In 2013, Changpeng Zhao learned about Bitcoin from a poker friend, which became the starting point of Changpeng Zhao’s experience in the currency circle. Subsequently, Changpeng Zhao began to get involved in cryptocurrency projects and joined the online crypto wallet service provider as the third founding employee. During the 8 months at the crypto wallet service provider, Changpeng Zhao quickly became enthusiastic about this technology. He not only began to read Bitcoin white papers, but also actively participated in activities related to Bitcoin topics, which made him more determined that cryptocurrency would succeed. Confidence.
In 2014, Zhao Changpeng sold his house in Shanghai and used the sale proceeds of 1.1 million yuan to buy Bitcoin. In less than a year, Shanghai house prices doubled, while Bitcoin dropped to its original value of three yuan. One percent, but this also made Zhao Changpeng famous in the currency circle.
At an event in March 2014, Zhao Changpeng met Xu Mingxing, the founder of the domestic Bitcoin exchange OKCoin, and joined OKCoin in June as the technical director and was also responsible for the company's international affairs.
Changpeng Zhao parted ways with OKCoin less than a year after joining.
When cryptocurrency became popular in 2017, Changpeng Zhao established Binance and launched the token BNB, returning to the cryptocurrency industry.
In less than 10 days, BNB’s listing raised $15 million for Binance. Immediately afterwards, the Binance website was launched, focusing on currency trading and targeting the global market; at the same time, BNB was also launched for trading. Subsequently, as cryptocurrencies became popular around the world, Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange, also continued to rise. On January 10, 2018, Binance announced that it had more than 5 million registered users worldwide and a single-day trading volume of more than 10 billion U.S. dollars. Became one of the largest exchanges in the world.
Binance, founded by Changpeng Zhao, is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume. It had more than 120 million users at the end of 2022 and processed transactions worth approximately US$65 billion every day, accounting for 50% of the crypto market. Most of Changpeng Zhao’s personal wealth comes from his cryptocurrency holdings and his holdings in Binance.
Biance Exchange, according to its official website, was established in July 2017 and became the world's largest exchange in six months. In January 2022, the Bloomberg Rich Index showed that Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange, ranked 12th on the global list with a net worth of US$94.1 billion, equivalent to approximately RMB 597.7 billion. Zhao Changpeng's total assets once exceeded that of Nongfu Spring Chairman Zhong Qiaoyi. But with the advent of the bear market in the currency circle, Zhao Changpeng's total assets plummeted.
On the evening of June 5, 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission took Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao to court. In the 13-count indictment accepted by the federal court in the District of Columbia, the SEC stated that Changpeng Zhao and Binance participated in widespread fraud and were suspected of manipulating the market, concealing business facts, and intentionally evading the law.
Therefore, in just one day after being indicted, the net worth of Changpeng Zhao, the former richest man in China, plummeted from US$27.4 billion to US$10.5 billion.
Binance遭到美国证交会起诉后，业务面临挫折。已在全球裁减超过1,000名员工，而且裁员行动仍在进行中，预料Binance三分之一员工被裁。
币安原本在全球拥有约8,000名员工，意味将有超过2,600名员工受影响。Binance发言人证实裁员消息，但没有透露具体裁员人数。发言人解释，裁员是为了下一个牛市周期做准备，强调公司需要关注人才密度，以保持灵活性和活力。
美国证交会获得的Binance内部文件称陈光英是财务总监，但她在Binance似乎没有正式头衔，也没有公开露面。
与陈光英、赵长鹏两人一同工作过的一位前Binance高管说，陈光英是赵长鹏非常信任的人，她是Binance金库的门户。自2019年以来，陈光英给自己支付了至少3,200万美元的薪酬，同时还签署了一些Binance最可疑、最重要的商业交易，还监督了那些据称用来人为提高平台交易量的交易活动。
据美国证交会称，陈光英还在监管多个实体方面发挥了至关重要的作用，赵长鹏用这些实体来为他自己的奢侈生活提供资金，包括购买一架价值5,500万美元的私人飞机和一艘价值1,100万美元的游艇。
In a traditional industry, it took more than four years to become the richest man in the world. No industry in history has been able to do this. Only the encrypted digital currency market, which is full of hot money and speculation, can do it. From another perspective, this industry lacks supervision and is completely developing wildly. In the bear market, Binance is blindfolded and running on the train, and in the bull market, it is blindfolded and running on the rocket!
Binance’s platform currency is BNB, with an issuance price of 0.1 US dollars. It reached a maximum of 691.8 US dollars in May 2021, an increase of an astonishing 6,900 times, and it only took less than 4 years! The current price is around US$208, with a total market value of US$41.8 billion.
Sometimes I can't help but think, gulp, if I had gone to work at Binance in 2017, and then even if my salary was 10,000, and I was given BNB, then with an increase of several thousand times, I would have been financially free long ago.
According to data from Binance. Contract trading is actually much larger than Bitcoin spot trading. In traditional financial markets, derivatives transactions are generally much smaller than spot market transactions.
Binance's Bitcoin spot trading volume in 2021 reached US$1.15 trillion, and even more astonishingly, Bitcoin contracts reached US$5.94 trillion throughout the year, a total of US$7.09 trillion, which is more than four times the spot trading volume. This shows how terrifying the speculative nature of this market is.
In June 2021, Binance’s monthly Bitcoin contract trading volume reached US$825.3 billion. Binance’s Bitcoin spot and contract transaction volume was more than 7 trillion U.S. dollars throughout the year. Based on Binance’s 50% market share, it is estimated that Bitcoin spot and contract transactions should account for more than half of the 22.25 trillion U.S. dollar transaction volume. So we know why Binance can earn 12.3 billion US dollars a year.
Digital currency is heavily hyped and speculative, and the technical term is excessive financialization. For example, last year there was a popular meme coin called people.
People are being traded crazily on Binance. For a token with a market value of several hundred million US dollars, its contract transaction volume reached US$13.7 billion in one month in February 2022.
Contract trading is actually a capital market and a betting market. A Binance executive revealed that each contract trading user provides the exchange with an average monthly income of 60,000 yuan. If they can play for the next year, it will be 720,000 yuan.
The huge profits of cryptocurrency exchanges are beyond imagination. Binance has become the largest cryptocurrency trading platform in the world, with a total number of users of over 100 million and a daily transaction volume of US$76 billion. Binance’s valuation once reached US$300 billion. Changpeng Zhao holds Based on this calculation of 30% of Binance shares, its peak value reached US$95.8 billion.
Thinking about it from another angle, there are so many people playing with digital currency, so much money, and so much speculation. That’s why in four years, Binance’s valuation went from zero to hundreds of billions of dollars.
In 2022, which has gradually entered a bear market, Binance's average daily trading volume is also US$65 billion, which is about 1/2 of the average daily trading volume of A-shares in 2022 and more than 4 times that of Hong Kong stocks. On one day in November 2021, Binance’s daily trading volume reached a staggering $136.7 billion. One practitioner said that even after waiving some handling fees last year, Binance’s profit was still about 40,000% of the transaction volume. In these 24 hours, Binance earned more than $50 million in profits from its trading business alone. What is the concept of having a casino that people all over the world can participate in anytime, anywhere.
Binance’s ability to make money, like a printing super machine, and its special position outside of regulation in the cryptocurrency world have also pushed Binance into the whirlpool.
Today, Binance has become one of the most special and important companies in the two fields of finance and technology. This company does not have a headquarters, and its employees are remotely dispersed around the world. Many of them may not have seen themselves from joining to leaving. several colleagues. Binance may have become the largest distributed company ever. In the history of the Internet, Binance’s organizational form is definitely a chapter that cannot be bypassed.
Binance is also very important from the perspective of business influence and profitability. A comparison can be made with Apple, the leader in the smartphone industry. Binance’s market share among cryptocurrency exchanges in 2023 is 50.6%, while Apple’s smartphone market share in 2022 is 24%, which is the first in the world and Apple’s highest market share in history, but this Compared with Binance’s proportion, the number is much inferior. Even in the cryptocurrency winter of 2022, Binance’s spot trading volume reached $5.29 trillion.
The business and sales of the Apple ecosystem in 2022 will be US$1.1 trillion, of which more than 90% will be zero commission. Most of the time, there are handling fees for Binance transactions. So if Apple is the dominant player in smartphones, then Binance is the absolute dominant player in the cryptocurrency market at the moment. The absolute dominance of the entire industry and its pioneering work model make Binance one of the most important companies of our time.
But on the other hand, Binance is a mystery. Even Binance is one of the biggest mysteries on the global Internet today. It’s rare that a company is so important to the entire industry, but we know so little about it.
On the 42nd day after launching its exchange, Binance ranked 10th in the world by trading volume. Day 92, fifth in the world. Day 156, third in the world. 165 days later, it became the first in the world. — Until now. How does it do all this?
Binance is like a tourist attraction full of mist, and tourists always hope to gradually explore the whole picture through hard work. Binance is destined to become one of the most profitable and important blockchain companies of this era.
