian—a little more Asian than most Americans, but a little less Asian than other Asians they know. If Asians and When I hang out, they feel like I'm American, but a little less American than the Americans they're used to dealing with. I'm kind of in between."

Recently, CZ's tough side has brought him under intense scrutiny. CZ and Binance have outmaneuvered their opponents strategically and played with loose regulations to achieve great success - whenever a country can provide the most favorable regulations, the founder will camp here, and officials from various countries, including the United States, have accused Binance Deceitful, violating international sanctions and money laundering rules.

Binance insists it has changed the way it operates and that compliance is now the goal; CZ has always shown his soft-spoken, humble side when he speaks for the reformed company. But Binance's turnaround has raised questions about who CZ really is and how he built his business -- questions that have been made all the more poignant by the paucity of public records about CZ's background and Binance's operations.

A close look at CZ's background fills in many of the gaps, revealing how the Binance founder has torn between his years of hard-hitting business rivals while maintaining his image as a friendly, everyday guy. The magazine's detailed investigation of his past, drawing on interviews with his acquaintances and extensive commentary in the Chinese-language media, uncovered two worlds that shaped CZ's identity: Canada, where he grew up; China, where he returned as a "sea turtle," In the first half of this century, he took advantage of the rising wind of Shanghai and stood at the forefront of global business in one fell swoop.

CZ has taken lessons from both places, mastering many of the cutthroat business tactics that prevailed during the early frenzy of China's tech scene, while retaining the casual, non-threatening nature of the Canadians - a behavior that distracts attention from its tactics .

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Scholar father leads family to move abroad

The Keremeos Court building is a neat series of family townhouses that is otherwise unremarkable except for its refreshing surroundings. Surrounded by a vast rainforest of tangy cedars and ferns, the homes are part of the University of British Columbia's 2,000-acre campus, located on Vancouver's westernmost edge, bordering the Pacific Ocean.

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CZ in front of the Ladner Clock Tower in Vancouver, photographed by my father circa 1989. Photo courtesy of CZ

The environment here is completely different from the countryside in CZ's childhood. In Jiangsu province, schools and classrooms are scarce, filled with modest stone desks—a common sight in resource-poor rural areas, where learning is even more difficult in winter. Like his father, CZ understood the poverty and deprivation in China and realized that academia could be a refuge. At the age of 10, the family left the countryside and moved to Hefei, a small city in China that is also home to the University of Science and Technology of China.

In this oasis of knowledge, CZ would sit and listen to debates among senior students, who sometimes made him play chess. “CZ recalls, ‘Those guys taught me how to play chess, how to play Go. They talked about different things on campus, even politics. I think being around people who are seven or ten years older than you really [makes] You think about things a little differently than kids your age."

When the CZ family came to British Columbia, they moved from one of the world's oldest civilizations to one of the world's youngest. Founded in the 1870s, Vancouver was rarely visited by anyone other than the Aboriginal community. The city quickly became a gateway linking the flow of goods and people from China to Canada — and for decades it was a stronghold of anti-Chinese racism. Manifestations of this bias include the infamous "poll tax" to discourage Chinese men from bringing their wives to Canada, even though they built the country's railways and much of the city of Vancouver. “Although there have always been Chinese in [Vancouver], they lived under the stairs like Harry Potter. They were servants, not homeowners,” said UBC historian and Chinese immigration scholar Henry Yu.

However, by the 1980s, officials had completely changed their attitude. Canada, seeking to revitalize and diversify its natural-resource-based economy, has begun attracting immigrants from across the Pacific that it once despised. The plan includes visas for those who invest C$400,000, attracting academics like CZ's father. Ottawa intends to send a signal to ambitious Chinese: "Canada is opening the door for business if you want to succeed in the global economy."

Anti-Asian sentiment still exists in Vancouver, and Asians can remain very unpopular in some parts of the community, but CZ doesn’t often encounter racism. The high school he attended was made up of students of all ethnicities, most of whom had ties to the university. Still, CZ differs from his classmates in a few key ways. He recalled being one of only two students from mainland China, despite dozens of other Asian students. Most come from wealthier Hong Kong and Taiwan, and unlike CZ, they don't live in the modest housing reserved for graduate students and campus staff.

CZ recalls the huge wealth gap between his own family and other students, as well as the disparities that existed among wealthy Chinese-speaking immigrant groups. He said: "Kids in Hong Kong are more fond of brands, fashion brands, sports cars and so on. Taiwanese, although they are all very rich...but have a more humble attitude, and I get along better with them. I never Taiwanese families learn a lot about the value of humility.”

Today, the high valuation enjoyed by Binance and its BNBToken means that CZ is worth billions, but he still maintains “humble values,” at least publicly. Compared to the more obnoxious people in the crypto community—someone who buys a Lamborghini that doesn’t drive and tells crypto skeptics to “have fun with poverty”—CZ has never shown his flamboyant side.

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CZ using his first computer in Vancouver circa 1990, photo courtesy of CZ

In high school, some of his wealthier friends started working, mostly for the novelty of it or because their parents wanted them to understand the rigors of work. CZ is one of the only students who works for a living. That included summer overnight shifts at Chevron and a two-year stint at McDonald's. In his later life as a cryptocurrency mogul, someone made fun of CZ's experience working at a fast food chain. But unlike some rich men from humble beginnings, CZ has never distanced himself from his working-class past, even retweeting images of himself in McDonald's clothing.

Overall, CZ portrays his high school years as pleasant, even describing it as idyllic. He enjoyed his four years as captain of the volleyball team and competing in the Canadian National Math Competition. He got the nickname "Champion" from a gym teacher. CZ's high school friend Ted Lin said the name was likely due to the fact that many people at the school could not pronounce the "changpeng" pronunciation. CZ adopted his current name, CZ, only after entering the crypto world. He said he had tried using the name "CP" earlier, but dropped it after friends online told him it was short for "child porn" in the illegal market.

Despite his fondness for Vancouver (where he said he wanted to retire) and Canada, some of his actions belied his professed affection. He admitted that he hadn't set foot in the city in years, and that he didn't have any active family or philanthropic connections there. Nonetheless, CZ maintains that he is Canadian not only because of his passport information, but also because of his character. "I think like a Canadian. We're kind people, not aggressive, not overly competitive and generally helpful," he said.

He speaks warmly of Canada (where he grew up) because he has benefited so much from it — but that pales in comparison to what would later make him a billionaire, cryptocurrency.

Best-selling financial book that changes lives

As of early April, CZ was No. 46 on Bloomberg's list of billionaires, with a net worth of $29 billion (a figure that CZ called "inaccurate" and "difficult to estimate given all the volatility"). His name is popping up every day. Featured in the news. Last fall, many media outlets focused on his audacious cryptocurrency trade at FTX that brought down his rival Sam Bankman-Fried; more recently, reports about a rift between Binance and regulators over CZ’s rule-playing Conflicts abound. While many nonconformist tech entrepreneurs display their bold, defiant qualities in college—think Zuckerberg portrayed in The Social Network—that doesn't seem to be the case with CZ.

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CZ's first residence at McGill University in Montreal

At the end of his studies at McGill University, CZ did publicly show the brilliance he would later show in his career, co-authoring an academic paper on artificial intelligence in 1999 with professor Jeremy Cooperstock - a topic that has been around for 20 years later became widely noticed. Sitting in a cafe in Montreal, Jeremy Cooperstock said he remembers CZ well, in part because he was the only undergraduate student in his graduate seminar. He told me "it won't pay him well, but it will give him a good experience". In his memory, CZ was a man of personality who was very smart, but after many years he is surprised to find that his former student has become a billionaire.

During this time, CZ says, he read something that changed his life—not academic papers, or long-winded treatises like Atlas Shrugged, but a film aimed at the typical middle-class, everyday person. Books: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". Published in 1997, this bestselling personal finance book tells the story of two fathers—one who worked hard all his life for little, and the other who got rich as an entrepreneur or investor—in fables. The book made CZ suspicious of his father's advice. By then, he had finished his PhD, was working in the private sector, and would enjoy professional respect but little material wealth for the next 20 years.

“My dad always taught me to work hard and get a decent job, and my parents shared that mentality. They didn’t like business. After I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I started thinking, maybe I Want to own a business. It’s not that I have to be CEO, it’s about creating something meaningful.”

When CZ's thoughts turned to wealth creation, he did make the same choice as Zuckerberg and other gifted billionaires: drop out of college. In 2000, he became a regular at the Tokyo Stock Exchange during his summer internship and decided not to return to McGill University. (Many media reports that CZ is a McGill graduate, but this is inaccurate).

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"Returnees" studying social rules in Shanghai

Shanghai, on China's prosperous southeastern coast, was the "locomotive" that drove China's economic engine at the time, said Miu Chung Yan, a social work professor at the University of British Columbia who studies Chinese immigration. In 2005, the year CZ moved to Shanghai, the city became the third-busiest container shipping port in the world, behind Hong Kong and Singapore; it also recorded its 14th consecutive year of GDP growth of 11%. China is on the rise, and Shanghai is at the center of it all.

Crucially, CZ's early days in Shanghai coincided with China's golden age of technology, with domestic technology companies and industry leaders on the rise. Robin Li, Jack Ma and Ma Huateng started their companies at the turn of the millennium and are experiencing an explosion of investment and development.

"I've been taught to go where it's being developed, not where it's been established," CZ said.

He's not the only young Canadian returning to Shanghai. Canada's severe recession in the 1990s spurred a surge of reverse immigration in the mid-2000s. Returnees like CZ are known as "haigui," a Chinese pun for someone who immigrated overseas but returned to China. One study estimated that nearly half a million returnees arrived in China from Canada and around the world as of 2017.

The timing couldn't be better for CZ and others like him. English-speaking returnees who are Western-educated and proficient in Chinese language and culture are warmly welcomed in China and earn better salaries than their local peers, Miu Chung Yan said.

However, despite CZ coming to a city eager to accept him and speaking the local language, he admits that in China's fast, furious, free-spirited business environment, it is difficult to deal with the vague rules and regulations. “I didn’t understand the business culture and had to learn it from scratch,” he recalls. In New York, Tokyo and Vancouver, where rules-based corporations and egalitarian ideas prevailed, for CZ the key to relationships, especially with Relationships with state officials who would be supporters appear unfamiliar. Alcohol has a special place in Chinese culture in forging these business relationships. Baijiu, a strong Chinese liquor, is often used in business negotiations as a sign of goodwill and respect.

"I've read about it, I've heard rumors about it," CZ said. "But you know, when you actually go into business, at dinner parties with officials, they drink baijiu...they talk about relationships, and sometimes There are other things that need to be taken care of, and those are all foreign to me, so I never really liked that approach.”

Nevertheless, CZ quickly made a fortune in Shanghai. In 2005, he co-founded Fusion Systems, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that provides high-frequency trading systems, with four other expatriates, and has partnered with the world's largest banks such as Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. During that time, he quickly learned the rules — in China, he said, rules are “deliberately vague,” giving officials enormous powers of interpretation and selective enforcement. The budding entrepreneur put his math and coding skills to use, but his role at the company also taught him how to "think like a salesman" as he used his returnee status to act as a broker between East and West. As a junior partner and the only one who "looks Chinese...in a Chinese environment", CZ has been thinking "how do I market my firm's services? How do I get my next contract?"

And then -- as legend has it about CZ -- a late-night poker game in 2013 changed the course of his life. In this game, top Chinese Bitcoin evangelist Bobby Lee (Li Qiyuan) and American-educated Chinese venture capitalist Ron Cao (Cao Darong) introduce CZ to cryptocurrencies. CZ goes all out. He sold his apartment in Shanghai and invested $1 million in Bitcoin. The future billionaire left Fusion Systems and first joined cryptocurrency startup Blockchain.info — which started out primarily as a website for tracking bitcoin transactions — as head of technology. A year later, he was hired as CTO of OKCoin, a Chinese trading platform and token startup.

OKCoin is the battleground where CZ has honed himself as a bold public cryptocurrency figure who is unafraid to engage in open battles. At first, CZ interacted with the public on platforms like Reddit, which is not common among CTOs, where he politely but firmly rebutted criticism of OKCoin and cryptocurrencies. However, in 2015, after CZ had a dispute with OKCoin CEO Mingxing Xu over the company's direction, he left the company and instead retracted his previous statements on the same platform and lashed out at his former employer.

In a 1,600-word Reddit thread, CZ detailed how, under Star Xu's direction, the company used bots to boost trading volumes, fake reserve certificates and opaque financials. In response, Star Xu accused CZ of falsifying academic credentials and other fraudulent practices. While the feud eventually died down, it showed CZ’s willingness to strike hard in the debate, while also making China’s regulation of the fledgling cryptocurrency industry more stringent.

CZ's controversies and boundary-pushing with his next company, Bijie Technology, went one step further. Bijie Technology is another SaaS company that provides software for trading platforms and trading platforms. Over the next two years, Bijie's technology became the cornerstone of 30 Chinese exchanges and later became the powerhouse of Binance.

Trouble soon arose, however, as most of the trading platforms powered by CZ’s technology involved transactions in “postal currency cards” — postage stamps from China’s imperial and revolutionary eras, sparking a tulip frenzy. As the card mania spread, online marketplaces and dubious sellers for stamps have sprung up. So-called "stamp teachers" and "wealth advisors" lure unsuspecting investors into investment chat rooms on messaging platforms such as QQ and WeChat, where they advise investors to buy stakes in stamps and collectibles through digital trading platforms, Promises of super high returns. But many are deliberate manipulation and sell-off scams. According to a 2016 investigation by China's state-owned newspaper Securities Times, ordinary investors, especially elderly Chinese, lost hundreds of millions of yuan, some even losing their entire pensions.

CZ has no direct ties to the stamp scam, but his techniques arguably helped it flourish. What’s more, the rampant frenzy has put authorities on high alert: Chinese officials have swiftly enacted new regulations that limit the unbridled growth of digital platforms that reward irregular and risky behavior, and are even more skeptical of digital financial innovation. In January 2017, the state ordered trading platforms for stamps and collectibles to be rectified or shut down; by August of that year, the operations of these trading platforms had been halted. Most of Bijie's clients went out of business.

Meanwhile, CZ's ambitions began to look elsewhere. In 2017, the dramatic rise in cryptocurrency prices attracted millions of new investors into the space. CZ sees the industry leader, San Francisco-based Coinbase cashing in. He saw an opportunity and launched his own trading platform, Binance, in Shanghai in July of that year.

In just one year, Binance surpassed Coinbase to become the world's largest trading platform by virtue of its high-quality trading platform, global customer base and almost unregulated regulatory policies. Soon after, the company became the first trading platform to launch its own blockchain — a technological feat. Customers can earn Token rewards for trading, and Binance has added the ability to trade hundreds of digital assets, including those of unknown origin. These tactics have helped Binance steal customers from Coinbase and other competitors, as have the company's low transaction fees and policy of asking few or no questions when it comes to vetting customers.

By now, CZ has clearly adapted to the faster and more aggressive business rules of Asia, making competing with North American companies relatively child's play. In The King of Cryptocurrency, an Asian-American entrepreneur mocks the media that marvels at Binance’s sudden rise: “What’s happening here is arrogance and favoritism of rising companies in Western markets. Asia is not in Coinbase’s DNA. I saw a cultural gap that they couldn't bridge."

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CZ's power increased by exile

In some ways, leaving China is in the long-term interests of Binance and its founder, CZ. For years, CZ and his company have been swayed by U.S. rivals who describe Binance as allied with Beijing. Such an alliance would make CZ's relationship with US regulators more difficult, especially at a time of tension between the US and China. Over the years, the company has been accused of deliberately concealing its Chinese origin and business activities in China, allegations that Binance has denied.

Yet for a company and founders who prefer to operate outside of official regulation, no country can accommodate them for long. Binance’s stay in Japan is short-lived. In 2018, scammers used fake Google ads to trick customers into entering their Binance login information and then emptying their accounts. Binance was not directly responsible for the losses, but the scandal led to Japanese regulators requiring Binance to register as an exchange, an ill-suited choice for CZ. So, CZ decided to relocate his crypto empire to Malta, where then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscat was willing to welcome all things crypto-related and would not ask any other questions.

The period in Malta was also short-lived, with Binance announcing that it would no longer be looking for a new headquarters location, but would instead operate without its headquarters. For a while, Binance was so decentralized that CZ seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, off the network. In 2021, an opponent of Binance sued Binance in the United States for delisting Token. Plaintiff hired a private investigator to find CZ. In his report on the findings, the private investigator said his team had made "extreme" efforts to track down CZ but was unsuccessful, and he suspected that Binance hired others to cover up CZ's past and whereabouts so that He was "virtually undetectable". Recently, Fortune reached out to the private eye, who confirmed that the statements in the report are accurate. (The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed.) Until 2022, CZ will not show up in Dubai, where there are few restrictions on cryptocurrency transactions.

Binance’s approach to migration has been praised among crypto believers obsessed with decentralization. Unsurprisingly, this upset regulators in other countries, who viewed Binance as a lawless offshore casino. Not without reason. Over the past three years, Binance has been exposed to a range of ethically dubious or potentially downright criminal behavior. These include lax "KYC" policies, which allowed Iranian users to trade on Binance's trading platform despite the country's international financial sanctions; and a failed plan in 2018 to register a subsidiary in the U.S. , according to the Binance executive who proposed the plan, is intended to serve as a “regulatory sinkhole” that distracts U.S. regulators from the rest of the company.

Binance admitted to engaging in questionable tactics but said it had dismissed them. In February, the company said it was close to reaching a sweeping settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice and other regulators, addressing past misconduct and charting a path forward. This is despite the fact that the CFTC’s recent lawsuit against Binance has raised questions about the viability of the settlement.

At the same time, companies have said they want to turn the page, but that aspiration has been complicated by widespread mistrust of cryptocurrencies by regulators, especially after the collapse of trading platform FTX.

Although it was CZ's tweet that exposed the FTX scandal last November, he said he was as surprised as anyone by the fraud committed by SBF — a company he knew and invested in in the early days of FTX company.

CZ and SBF are two of the most influential figures in the space during the cryptocurrency boom of 2020-early 2022, and there are some notable parallels in their journeys. Most obviously, they are both the children of scholars, even though CZ's father is a fringe figure in the university world. SBF, by contrast, is the son of two law professors at Stanford, owns a nice house on campus, and lives the highest life in academia.

Today, the two men are in very different situations. SBF is still living at his parents' house, awaiting trial on a string of fraud charges that could land him in prison for life. CZ, meanwhile, is already a father to two toddlers with Binance co-founder He Yi.

It's easy to imagine CZ outraged by the privilege and entitlement of his competitors. SBF has mocked him on Twitter several times, including suggesting in the summer of 2022 that CZ would be arrested if he ever set foot on U.S. soil. (Binance says CZ has visited Canada several times in recent years, including to attend his father’s funeral, but has maintained a very low-key lifestyle there.) But CZ claims he has no personal vendetta against the one-time competitor.

“He seemed to me like one of those smart, talented but very aggressive young kids,” CZ said. He told Fortune that he had met with SBF three to five times, primarily as a client, Because the latter’s Alameda hedge fund used Binance as a trading platform.

As of mid-April, Binance appears to have weathered the combination of the crypto market crash (following the collapse of FTX) and regulators increasingly aggressively going after the company. While its finances remain a black box, blockchain data shows that Binance has gained market share from rivals in recent months, and its trading volume and revenue may also be increasing, likely due to bitcoin and other crypto currencies. A rebound in currency prices.

Meanwhile, CZ continues to insist that he and his company are decentralized and not owned by any country. From this perspective, he has transcended the influence of China, Canada, and other countries, and has become a truly stateless individual.

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father's legacy

CZ's English isn't perfect, as can be seen from his Twitter feed. He's never mastered North American idioms—for example, he called "MLB umpires" last year "baseball referees." But his humility and thoughtfulness feel very Canadian. Over the course of the 30-minute interview, his demeanor suggests that — despite his new identity as a billionaire wandering around Dubai with sticky notes — he still has inside him the same french fries he ate at McDonald’s in Vancouver 30 years ago juvenile.

Still, it's hard to pin down what exactly is driving him. Crypto is still a cutting-edge industry, and every major player, including established institutions like Coinbase, is trying to use "cunning" tactics to gain an advantage or just to survive. Despite Binance's recent pledge to "get on track," it may be further away from the law than most of its competitors.

Still, when asked if he learned to break the rules growing up in Vancouver, CZ denies: "I've always been a fairly close-knit, rule-abiding citizen ... I've always had a conservative personality, even though people might think otherwise. ,” he said, but the culture of cryptocurrencies changed his view: “Then you find out that this new thing has different rules in different places. So instead of saying we want to change the rules or even avoid the rules, we just want to I want to find a more favorable place."

The argument is persuasive in some respects, but it also feels tailor-made for Binance’s self-interest. CZ has clearly been able to find the rules where it is best for him and Binance, or there are no rules. This is in stark contrast to his father, who played by the rules of a different era.

Jean Legault, a geophysicist at GeoTech in Ontario, Canada, hired CZ's father, Shengkai Zhao, with whom he had worked for six years, on the recommendation of industry leaders. Legault remembered Shengkai as a brilliant geophysicist with an extraordinary technical mind. Shengkai wrote the original code that enabled GeoTech to use the software to create 3D inversions of geophysical data, an invaluable tool for engineers. The company still uses his user manual to this day. Legault added, "Other geophysicists were later asked to do the same work, but they couldn't replicate Shengkai, who is a very good guy."

According to Legault, Shengkai lived to work, he could have reached the top in academia or business, but he was too humble. Shengkai never boast about their knowledge or achievements. CZ agrees, telling Fortune that his father started his career during the Cultural Revolution with poor English and never went into business. Never made any money.

CZ recalls watching his father work on complex math equations in the lab or on his desktop from morning till night. But despite this, historical forces and changes as an immigrant mean that Shengkai can only work on the fringes of academia, never enjoying the prestige he would have earned if he had been born in a different time or place.

But his son CZ was influenced by immigration. The success of the Binance empire may be that CZ fulfilled his father's destiny that could never be realized before.

Shengkai died of leukemia last year. Thinking of him, CZ's tone was a bit regretful, as if thinking of his boyhood. “My dad spent all day in his lab and on his computer, he never got to any of my volleyball games. I was captain and played two games a week, but my parents never watched it a match."

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