Who is Changpeng Zhao?

Changpeng Zhao, also known as CZ, is the founder and CEO of Binance. The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world based on real trading volume. Using his Twitter channel, he keeps the community well informed of developments and updates about the crypto exchange. His charisma and good communication have helped Binance to achieve great successes. In this article, you will learn more about the charismatic Changpeng Zhao.

#BNB tats pic.twitter.com/n6Fk2pP8sB

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) September 14, 2022

The history of Changpeng Zhao

Changpeng Zhao was born in 1977 in China and moved to Canada as a teenager. He studied information science at McGill University in Montreal and received his bachelor’s degree. CZ has always been active in the financial sector. His first job after graduation was at the Tokyo Stock Exchange where he developed software to match trade orders. Four years later, he worked as a developer at Bloomberg Tradebook until he moved to Shanghai in 2005. There, he founded his first company at Fusion Systems, focused on developing trading systems for brokers.

CZ invested $1 million in Bitcoin in 2013

CZ first encountered Bitcoin at a poker tournament in 2018 with Bobby Lee and Ron Cao. This conversation intrigued him so much, that he sold his house for $1 million and invested the full amount in Bitcoin in 2013. The Bitcoin price was $600 at the time, but dropped to $200 not long after his investment. Despite this decline, he hasn’t sold his BTC assets to this day.

He first came into professional contact with cryptocurrency when he started as OKCoin’s CTO. He also did several crypto-related projects for Blockchain.com. It wasn’t long before he started his second own company, Bijie Technology, developing exchange software in the cloud. At its peak, Bijie provided more than 30 exchanges with software in the cloud.

The start of Binance

CZ left OKCoin to set up his own cryptocurrency exchange in 2017. He started the company in July 2017 and held an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for investors. During this ICO he raised about 15 million dollars. Investors received Binance Coin (BNB) in exchange for their investment. Investors paid between $0.10 and $0.50 for 1 BNB and they got a nice return on their investment. 1 BNB is currently worth about $17.

The cryptocurrency exchange became more and more popular and more people switched to his exchange. Binance was one of the first exchanges that offered a partner program, so, many people started to promote the company even more. Major competitors, such as, Coinbase Pro (formerly GDAX), Poloniex, Kraken or Bittrex were more expensive and did not have a partner program. Because of the partner program, social influencers and website owners had an incentive to promote the cryptocurrency exchange. And the exchange was actually cheaper.

During the bull market of 2017/2018, the exchange had to pause the registration of new users as a precaution. According to its claims, more than 10 billion dollars in cryptocurrency was traded daily on the exchange, by almost 8 million members. Currently, the company has passed the 30 million members and has more than 1000 employees over the whole world.

Changpeng Zhao net worth

Forbes has placed Changpeng Zhao in the top 3 richest cryptocurrency characters. His net worth is estimated at $ 1.2 billion (2019) and are thus in the top 2000 richest billionaires. In 2018 he was in the 216^th place of the richest Chinese person, but was removed from this list in 2019. In 2022 he’s back on position 19, with a total net worth of almost 18 billion, according to Forbes.