Contents:

• Early life
• Beginning story
• Achievements
  
  

Early life

Changpeng Zhao (赵长鹏) is a Chinese-Canadian who was born in Jiangsu Province, China. Changpeng Zhao was born on September 10^th, 1977 and his family moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in the late 1980s. His father was a professor in China before he was exiled from the country. In his teenage years, Changpeng Zhao, who goes by CZ, helped support his family by working a number of service industry jobs which included flipping burgers at McDonald’s and working overnight shift at a gas station. CZ studied at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he majored in computer science.

Beginning story

After college, CZ began working for the Tokyo Stock Exchange, developing software for matching trade orders. He also worked at Bloomberg Tradebook where he was a developer of futures trading software.

In 2005, he moved to Shanghai where he founded Fusion Systems, known for “some of the fastest high-frequency trading systems for brokers.”

Beginning in 2013, he worked for various cryptocurrency projects including Blockchain.info, and also served as chief technology officer of OKCoin.

In 2017, Zhao left OKCoin to start a cryptocurrency exchange called Binance.

In September 2020, he was named in a lawsuit against Binance alleging that Binance facilitated the laundering of more than $9 million. There’s been controversy — including rumors of high listing fees and a legal spat with VC firm Sequoia — but Binance is the top dog and it remains the exchange that every crypto firm aspires to list on. It is also pushing out overseas beyond Hong Kong. Binance has explored the global potential of crypto by moving its exchange to Malta, a country keen to woo blockchain giants, and inking deals to hire large numbers of staff in Uganda, Togo and Bermuda. It looks like that is just scratching the service for what Binance has planned.

Achievements

CZ launched Binance in July 2017, following a $15 million funding raised during an initial coin offering. Binance has enjoyed a meteoric rise. The exchange processes over $3 billion in crypto trades per day, which makes it the world’s largest by some margin, according to CoinMarketCap.com. Binance’s own token (BNB) is currently trading at over $14 — that’s up from an initial ICO price of around $0.10 and it gives it a total market cap of $1.6 billion. In less than eight months.

In February 2018, Forbes Magazine placed him third on their list of “The Richest People In Cryptocurrency”. As of September 2018, his net worth is estimated at $1.1 billion.

The crypto bear market pushed out many of our competitors, and we increased in terms of market share [in 2018].

– CHANGPENG ZHAO

Crypto-currency could be the future, we didn’t know for sure today. Let time reveals the answer to us, could be in our time or in our grandchildren time. What is sure is blockchain will be the key to the future.