If I said the biggest shift in your life hasn't happened yet, what do you think it would be
I don't know what it would be. But I believe the opportunities of the future will always be greater than those of the past. The speed of change and transformation is accelerating, and the scale is growing larger. Before the internet, it was hard to change the entire world at once; now information flows more freely, we have a network for money — blockchain — and now we have AI. So I think there will be quite a lot of major shifts in the future, I just can't say exactly what they will be. I think AI will bring massive efficiency gains, and that will further accelerate these shifts.
Let's start from the very beginning — who are you
I guess I'm a "crypto guy," that's what President Trump calls me. I'm a firm believer in blockchain technology, and my biggest contribution has probably been in this area, and I will continue to devote most of my energy here. I frequently travel to different countries to advise them on crypto regulatory frameworks, so people usually see me as a "crypto salesman."
Many of our guests share one thing in common: a childhood trauma that gave them a relentless drive. What happened in your life that explains why you became one of the 20 richest people in the world before turning 50
First, I don't think my ranking is accurate. I'm probably outside the top 100, or around 500. There are many people who aren't on this list at all, and a large portion of my assets are concentrated at high levels (translator's note: referring to the high volatility of token holdings).
As for why the list says that, I have no idea. I think they just want to sell news, and putting a crypto person near the top probably attracts more attention. I also heard a rumor that one of our Chinese competitors paid some journalists to rank me higher, so that I would be scrutinized more strictly. But I can't confirm that.
So where exactly does this drive come from
I can't recall any traumatic experiences from my childhood, but my family was quite poor when I was young. We immigrated to Canada as a family, and my parents both worked jobs close to minimum wage. Some of my friends came from investment immigrant families from places like Taiwan and Hong Kong, and they were quite wealthy. So there was definitely a bit of pressure when I was a kid. But overall, there was no trauma—I have many great Taiwanese friends, and they and their families treated me very well. It's just that comparisons were inevitable.
I feel very fortunate to be able to stand on my parents' shoulders. They immigrated to Canada for me and my sister. I'm considered a second-generation immigrant. People often say that second-generation immigrants watch how hard their parents work—first-generation immigrants, due to poor English, usually do hard labor close to minimum wage—and it's precisely the second generation who sees this hardship and wants to push forward. I think it's this environment that drives me. By the third or fourth generation, it usually fades.
You just mentioned your sister—what does she do
She's also in tech. She used to work at a startup in Tokyo, then went to Morgan Stanley, where she became a managing director at a young age—Morgan Stanley has only about four hundred managing directors globally, out of a hundred thousand employees, so she was extremely successful in her career. She was at a big company and retired around the age of 42. After having a child, she experienced postpartum depression, and a year later she resigned and retired, and now she's fully recovered. So now she counsels people going through depression.
The third and fourth generations fade—so how do you prevent that from happening to your kids, and your kids' kids
I'm not sure, I don't have an answer yet, and I don't know of any method that truly works. Also, I don't count—I have kids, but my kids don't have kids yet, so I can put this question off a bit longer. I think about it occasionally, but I really don't know what the solution is. I think education is key, but it's hard, really hard.
In 1999, there was a famous video of Jack Ma speaking to 17 co-founders about Alibaba in his living room. Take us back to Binance's first day—if someone were in your living room then, what would they see
Binance's start was a bit different. At the time, we already had a team of fifteen to twenty people working on a company called BJ Tech, selling trading systems to other trading platforms. About 80 to 90 percent of our clients weren't crypto trading platforms, but traditional markets—businesses dealing in stamps, jade, and the like, but they used order books to trade. I had led this team for two years, and the business was stable.
Then in May 2017, I called everyone into a meeting room and said: now might be a good time for us to build a crypto trading platform. I said, if we don't do it, this thought will keep coming back to me again and again; if I don't do it in this lifetime, I'll probably still end up doing it in the future. And I felt we had everything we needed—we had the product, the systems, and the team. What we lacked were a few things: we lacked a marketing team, and we lacked customer service. BJ Tech was a B2B business, we had sales and account managers, but no customer service. Anyway, I called everyone into the meeting room, and everyone said yes, let's do it. Then we discussed domain names, I had two options in hand, and ultimately chose Binance. It was a moment in time. That meeting room was even smaller than this one.
If I were a fly on the wall in that meeting room, what would I see that other trading platforms' meeting rooms don't have, that took you from zero to global number one in six months
I don't know about other trading platforms, but there was nothing particularly magical about ours. Just a very hard-fighting, very pragmatic team, with almost no ego, very humble, strong execution, and very much in sync with each other. Everyone on the team trusted me, and was basically willing to follow me to the ends of the earth. I said we're going to do this, and everyone followed along.
There's a bit of Asian culture in this. In the West, when you want to do something, you have to discuss it first, and everyone has to share their own perspective; whereas in Asian culture, once people have committed to a leader, they'll follow almost blindly, and sometimes it's actually hard to get feedback from them. The upside of this culture is that as long as the direction is right, execution is extremely strong; the downside is that if the leader's direction is wrong, it's usually a disaster. We were lucky—the direction was right.
What does "hard work" mean to you
To different people, "hard work" means different things. But I think delivering results and having impact is more important than working long hours. Many people work very long hours but produce nothing. Making a high-quality product that people love, while also working long hours—that's what truly matters. Usually people who are passionate—what measures them isn't hours worked, but how much they love it, and how quickly they can produce high-quality results. But to achieve that, you need a group of extremely passionate people, and they really do have to work quite hard and quite long hours. It's just that because they genuinely love it, they don't feel like they're suffering. That's how people outcompete others.
Especially in the financial industry, people don't really count hours. When something needs to get done, sometimes it's after putting the kids to sleep, starting at 9 PM, rushing to finish before midnight, sometimes even staying up until morning. That's how things get done.
What is the biggest misconception people have about Binance
There are quite a few misconceptions. Some people think it's a Chinese company, but it's not — we have many Chinese employees. Others think centralized exchanges are bad, are evil, but we've actually been pushing for decentralization all along. It's just that most people today — most people in crypto — prefer to use centralized exchanges, prefer email passwords and customer service over wallet addresses and all that. But I believe the future is decentralized, so we will invest very heavily in that direction.
Why do so many projects listed on Binance ultimately disappoint investors
In any market, in any industry, by project count, most projects will fail. Look at the internet — there might have been millions of internet companies back then, and today only a few dozen, a few hundred succeed. Only a handful become truly big. AI companies will be the same — most will die, but the ones that survive will be extremely successful.
The difference is that tokens are public, anyone can invest, so anyone can get burned. Back in the internet era, not everyone could invest. Put it another way — wouldn't you want to have invested in Anthropic when it was still very small? In any new industry, most companies will fail, but the industry itself usually survives, and a small batch of companies will do extremely well.
As for whether investors should be allowed to enter earlier, that's another topic, a whole other debate. I personally don't agree with the logic of "accredited investor protection" — using that kind of protection to keep you out of early-stage investing ultimately just makes everyone poorer.
From many economics books you can see that most Americans became wealthy because they could access the stock market, and because there was a good stock market. If you take that away, many people would be much poorer. Today in many countries outside the US, the stock markets aren't as strong, and investor returns in those markets aren't as good, and those people often can't access the US stock market either. So should we let more people have equal access to investment opportunities, or "protect" them by keeping them out? That's debatable, I don't know the standard answer. But my philosophy is usually: give people opportunities, give people education, let people decide for themselves. That's also why we do tokens, and now asset tokenization.
If project teams have to spend money to buy market makers, buy launchpads, buy exchanges, can retail investors still win
Yes. The short answer is "yes." But there's obviously a lot of subtle balance here. Take advertising — you can do it well, or you can do it badly. If you make false promises in advertising, then of course people will get hurt. But between false and true, it's not always black and white — it's a gradient scale. You can overhype, you can use ambiguous wording that's easily misread, there's a lot of room to operate in that gray zone.
Of course, we encourage everyone to do the right things and do them the right way. So how do we do that? I think it's a whole combination: encourage founders to do the right things; educate users to pick good projects, teach them how to evaluate projects, not just look at hype and marketing, but look at fundamentals; plus a regulatory framework — most countries have disclosure requirements in the stock market, while the crypto market is still very underdeveloped. So combining these things is very important.
But overall, in the long run, in any new industry there will be some people who are good at over-packaging and over-marketing, and some of them can gain short-term benefits at the expense of users, but in the long run they won't survive. The platforms or projects that survive must be built solidly and sustainably. So the market has a self-screening mechanism — let the market decide.
Can you explain four meme to my mom
I don't know if your mom understands memes. Let me put it this way: there is a fairly active group of people who will trade a token as long as there is some culture, some joke, some meme behind it. These four meme people will look for anything fun and with a bit of viral potential.
Four meme evolved gradually. The original "4" came from a tweet I posted in 2023, which was a New Year's resolution. I said that in the new year I would do less and focus on three positive things: education, regulatory compliance, and product. The fourth thing was to ignore FUD, ignore fake news and those negative narratives. Then I said, if I see FUD from now on, I'll just post a "4," and you guys help explain what that means. The community really liked this idea.
Sure enough, within 24 hours a negative article appeared, I posted a "4," and everyone was happy — not everyone was happy, but a lot of people rushed in to play along, and it became a popular thing. Later, a community member posted a selfie holding up four fingers, and I thought it was pretty cool, and everyone liked it too, so a few weeks later I also posted one and made it even more popular. Then it gradually evolved. Two years later, today, my meme is very popular, and there are probably a thousand memes with "4" circulating. That's how it came about, a long-winded answer.
You turned a single number into one of the most influential memes in crypto. But every founder has scars — was there ever a time when you posted "4" while actually thinking, "Damn, they might be right"
I think most of the time when I post "4," it's because I know there are inaccuracies in that news. So I don't think I've ever overdone it, but others might have.
The Tweet That 'Ended FTX'
As part of Binance's exit from its equity investment in FTX, we received around $2.1 billion equivalent in cash (BUSD and FTT). Given the recent revelations, we decided to liquidate the remaining FTT on our books. — This was your tweet on November 6, 2022, and it quickly ended FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and CEO of FTX, one of your biggest competitors, said your tweet killed FTX. Does any part of you feel he's right?
Absolutely not. Why? If your competitor can kill your company with a single tweet, then you don't really have a company. If he was running a company from the start that I could kill with one tweet, he never had that company at all. It doesn't make logical sense. I could tweet about any company, and they wouldn't collapse.
FTX collapsed for multiple reasons. I don't know exactly what the reasons were, but no company goes down because of a competitor's tweet, no matter how big that competitor is. Today, if you build a strong AI chip company, and Jensen Huang tweets that they're going to sell their stock, sell your token — as long as your product is good, you have real customers, and you manage your cash well, your company won't collapse. The stock price might fluctuate, but the company won't go down. It's that simple. Anyone with basic logic would understand that no company collapses because someone sent a tweet.
So you completely didn't expect it, or you underestimated the impact a single tweet could have
I don't think my tweet played that big a role. It was just one link in a chain of events. For example, CoinDesk published an article three or four days earlier saying they might already be insolvent. The fact is they lied to their customers, misappropriated customer funds, said the money was all there when it was actually used to buy other things, and they had no liquidity. Honestly, I didn't know any of this at the time.
I just said: we exited five years ago, but we still hold FTT tokens, and I said we plan to sell them. I felt it would be better for us, for Binance Group, to be clear and transparent about disposing of the tokens. So it was more like a public disclosure tweet, and I didn't expect it to have any impact. And I said in the tweet that we would sell in batches over several months to avoid impacting the market price. I never know how the market will react, and I truly didn't anticipate the market volatility that followed.
But you know, Alameda's CEO — Caroline Ellison — also tweeted 20 minutes after my tweet. Many people say her tweet revealed more information than mine. Who knows.
In the FTX collapse, what is the one thing no one has understood to this day
I don't know what other inside story there is. My understanding is simply this: they misappropriated customer funds, took billions of dollars of customer money to buy other things, and then when the market turned, customers couldn't withdraw their money. It's that simple.
What was the hardest period of your life
There have been several very difficult periods. I mentioned in my book that right after Binance launched, we did a BNB ICO, and once the platform went live, BNB started trading, but it fell below the ICO price and stayed there for about two and a half weeks. That was a very hard period in my life. The psychological pressure was enormous—tens of thousands of people had bought this coin, essentially investing in us, and at that time they were losing money. Fortunately, it only lasted two and a half weeks.
Later, going to the United States and dealing with the U.S. government was also agonizing, and that lasted a year and a half, two years. These things were all very stressful.
What belief did you carry with you when you went to prison, and what did you let go of when you came out
Rather than a belief, it was more fear. At the time, I was very worried that I would be locked up there permanently—that they would add another charge, and another, turning it into an endless series of charges. Fortunately, that didn't happen. It stopped there. That was my biggest fear.
It looks like Andrew Tate is going through that kind of thing right now. I don't know much about his case, and I try not to comment on other people's legal cases. In my case, no one in American history had ever gone to prison for a single violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, and that is still true today. Most people wouldn't even be prosecuted at all, and the vast majority of bank executives are not prosecuted either; some just get a deferred prosecution agreement. As I recall, only Arthur Hayes—someone in crypto—was sentenced to home confinement. So for him, it was over. I thought that was probably the harshest punishment they could impose on me. But that's how it turned out, and that's that.
So you went in not knowing when you would get out
The sentence was four months, so I knew the term was four months, but you never know whether another charge will be added. I had received some assurances from the U.S. government that there would be no additional charges, but the U.S. government is so large—a promise you get from one agency does not necessarily cover other agencies.
When things got hard, did anyone just disappear
Do you mean inside Binance, among my friends, or across the whole industry? I don't think so. I haven't seen my friends do that, and no one at Binance disappeared. The group of co-founders from 2017 is still all here; not one has left. So we are a very cohesive team.
But in the industry, yes, many people have left. There are too many projects in the crypto space that promise the world, promise you the moon, and then a few months later, they're gone.
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