The real challenge in crypto isn't identifying and buying an asset early. The true difficulty lies in having the conviction to hold that asset for over a decade through extreme volatility, regulatory threats, hard forks, and security risks. Most early buyers sell far too soon.

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.

Before launching its own exchange, CZ's company provided "exchange-as-a-service" software to 30 other exchanges. When the Chinese government shut down their clients in 2017, they were forced to pivot, using their existing technology to launch Binance.

While at Blockchain.info, CZ learned a powerful lesson in community-led growth. The platform, which was larger than Coinbase at the time, acquired its first 2 million users almost entirely through a single, 150-page-long thread on the BitcoinTalk forum managed by the founder.

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.

When Facebook first offered $1B for Oculus, founder Palmer Luckey turned it down. His early, significant Bitcoin holdings made him financially independent, so he didn't care about the money. This forced Facebook to return with a much larger R&D commitment ($1B/year for 10 years) that aligned with his mission, not just a higher price.

Founders Fund invested nearly 10% of its fund into SpaceX immediately following a launch failure, betting on Elon Musk's team despite their lack of aerospace experience. This exemplifies a high-conviction, founder-centric investment thesis that ignores conventional industry wisdom and short-term setbacks.

CZ went from "barely financially free" to a Forbes cover billionaire almost overnight. This jump meant he skipped the gradual wealth accumulation stages (e.g., buying fancy cars, then yachts) and never developed expensive habits, retaining a practical, function-over-form lifestyle.