AMA with CZ: On Delisting, DEX, Launchpad, and More

On the second live ask-me-anything session with Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, he responded to questions about a wide variety of topics, including decentralized exchanges, the Binance ecosystem, and more. Watch the full session here.

ON DELISTING

The first thing I'm going to talk about is delisting. There's a lot of questions and misconception about delisting. So, number one, delisting has to be done.

We got to understand that when we list a project, we go for a certain number of criteria and over time, certain projects might fall below that standard and when they do, we have to delist.

The standard is pretty clear actually. I wrote an article about Binance Listing Tips on LinkedIn. It's been there for a year and a half and I have updated over five or ten times. There are some very simple criteria. If you have a large user base, that means people are using your service or product. Then you have value. So you have utility value.

That's the easiest thing to judge if a project has value, so that's very apparent. And if you don't have a large number of users, at least we want to see if you have a product. To have a large number of users, you got to have a product. If you don't even have a product, and we look at the time span.

So, if it's after a long time since your ICO and you still don't have a product, that's not a good thing. We do look at the team of founders, and how active development is, and how the team is behaving, etc. So there's a number of other factors we look at. One of the tricky parts is, we do try to maintain active communication with all the project teams and it's usually a very bad sign when they don't respond to us.

So it's basically not beneficial to not respond to our inquiries about statuses. What we don't do is giving early notices for delisting. So for example, we don't give like three warnings, “first warning, second warning, third warning,” because when we do that, the project team will have a much earlier notice on when they will get delisted and some of the unethical teams may even short their own coins. So they will dump their own coins first. So we keep very tight control over the information flow and this is why at the time of delisting announcements you see a very sharp drop in price, but before that, I think you guys can see that there's no changing price.

That means we actually do a very good job of keeping the information confidential. We prevent inside information from going out or offering information from going out. Basically, there's no early notice for the project teams. To most of the project teams, it will come as a surprise.

At least, especially some of the arrogant ones. We do realize in full that by delisting coins, we actually hurt ourselves as well. So that is very well known to us, [00:04:00] basically. The projects have to defend themselves. Most projects will go on with or without us. The delisting will hurt the price in the short term. Longer term, the coin value should be defined by how well the project's doing, but short term, we do have an impact on price.

And also, we hurt some of our users who hold that coin. Almost all the projects will fight back; they will explain why our decision was wrong, why our process was broken, etc. Typically, given that they are already hurt at that stage, we don't really get into argument or debate.

We just take the heat. And we don't really respond, so we do take some heat from delisting coins, but basically, it has to be done. I just want to get that out there so that people understand how the process works. We're fully aware, every time we do that, we hurt ourselves as well, but it basically has to be done.

ON BINANCE LAUNCHPAD

Basically, Launchpad is a place where we want to help good projects raise money, but it's not only about raising money. We want to help them raise awareness and exposure.

Every time a project goes through Launchpad, many people know about the projects. Some projects are well known, for example, BitTorrent, everybody knows what it is. For some of the other projects we're putting through Launchpad, Fetch or other projects in the future, many people don't know about them.

So the rise of awareness and exposure, and also credibility, is a very strong thing for any project. We also help them raise liquidity. Usually after the Launchpad initial sale, if nothing goes unexpectedly, they have a very high chance of getting listed on Binance. It's not guaranteed, but most projects will have a pretty good chance.

So, let me talk about the structure of the Launchpad projects. The way we do it is, basically we have a choice, so we can try to advise the project to keep the initial price sales price low. We think that's a good thing.

“Do you want low or high?” Most people will say, “we want the initial sales price to be low.” When the initial sales price is low, we necessarily generate very high demand. So basically, by default, by design, a large number of people would not be able to grab it. It is a rush sale type of event.

We don't live in a perfect world. We don't know how to price it perfectly so that everybody gets a piece and the guys who don't want it don't get it. We want there to be higher demand than supply at the initial sales stage, and this will also help with the listing. When that coin is listed later on, the high demand will help drive the price even higher, hopefully.

That's the structure we choose for it. A number of people say, well now, the rush sale is not too fair to everybody, but it is fair that if you have a good Internet connection, you can reach our servers quickly. Then you have a better chance. There's a number of other ways we could do it and we have done it in the past, even with our own token sale.

We could give a certain allocation to large BNB holders. We can do it based on the allocation. That basically favors wealth even more. Or, we can say that everybody gets a little bit; everybody gets a dollar worth of allocation, but then that's not interesting to most people. So, that's a balance somewhere to be achieved.

The current design is the current design, and we most likely will continue with this design for a few times, then look at how to potentially improve it from a structural point of view. But right now, we try to convince the projects to keep the initial price low and the demand high and it is a rush sale.

So basically, it is first-come, first served. It is fair. That's just how the world works and there's a bit of luck involved. If you have a slower Internet connection and couldn't get it, that is what it is, really. So there are a few misconceptions around Launchpad I want to clear up as well.

Some people actually think that we try to reserve, for our friends or for ourselves. I can honestly tell you that there’s really no need. If we want certain allocations out of certain projects, we will just go to the project almost directly and we will almost always get it. So there's really no need for us to compete with our users on the public sale.

The public sales really just for public sale. It's very simple. And if you want to give it to a number of whales, like the large BNB holders, we could do that as well, without affecting the public sale. We don't do that.

In the future, if we move to a BNB allocation model, where you get asset allocation based on the number of BNB you hold, that may favor the whale traders. We may do that in the future, we may not. We haven't decided yet. Overall, the goal is to help build projects and bring people to them, and help the projects build the ecosystem.

Again, I still strongly believe that it is the entrepreneurs that will build this ecosystem, and we want to do everything we can to help them. Now with Launchpad, this is a great way for them to raise funds, raise awareness and raise liquidity, and get them started. So just to let you guys know, we will announce the next Launchpad project today.

I will wait for the announcement, but that project will be announced today. I think some of the comments from Twitter asked how often do we do it. I think roughly one to two a month, I don't know. It's not so much an exact schedule, but we want to find good projects. As soon as we can find good projects, we will do it.

Right now, given the frequency that we're doing, there are enough projects in the pipeline.

ON CRITICISM

On that, let me talk a little bit about the negative criticisms we've been facing a little bit. I can honestly say, I personally and we, Binance as a team, take criticism pretty well, especially constructive criticism.

We're okay with that. We're probably one of the exchanges that interact with our community the most, so I’ll talk a little bit about that later. And I do spend quite a lot of time with especially the Twitter communities because that's the only platform I use right now. But even then, I don't respond to every message, so sometimes I feel hopeless when somebody says, “CZ, you gotta respond to this negative message.”

I do respond to our users very actively, but I don't respond to negativity. I like positive energy. I only associate myself and my team with positive energy. For the guys who have negativity, basically in a free world, nobody's forcing them to use us. I strongly believe it’s more beneficial to focus on making something yourselves, than focusing on saying negative things about other people.

And honestly, I do have more followers than most of the guys who were saying negative stuff about us and if I interact with them, I actually give them a lot more exposure than I want to, so I don't do that either. The other thing is, my time is probably more expensive than those other guys’, so I don't waste my time on that and time, I view as the most expensive resource I have.

So the haters going to hate and they probably going to spend their lives hating, and we're going to spend our lives building meaningful things. So. That's my philosophy. In terms of interacting with the community, Binance by far has the highest community engagement among our peers, I’m pretty sure.

We are also the first exchange to formally introduce an “update every two hours” during outages, and I see a number of other exchanges copying that, which is really good. Now, users are much more informed during outages or technical difficulties.

We’re the first exchange to institute one-day response for 99% of our tickets. So if you submit a support ticket, you will likely get some kind of response. The issue may not be resolved within that period, but at least you will get a response. I think again, a number of exchanges have copied us on that, and that has improved the service of the entire industry, which is good.

We are also one of the very few exchanges that do help desk on Twitter. We have a HelpDesk account and they are active, and they actually respond to people on Twitter. We’re one of the most active marketing teams. We do all kind of events–offline and online, meetups, online trading events. etc.

Luckily, we have one of the most supportive communities. We have a large number of Binance Angels. The Binance Angels are volunteers. So they don't get paid. They work because they like us and they believe in our mission. We have many local meetups organized by our Binance Angels.

They are more spread out than us. I think I'm probably one of the most engaging CEOs in this space and I will try to continue to do so. And also, we are the first exchange to do exchange-based gas distributions, airdrops, etc. So I think that also changed for the industry quite a bit. Moving on, I want to talk a little bit about the BNB price.

BNB PRICE

So this is probably an interesting topic for most of you guys, but I'm not going to make any predictions on what the price is going to be. Very luckily, we climbed to the top eight, top nine among all crypto coins. We were probably the number one ERC token if you don't count the stablecoins. Well, USDT, really.

A number of guys have written about how to price a . Andrew Kang wrote a number of articles and a number of tweets about it. He knows about our model in-depth. Gautam Chhugani also wrote a number of tweets and a number of articles about how to price BNB. So, thanks to those guys. Alex Saunders of Nugget’s News also released a number of videos, very detailed videos, explaining BNB.

CryptoLark, in the early days, had a number of videos. Even Boxmining, Michael, has a number of videos. So, I recommend you guys to look at those, but fundamentally it’s very difficult to come up with a mathematical model for a cryptocurrency. So, let me take a step back and say okay. How do you price Bitcoin?

So that's a pretty tricky thing to do. I've not seen a mathematical formula that can handle or actually predict bitcoin price, or even calculating the fundamental value of it. I think mainly because it's a utility token and so far, we, as humans, have not figured out a mathematical formula for utility tokens.

I forgot to mention, Multicoin has a really good report, an in-depth report about BNB. And Multicoin also had a few attempts on how to value utility tokens, but basically, this is very hard to calculate and also even though the blockchain is public, there's a lot of data that's not authoritative.

For example, how many users are there using Bitcoin? We don't know. We can calculate how many addresses there are, and how many addresses have coins on them. But we don't know how many people that is. One person can hold a lot of addresses, etc.

Basically, fundamentally, it's kind of impossible to value a utility token and given that difficulty, that's where the exchanges come in. On the exchange, exchanges used for price discovery based on supply and demand, but the way the exchanges work, it's not always rational.

It’s basically based on mass psychology, and very often, mass psychology overreacts. Sometimes too high, sometimes too low. I think BNB is you know, a very similar category. BNB is not a security, it is a utility token.

BNB USE CASES

There are so many places you can use BNB. I will not iterate all of them, but you can use it to buy airplane tickets, hotels, use it for collateral for loans, you can buy a number of things with it.

We focus on increasing the utility of BNB. So this is also why it's really hard to calculate the value using a formula. But the exchange does have the price discovery mechanism for it, and the current price is the current price. Whether it's undervalued or overvalued, we don't know.

Everybody has a different opinion. I think right now, the BNB token probably has more use cases than most other coins out there, and we continue to build and we continue to add more use cases and we continue to expand the BNB ecosystem and we will work very hard at it. I just got a message before I came onto this live video stream, that BNB against BTC is at its all-time high again.

So we'll continue to push forward. Speaking of BNB. BNB will very soon become a native token on the BNB Chain, and BNB Chain’s main application is the Binance DEX. So let me talk about the Binance DEX a little bit.

BNB Chain & BINANCE DEX

The BNB Chain is a very fast blockchain. It's one-second blocks, one block is final. So basically, we will be able to achieve one-second transactions and I think this will have some really interesting implications.

There is a lot of misinformation about BNB Chain and Binance DEX, to the point where people are even debating whether we could call it a DEX or not. So let me correct that as well. The 11 nodes are for the testnet. Almost all of the information we have released are regarding the testnet, not the full mainnet.

So they know governance has yet to be decided for the mainnet and we are more focused on speed and performance for this test net. And the exact mainnet launch date is still to be decided. We want to see how the progress of the testnet work. If we couldn't find any bugs, if everything is very solid, very stable on the testnet, then we're going to launch it early.

If not, we have the flexibility to fully test it and then launch the mainnet. How many nodes are there going to be on the mainnet, and who is going to run them? We don't know yet. We haven't really decided that part. We will come to that when we actually are ready to launch the mainnet. But the current technical model allows any number of nodes and a number of people to run them.

Technically, it’s a fully decentralized exchange architecture. Technical-wise, I don't think there's anything that's centralized about it. Some guys are really bent out of shape about us calling it a DEX, and I think those guys will probably continue to be bent out of shape.

Because I think their definition of a DEX may be different from ours, which is fine, but we don't really care what the definition is. We really want to care about how to make it usable for people. So we wanted people to be able to use it. So, the BNB will migrate to the BNB Chain as a native token.

We are also encouraging other ERC-20 projects or ERC-20 tokens to migrate to BNB Chain. There are many benefits to doing that. Number one, BNB Chain IS a faster Chain. It will be less congested. It’ll be cheaper to send and receive tokens. We are encouraging people to move to BNB Chain and it's super easy to create a token on BNB Chain.

For those people who have tried it, basically, you just apply a few parameters. You give a project name, number of decimals and some parameters, and boom, you have your token. And there's no smart contractor program. This is more secure. There's less room for bugs, etc. So we are highly encouraging other tokens to migrate.

Basically, if you run an ERC-20 token only for the ERC-20 token, you're not using the smart contract for any other thing, then migrating to BNB Chain makes total sense. We will reduce the fees for issue tokens and even for listing for the initial coins. We will subsidize some of those coins to move to the BNB Chain. And there are many other many strong benefits for moving to the BNB Chain.

Once you move to the BNB Chain, you will get Binance as a partner. We will help you to do marketing. So we will get the Binance marketing engine working for you, we’ll help you reach our audience, which is a large audience and very active as well. And you can associate your brand with our brand credibility.

You become a Binance long-term partner and early projects will get a disproportionate amount of benefits because we will spend the time to help the early projects that migrated to BNB Chain. So start early. I can also tell you guys that there are about eight projects already confirmed for migrating to BNB Chain from ERC-20.

These are eight projects that already have market caps, that are already trading on Binance.com. These are not small projects and they will migrate to BNB Chain. I think just given these eight projects, there will be significant value moving on the BNB Chain. So that's already happening.

And we're inviting more to join. There are many other projects who are not listed on Binance.com yet and we will ask them to consider moving to BNB Chain. Also, if you issue a token on BNB Chain, you will get priority consideration for Launchpad and priority consideration for Binance.com listing reviews.

We do not guarantee you will get them, but you’ll be reviewed at a higher priority than if you're not using the BNB Chain to issue a token. So, we will fully leverage our influence to help people move. And if you're using the Binance DEX or BNB Chain to issue a token, it will be much easier for us to add your token to our wallet, because then there's basically no additional development work to be done. You would just be ready.

ON BNB CHAIN BOUNTY PROGRAM

A couple of other announcements, we are running a bounty program up to US$10,000 per bug for the BNB Chain in the testnet environment. So if you find a bug, we have a bug bounty program already, and that's paid in BNB, of course. Please do test it, and if you find a bug, report it. If you want to know the more detailed information about that, you can look at www.bugcrowd.com.

We have that campaign going on there. In two days, we're going to start a trading competition––a simulated trading competition. You'll be trading testnet coins. But we're giving away US$100,000 equivalent in BNB as a real prize.

So, there is real money to be won, and there’s really not a whole lot of cost other than playing with it. We want to use that to flush out any potential issues with the system so that we can release the DEX sooner.

COMMUNITY QUESTIONS

[25:20] Binance DEX suggests that Binance supports decentralization, and many other factors do as well. Given Binance’s popularity and influence, assuming crypto reaches its ambition and becomes accepted generally, how does Binance avoid becoming the Central Bank (a.k.a not centralized)?

Okay. So I think that question is quite interesting. We don't really decide what we become, or whether we become a central bank are not right now today a very soon. We're going to provide both services. We’re going to be a centralized exchange. We’re also going to be a decentralized on-chain exchange. And we facilitate we help with the development of that, together with the with our core community. So the Binance DEX is actually not developed fully. There's a lot of community contribution to it, and whichever gets more popular will be the one more popular.

We also have the Trust Wallet, which is a totally decentralized wallet structure. So you can use that as a wallet. We have a native Binance DEX wallet as well. That's web-based. So we don't really decide whether we become centralized or not. The market decides.

[26:33] How do you incentivize the integrity of the network?

The validators behaved reasonably, so the current governance structure in place. It's a voting structure among the validators. If any of validators are not behaving properly, the other ones can kick them out. There's a there's a minimum threshold for that to happen.

[27:14] What's your goal in terms of volume and monthly active users on DEX in the short term?

I don't really know what the goal is. So we don't really set a goal like it's X number of users or like X amount of trading volume. I think the ultimate goal is to have the DEX be more popular than all the centralized exchanges. That's the ultimate goal for DEX. But at the same time, we will continue to push the centralized exchange in terms of features and usability as well. So we'll see how that evolves. We support both developments, and I think when the technology gets to a certain point the DEX will become popular.

[27:52] Will tokens who switch to BNB Chain get free or cheaper listing fees?

I think that for the first few projects, we will grandfather them in and we'll reimburse the fees onto the network. But later on, it will depend on how many projects we get on the BNB Chain. It's demand-and-supply-driven. If the demand is high, we will reduce the incentives.

[28:30] Will tokens who switch to BNB Chain get listed on Binance centralized exchange or the DEX?

They will get priority consideration.

[28:55] What mode of listing will be on DEX? Only a hundred-k (payment) or hundred-k plus voting of validators where payments do not guarantee listing?

There will be a fee. The hundred-k is just a number I threw out there. We are really not sure we're going to go with that number, to be honest. But again any number I say is going to be broadcast, and people are really bent out of shape on that number. It will be a number in terms of the listing fee plus voting. So the validators have to vote. The current mechanism that's designed is that you have to apply. And when you apply, you pay for a very small fee. And then when the validators vote and pass, now you can decide to pay the real fee and then will get listed, or you can decide not to pay the fee and not get listed. So it's really a free market. if you think the fee is too high, don't pay and don't list.

[29:42] Will validators on Binance be required to stake BNB in order to process DEX trades or will they be delegated stake based? Either a rough estimate of how many validators there will be?

Right now, the current design is that validators don't have to stake BNB, but that might change at any time. We haven't really thought about the governance process of the validators. We just want to get the network working first and then we'll worry about that. I think the governance aspect of the validators is simple to do. That's a solved problem. Many people have different solutions. That's more of a business-end design instead of a technical design. The current priority is all to make sure the technology works.

[30:35] Can you provide any details on BNB Chain gateways/on-ramps for depositing non-BNB Chain assets onto DEX, or if you allow third-party gateways to issue peg tokens on DEX besides Binance.com yourself.

Many people who played with our testnet have the misconception that BNB Chain is only for peg tokens. That is not true. Our aim is actually just to have more native tokens issued on BNB Chain, but initially, we will have some peg tokens, especially the stablecoins and other major currencies. We don't have to be the only party to peg them. Binance.com may provide the pegging facility ourselves, but we don't have to be the only one. Anyone can provide pegging facilities, but we want to make sure the pegging is done in a much more transparent fashion. Ideally, we want to see where there is an address which holds the peg tokens or peg coins. For example, if we someone wants to peg BTC, it should be a very simple mechanism where there's one address which holds the BTC, and everybody can view it. And there should be an order book of that full amount of one-to-one ratio so that when people want to convert back, they can convert right away. And we want to make sure that the full liquidity is there, so as long as other people can do the same process, be transparent, and do the pegging, we are fully for it.

[32:35] What is the V Label worth to Binance if they give this [to a] project that will later become delisted?

The V Label on Binance Info basically means that the business info [on the website] is verified by the project team itself. Binance Info is a place where communities can supply information about coins. We are just providing the platform. We do actually provide the whole information.  The V Label just means that the projects actually verify the information themselves. That’s what the V Labels mean. It does not mean we endorse or not endorse the project in any way, and the V Label does not affect our decision to list or delist of tokens later on.

[33:29] Will Binance Launchpad introduce new projects to users in March?

The next Launchpad project will be announced later today. So yes, we are doing another one in March?  

[33:46] How does Binance plan to expand the Launchpad?

So basically, we look for good projects, as long as there are good projects coming on to Binance Launchpad. So there's an application process for Launchpad, and it’s public. If you go to the Binance website and get to the Launchpad section, you can apply, as long as they're good projects, we will do them. But we don't want to overly do them if they're not good projects.

[34:15] BCF (Binance Charity) recently made donations for ALS, and it's doing great work in Africa. What type of projects is Binance Charity Foundation most interested in? How do Binance  Chain and BCF interplay?

The BCF team will be doing an AMA on March 18th. So please do join that one as well. But in general, Binance Charity Foundation is more of a platform. So we don't really choose. We don't really have a specialty on one type of charity work. We want to support all charity work that is done transparently, that is tracked on the blockchain. That's our strong mandate: all the charity needs to be done on the blockchain. The Binance Charity Foundation platform will support a number of different charity programs, and over time we will add more to it.

[35:24] How much does Binance plan to pledge towards philanthropy in 2019?

We don't have a set number. We got to find good philanthropy projects that are willing and that are crypto compatible. That goes to the extent of teaching the end-beneficiaries about crypto and being able to track the entire process through the blockchain. When we find those kinds of projects, we're happy to donate. We are not just donating ourselves. We actually asked our other partners to donate with us. So right now, we actually have quite a bit of donation that we're waiting to give out, but we just got to find good projects.  

[36:07] You often talk about how you met your crypto bodies through poker games. Do you still play Texas Hold’em? Do you see a lot of similarities between trading and poker skills? When do we organize a Binance Charity poker tournament only for BNB holders?

I used to play poker quite a bit a few years ago, but I stopped completely. I haven't played for like two or three years, other than some very casual games. I'm a terrible player at Texas Hold'em, so I generally lose and I'm not patient enough. I think that's also what made me a terrible trader, so I don't trade either. I think poker and trading are similar. You got to have a lot of patience. You got to control your behavior. You got to control the timing. You can't have the wrong behavior, and then you can't have the right behavior at the wrong time; that will not work. I don't play poker now, and we don't have any plans to organize poker tournaments, I think those things are very time-consuming for Binance Charity. There more efficient things for them to organize, so there nothing on the plan right now

[37:22] What is your investment thesis on Binance Labs, and how is that influencing Season Two of the Incubator Program, especially within the new Lagos chapter, will we be an increasing focus on emerging markets or not?

We are actually expanding Binance Labs quite significantly around the world. For the second season of Incubator, we actually do incubators from five different locations and bring them together in one place at towards the end. So it does require quite a bit more effort, but we are doing that around the world.

Our investment thesis is quite simple: anything that helps this ecosystem grow. My word for Binance Labs is that it’s “infrastructure impact investment,” so anything that improves the infrastructure -- faster blockchains, better wallets, more secure wallet payments, e-commerce -- any of those fundamental things, we will invest in. So it's very broad, but we look at each specific project.

[38:34] What are the biggest challenges ahead of Binance this year?

We face challenges all the time. There are so many challenges right now. For Binance this year, most of the challenges internal. We need to focus on how we improve our internal management, internal organization, internal communication. The team's grown to a size where we are facing some of those issues, but luckily everyone's very motivated. So we overcome those issues by pure passion.

[39:11] What is the one thing you feel Binance can improve upon?

I think internal communications can be improved upon right now. We have so many projects going on at any given time, one person may not know about what's going on in other parts of the organization, especially given that we so decentralized. So I'm hoping to find ways to improve in that area.

[39:11] What's the aim of Binance in five years?

We basically want to be the infrastructure services provider in this space. We have a good exchange. Hopefully, we'll have a good DEX. And then we have a good wallet, and hopefully, we'll grow that as well. So we want to provide a few infrastructure services in this area.

[40:05] The team's very passionate and a big source of the success of the company. Are you currently accepting interns around the world?

Yes, we are accepting interns around the world. So the best place to apply for a job is through the Binance.com home page. There's a career or jobs link at the top. And that's the best way to apply. When you apply that way your resume and your application gets into the system. A lot of people message me directly, but it's kind of hard for me to get your resume into the system that way. So yes, we are hiring in almost every team and every department but we do have a small team and we grow very slowly, and that's intentional. Sometimes, some teams don't have allocations. It changes from day to day. So don't get upset if you don't get accepted.

[41:02] How do you focus on so many areas at once? Every area -- exchange, OTC, Launchpad, etc. -- is a different business unit with different strategies. How do you make sure that everything is on track and aligned towards one goal and vision?

We're focused on to too many directions. We have too many initiatives going on, I actually want to focus on less. But I think right now most of the initiatives are complementary, and we only start a new initiative or a new project when we have a good person to lead it and when we have a good team. So far, each team's doing quite well because the teams are relatively independent and relatively self-sufficient. But overall, I personally don't get involved in a lot of the initiatives we have now, so I've actually don't know what's going on in all of Binance. I do have a high level of understanding, but on the day-to-day basis the team just carries on with it.

[42:12] Do you feel that much major retail investment in crypto is crucial for the necessary liquidity required for mass adoption?

Yes, I think major retail investment would be good for crypto adoption. I think that's key. But you may or may not be the only one that's needed. For example, in 2017, crypto adoption increased because of fundraising activity. Some of them may not be fully healthy, but I think that's what drove the adoption in 2017. What's going to be the next killer app? I don't know but I think retail adoption is important.

[42:54] Globally, what can we do to help mass adoption?

I don't know what's the next killer app. If you asked me two years ago with the next killer app is, I would not have said fundraising, so we'll see. We just got to be ready when it happens.

[43:12] What are your interests besides crypto?

I read a lot of books. I listen to audiobooks too. Twitter's kind of my hobby. I spent a lot of time on Twitter. So usually more than an hour a day, multiple times a day. I don't watch movies that often, but when everybody recommends me a movie, I do watch it. I watch Alita: Battle Angel recently and it was great. I loved it. I think it's a great movie.

[43:47] What are your favorite books? I did a podcast with Anthony Pompliano, and I recommended history books. You should check Twitter on that.

[44:02] Last AMA, you mentioned that you'll be interested in a Ripple partnership and becoming an Xrapid exchange. So what's the current status on that?

I don't really comment on commercial discussions. And I said last time that we don't have anything active going on, so we're definitely not against becoming an Xrapid partner, but I don't know what the priorities are. So that's that.

[44:27] Why the so-high trading fees on Binance Jersey?

The fees are actually not put in by us. The trading fees are very very low the deposit and withdrawal fees are high because that's based on our partners, our banking partner or the fiat channel partner. They charge a fee. We've been working with them. And we also want to add more payment channels, so that when there are more channels the price will come down.

[45:00] When will fiat deposits and withdrawals be enabled on Binance Jersey? Do you have problems with banks? Did you solve the problems?

Yeah, so we did have a couple of problems with our payment channel. We just reopened the Euro and British pound deposits withdrawals as of yesterday. So give it another try. Basically, our volume was too high. The number of transactions was too high, and our previous partner couldn't handle it, and we just changed that.

[45:30] Do you own a Tesla?

I don't own a Tesla. I don't want any car. But as I said, if/when Tesla wants to/is willing to accept crypto for payments, I might probably buy one and give it to somebody who may donate it to charity.

[46:02] What about listing? What about new listings on your platform?

We continue to look for projects to list on Binance.com. So that hasn't stopped.

[46:20] How old are you?

Actually, I'm 42. I just had my birthday month not long ago.

[46:30] Why is the Binance app not on the App Store?

The iOS app did get removed from the iOS app store. We are working with Apple to resolve the situation. There's some history behind it and we actually don't have a lot of information why it’s removed. I guess this is very similar to a listing process that we run. We don't really know what's happening on the other side. But anybody who can help us in that regard, who knows Apple really well, we are happy to get the help and get our app listed on IOS app store again.

[47:10] Are there any upcoming plans to support security tokens on Binance?

We do have a security token license with our JV with Malta Stock Exchange. I think that outside of the US, that's probably as legit as a securities license as you can get, but we don't really know what to do with it just yet. We're waiting to clarify what we can or cannot do with it. So well, we'll see.

[48:03] Will there be fiat US dollar availability deposit to invest on Binance soon?

I think we have a few channels already. We enabled it through third-party partners, like Simplex and Spend.com. Now you can deposit using your credit card. Well, you can use your credit card to buy crypto and deposit that directly onto Binance.com, but it's a two-step process. We rely on partners and we continue to add more fiat gateways. We are adding a number of fiat exchanges around the world, and that's still the plan for this year, and that's happening at a faster pace now.

[48:48] What's holding back the Singapore fiat exchange?

We just got to work through it. There's so much more stuff we're doing, so we just basically doing things step by step, but I think the Singapore fiat exchange will come online very soon. I'm hoping that will be in Q2 this year, but don't quote me on that. We have good exposure in relationships in Singapore. But we're just working through it.

[49:16] What about accepting fiat Canadian dollars?

We don't have a solution in place just yet. So if anyone has any banking channels they can provide in Canada, we’ll be happy to work with them.

[50:32] How do we get a project without a working token on BNB Chain?

If there's a project that does not want to issue their own token, you are more than welcome to use BNB into your ecosystem. And if you want to issue tokens about it on the BNB Chain, that's also okay too.

[51:10] Where do you prioritize your personal time at work?

I spend roughly 10% to 20% of the time in engaging with the community, on Twitter mostly, and then I do have one-to-one chats with users as well. I spend maybe like 10% to 20% of my time with the product teams, just going over product priorities. I don't really review designs anymore, they just get on with it and they get it done very quickly. And then I spent the other times just doing random stuff. I'm a very much a generalist now, so I don't really afford any specific time on a large amount of time on any single task.

So many people make that misconception when they think I'm still in charge of everything. They come to me with a, “Hey, I have a project, I want to pitch you.” That's much better if they go to Binance Labs because I don't really look at projects. And other people come to me say “Let’s have a partnership. I want to talk to you about it.” I'm like, “What is it about?” And it's better to talk to somebody else who's in charge of that aspect. So I'm very much a generalist now.

[52:21] Can trailing stop loss be implemented on Binance?

The OCOs (one-cancels-the-other) function will come probably in March or April. That's in the works already, Trailing stop loss and other things will probably follow that.

[52:40] Do you own the company?

Binance is actually moving away from a company concept. A company is a virtual concept, right? How do you define a company? Is it by the piece of paper that you register or is it by your offices or where your bank account is? So Binance doesn’t have a bank account. I have no office. So we're moving away from the company concept. We’re really just an organization or a community that's working together. And with the release of Binance DEX, that concept is going to become even more apparent, especially when DEX takes off. So hopefully that will happen.

[53:45] Do you have any announcement for XRP?

I think if I talk about XRP any more, I'm going to become one of the XRP armies. But I do want to say something. It’s very typical in our society that as soon as there is any accusation against you, you're assumed guilty by many parties. I think people are aware that there is a lawsuit against XRP on whether they’re a security asset or not. Our judgment is they're not, and until proven that they are, we listed them, and luckily we actually dragged other exchanges to list them.

That's a good thing. I think that's a very positive step towards our society that we don't just judge. Just because there's a lawsuit doesn't mean they're guilty. So we apply our judgments there and we always very supportive of XRP.

There are a lot of guys who complain they’re overly centralized, etc. But look they market. The markets vote with their feet, as I say, and XRP is one of the largest market-cap coins, and it's like that for a reason.

Parting Notes

Let's do more of this AMA. I think a roughly reasonable timeframe to do this AMA frequency is basically a month or so. I will collect whatever topics we need to discuss on a monthly basis and try to do this once every month or two months or so but don't hold me to it.

Thank you so much for attending and let's hope to do this once every month or so.