Binance Founder: Changpeng “CZ” Zhao’s History

The founder of Binance is Changpeng Zhao, famously known as CZ by his followers. What started as an idea in the mind of a young entrepreneur became a success story of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms (with one of the best crypto referral programs) in the world.

Binance was developed in 2017 in China, where CZ was from but moved its headquarters to Japan since the platform was banned in China. It is currently registered in the Cayman Islands.

In recent years, Binance has come under fire from many regulatory authorities on the legitimacy of the company. As of 2021, Binance was under investigation for money laundering and other tax offenses.

Binance Founder Net Worth

Changpeng Zhao’s net worth exceeds India’s Mukesh Ambani, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google and even Mark Zuckerberg.  According to an article on Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Changpeng Zhao is currently the 13th ranked richest person globally. 

As of March 1, 2022, his estimated net worth is $77.3 billion.  It is estimated that the actual net worth of Changpeng Zhao is even greater than this because he also holds personal crypto assets, including Bitcoin and Binance’s coin, BNC. This token also surged an astounding 1300% in 2021.

If you want to know more, you can follow CZ on Twitter. His handle is cz_binance.

The Origin Story of the CEO of Binance

When he founded Binance, it was based in China, but he moved to Japan since the Chinese government placed heavy laws on cryptocurrency trading. Within a year of its launch, Binance quickly gained ground with a market capitalization of $1.3 billion and became one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms in the world. It has carried that title from 2018 to 2021. This was partly made possible by the, at the time, very generous and groundbreaking referral program commission structure that was in place, which brought in millions of users to the exchange. If you want to read more about this, check out our Binance referral program review.

The Background Story of Binance

Binance, founded in 2017 and headquartered in China, had to move to Japan due to strict laws on cryptocurrency trading in China. In March 2018, Binance moved to Malta to open an office there since Japan also imposed stricter regulations on crypto trading. In the same year, Binance signed an MoU with the Government of Bermuda and the Malta Stock Exchange for trading tokens securely.

Towards the end of the year, Binance, in cooperation with other cryptocurrency exchange platforms, raised money for a stablecoin project which raked a staggering $32 million. The following year after this, Binance became partners with Simplex, an Israel-based payment processing service provider. The reason behind this partnership was to allow users of Binance to make purchases using credit and debit cards like Mastercard and Visa.

In an unfortunate event, Binance announced that some hackers had stolen 40 million USD worth of Bitcoins from their server, which created a huge dent in the platform’s functioning. The company had to temporarily halt both deposits and withdrawals to ensure security and allow them to trade freely. 

Binance then pledged its existing customer base that they would reimburse the loss caused by the hackers through a program called the “Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU).”

By the end of 2019, the platform started offering futures contracts that allowed users to leverage high amounts, sometimes as high as 125 times the value of the original contracts. Before the year ended, they also acquired the Indian Bitcoin exchange platform called WazirX.

By early 2020, there were already evident signs of Binance’s downfall. The Malta Financial Services Authority announced that Binance was not authorized to operate as a cryptocurrency exchange platform, and hence, they had no responsibility for the regulatory checks for Binance.  When the owner of BitMEX, Samuel Reeds got arrested for money laundering, Zhao exclaimed it to be a surprise and that cryptocurrency owners need to be more careful and compliant.

The end of the year was marked by leaked documents of Binance, which alleged that CZ, the founder of Binance, was behind this grand scheme to deceive the United States regulators while gaining profits from investors of cryptocurrency. Henceforth, all IP addresses from the US were blocked from the Binance app.

By May 2021, Binance went under investigation by the United States Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service, and Binance was accused of money laundering and other offenses regarding taxes. As of February 2022, Binance has taken a $200m stake in Forbes.

The Success of Binance

The central concept behind Binance is to spread the idea of free money. The “freedom of money,” as Binance regards it, is to facilitate anyone who wants to send money to anyone in any part of the world, can do so without going through complex procedures that are almost impossible to go through a day. This sentiment of trying to spread the idea of free money has been working excellently for Binance as they have been very successful with their Binance referral program and its complementary Binance referral code which has brought in an incredible amount of users.

Apart from that, the success of Binance can be boiled down to the very fact that it has its cryptocurrencies-

• Binance Smart Chain (BSC) BSC uses “Proof of Staked Authority” to operate. It has already approved 21 validators.
• Binance Coin (BNB) had the third-highest market capitalization in 2021. You can also use this coin to pay fees and make purchases within the app

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