Binance CEO Chaingpeng Zhao. Source: Medium
Changpeng Zhao, popularly known by his cool moniker CZ, is the CEO of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Binance grew from an idea to the biggest market for crypto trading in just a few months. CZ, who loves wearing black, turned into a crypto billionaire pretty quickly, becoming a sensation in the world of blockchain.
Let’s take a look at some interesting facts about him.
Binance was founded on July 1, 2017. It became the biggest crypto exchange market in the world in a little under 6 months. Its initial coin offering was Binance Coin (BNB) that started at around ¢11 and now is valued around $10. It was over $24 in January this year.
In 2005, Zhao was in Shanghai, where he founded Fusion Systems. It was a trading platform for brokers. He started his crypto journey in 2013 with blockchain.info. In 2014, he sold his Shanghai apartment for about $1 million to use this money on Bitcoin.
Well, this goes without saying. After all, he founded the company. But the fact is that he loves it so much that he isn’t passionate about houses or cars, but only Binance hoodies and T-shirts. He doesn’t own a single car or a house. But check him out in his mostly-black clothes. And since he’s generally seen in black, we’re guessing that’s his favorite color – like Steve Jobs.
He seems to love rather unusual marketing tactics. Binance has offered several promotions. One of them had a Lamborghini as a giveaway! While CZ himself isn’t interested in cars, his company’s promotional methods have generated a lot of attention. Although we’ll have to give it to his marketing chief who came up with this idea.
CZ was born in Jiangsu, a coastal province in China. His parents moved to Canada soon after he was born. As a teenager, he started working to help with the household expenses. In the 1980’s, he joined McDonald’s and flipped burgers to help his family.
Later, he went to McGill University and studied Computer Science. He was also passionate about stock markets and trading, which made him choose this career.
Worked at gas stations and McDonald’s, and he’s here now. His company, Binance, is expected to rake in about $1 billion in profits in 2018 alone. While big cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple saw a little downfall in their values this year, Binance has been booming and is making big bucks for CZ.
With such unprecedented success, Zhao has become a crypto star, and rightly so. His company, Binance can easily handle 1.4 million transactions each second.