Despite massive financial incentives, high-frequency trading firms rarely develop custom ASICs. CZ explains that FPGAs offer the best trade-off between speed and flexibility. Trading algorithms change too frequently, making the long development cycle of custom silicon impractical compared to reprogrammable FPGAs.

CZ's key metric for Binance's health was Daily Active Users (DAU), not trading volume or revenue. He believed that as long as more users were finding value in the platform, long-term success was guaranteed, even if short-term revenue was not optimized.

CZ predicts millions of AI agents will soon transact on our behalf, booking hotels and making micropayments. Traditional banking systems cannot handle this volume, speed, or the KYC requirements for non-human entities, making crypto the only viable payment rail for the agent economy.

Bridge was founded just before the 2022 crypto crashes. The collapse of the NFT market, their initial focus, forced them to pivot to stablecoin infrastructure, which proved to be a much larger and more durable market, demonstrating how market shocks can be clarifying.

After six months of research convinced him of Bitcoin's potential, CZ demonstrated extreme conviction by selling his only major asset, an apartment in Shanghai for under $1M, to go all-in on Bitcoin. He bought in at an average price of $600 while the price was dropping.

CZ spent nearly a decade, from his first internship in Tokyo to managing a team at Bloomberg, exclusively building low-latency order execution systems for traditional finance. This deep, niche expertise became his unfair advantage when building Binance's high-performance matching engine.

Large financial institutions, which once insisted on building all tech in-house (even email clients), have undergone a cultural shift. Humbling experiences and the clear ROI of AI have made them more open to adopting best-in-class external software, creating a huge market for B2B fintechs.

CZ revealed that a key reason for exiting their FTX investment 1.5 years before its collapse was SBF's behavior. SBF was badmouthing Binance in DC and aggressively poaching their VIP account managers with 5x salary offers to gain access to their client database.

Sea's multi-billion dollar fintech business wasn't a top-down strategic initiative. It was born from necessity to solve internal problems: a lack of payment methods for its gaming customers and the need for a scalable transaction system for e-commerce. This internal tool evolved into a major consumer-facing business.