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.
CZ’s first-hand account reveals that the US prison system segregates inmates by ethnicity (e.g., Chinese, white, black, Hispanic) into groups or "cars". This practice is encouraged by guards as a method to reduce friction and manage conflict through group representatives.
For his free education platform Giggle Academy, CZ is resisting the obvious "learn-to-earn" token model. He believes issuing a token would attract speculators and "farmers," making it impossible to distinguish genuine learners and corrupting the project's core mission.
During his legal battle, CZ experienced periods where the DOJ would go completely silent after a deal was rejected. He realized this was a deliberate tactic to create uncertainty and mental pressure, as two weeks was the "optimum time" before a defendant gets used to their new reality.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
CZ's first entrepreneurial venture in Shanghai aimed to bring Wall Street tech to China. However, after launching, they discovered that as a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise (WFOE), they were legally barred from working with Chinese financial institutions, forcing a pivot to general IT services.
After working for years without officially graduating from McGill University, CZ needed a bachelor's degree solely to apply for a work visa in Japan. He pragmatically enrolled in an online program, the "American College of Computer Science," to check the box, demonstrating his focus on utility over prestige.
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.
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.