By Jeff John, Roberts, and Yvonne Lau

原标题：《The making of Binance’s CZ: An exclusive look at the forces that shaped crypto’s most powerful founder》

Compiled by: Guo Qianwen, Lin Qi, Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

Zhao Changpeng is sitting in front of a bookshelf in his home in Dubai, a place he calls home, as is Paris. In the video, he is affable, gentle, even humble. This is the exact opposite of the image most familiar to his competitors: his ambition to build Binance into the world's largest and most influential cryptocurrency exchange.

He is used to dealing with others with different faces. "If Americans deal with me, they think I am Asian - slightly more Asian than most Americans, but less Asian than other Asians they know. If Asians deal with me, they think I am American, but less American than the Americans they usually deal with. I am somewhere in between."

Zhao’s hard-line side has recently brought him under intense scrutiny. Zhao and Binance have thrived by outmaneuvering rivals and gaming lax regulations — the founder has set up shop in countries that offer the most favorable regulations, with governments including the United States accusing Binance of deceptive practices and violating international sanctions and money laundering rules.

Binance insists it has changed its operations and that compliance is now the goal; Zhao has often been the soft-spoken, humble figure he is when he represents the reformed company. But Binance’s transformation has raised questions about who Zhao is and how he built his business — questions made more acute by the paucity of public records about his background and Binance’s operations.

A careful study of Zhao's background fills in many of those gaps, revealing how the founder of Binance juggled a dual identity - over the years he beat down business rivals with tough tactics while maintaining a friendly, everyman image. A detailed investigation of his past, based on interviews with acquaintances and extensive commentary in the Chinese media, uncovers the two worlds that shaped Zhao's identity: Canada, where he grew up; and China, to which he returned as a "sea turtle" who rode Shanghai's rise to the forefront of global business in the first half of this century.

Zhao Changpeng has absorbed the experience of both places, mastering many of the cutthroat business strategies that prevailed in the early frenzy of the Chinese tech world, while retaining the Canadian's casual, non-threatening character - a behavior that deflects people's attention from his tactics.

Until recently, Zhao Changpeng frequently spoke to the cryptocurrency and business media, but in the past few months, he has completely reduced the number of such appearances - due to concerns about the regulatory environment and Binance's belief that the media has distorted the company and Zhao Changpeng. This time he broke his usual silence and spoke to Fortune magazine, sharing many previously unreported details of his life. This interview provides a first-hand account of Zhao Changpeng's business operations, argues that his success coincides with the development trend of the Chinese diaspora community, and will explain how his wise but cold father influenced Binance's emergence as a cryptocurrency giant.

The scholar father led the family to move abroad

Keremeos Court is a collection of neatly arranged family townhouses that are otherwise unremarkable, except for their refreshing setting. Surrounded by a vast rainforest of aromatic cedars and ferns, the homes are part of the University of British Columbia’s 2,000-acre campus, located on the westernmost edge of Vancouver, right next to the Pacific Ocean.

In 1989, 12-year-old Zhao Changpeng came here with his mother and sister to join his father. Zhao Changpeng said that his father loved books all his life and insisted on studying even when he was in the countryside. His father persevered in academics and eventually found a doctoral program in geophysics in Canada. A few years later, he brought his family to UBC to study with him.

Changpeng Zhao in front of the Radnor Clock Tower in Vancouver, photographed by his father circa 1989. Photo courtesy of Changpeng Zhao

The environment here is nothing like the rural environment of Zhao's childhood. In Jiangsu Province, schools and classrooms are scarce, and the classrooms are furnished with simple stone tables - a common practice in rural areas with scarce resources. Studying is even more difficult in winter. Like his father, Zhao Changpeng understands poverty and deprivation in China, and realizes that academia can be a refuge. At the age of 10, his family left the countryside and moved to Hefei, a small city in China, which is also the home of the University of Science and Technology of China.

In this intellectual oasis, Zhao would sit and listen to debates between senior students, who would sometimes let him play chess. “Those guys taught me how to play chess, how to play Go,” Zhao recalled. “They talked about different things on campus, even politics. I think being around people who are seven to ten years older than you does [make] you think about things a little differently than kids your age.”

When Changpeng Zhao and his family arrived in British Columbia, they moved from one of the world’s oldest civilizations to one of its youngest nations. Vancouver was founded in the 1870s, and few people outside of Indigenous communities had ever set foot there. The city quickly became a gateway, connecting the flow of goods and people from China to Canada—and for decades it was a stronghold of anti-Chinese racism. Manifestations of that bigotry included the infamous “head tax” to prevent Chinese men from bringing wives to Canada, even though they had built the country’s railways and much of the city of Vancouver. “Even though there had always been Chinese people [in Vancouver], they lived under the stairs like Harry Potter,” says Henry Yu, a historian and scholar of Chinese immigration at UBC. “They were servants, not homeowners.”

But by the 1980s, the government had completely changed its tune. Seeking to revitalize and diversify its resource-based economy, Canada began to attract immigrants from across the Pacific that it had once despised. The program included visas for those who invested $400,000, attracting academics like Zhao Changpeng's father. Ottawa intended to signal to ambitious Chinese: "If you want to succeed in the global economy, Canada is open for business."

Anti-Asian sentiment still exists in Vancouver, and Asians are still deeply unwelcome in some parts of the community, but Zhao didn't often encounter racism. His high school was made up of students of all ethnicities, most of whom had ties to the university. Still, Zhao was different from his classmates in some key ways. He recalled that although there were dozens of other Asian students, he was one of only two from mainland China. Most were from wealthier Hong Kong and Taiwan, and unlike Zhao, they didn't live in the modest housing reserved for graduate students and campus staff.

Zhao Changpeng recalled the huge wealth gap between his own family and other students, as well as the differences that exist among wealthy Chinese-speaking immigrants. "The kids in Hong Kong are more into brands, fashion brands, sports cars, and so on," he said. "The Taiwanese, although they are all very wealthy... have a more humble attitude, and I get along with them better. I learned a lot of humble values ​​from Taiwanese families."

Today, the lofty valuation enjoyed by Binance and its BNB token means Zhao is worth billions, but he remains, at least publicly, “humble in his values.” Compared to the more unsavory elements of the crypto community — some who buy Lamborghinis they don’t drive and tell crypto skeptics to “enjoy the pleasure of poverty” — Zhao has never displayed a flamboyant side.

In Vancouver, where his mother worked as a seamstress and his father drove a beat-up Datsun, Zhao would often ride to and from volleyball games in a friend’s parents’ BMW, where he was the captain of the team. The only big expense he remembers was when his father spent $7,000 — a staggering sum at the time — on an IBM-compatible 286 computer, which his father used for research and to teach his son how to program. If you want a clue from Zhao’s early life that he would become a billionaire, this might be it. Learning from his father, whom others called a genius, would be crucial later in Zhao’s life as he built technology that would power Binance. “My father was a mentor in technology,” Zhao said.

Changpeng Zhao using his first computer in Vancouver, circa 1990. Photo courtesy of Changpeng Zhao.

In high school, some of his wealthier friends took jobs, mostly for the novelty or because their parents wanted them to understand the rigors of work. Zhao was one of the only students who could make ends meet with his work. This included working overnight shifts at Chevron in the summer and working at McDonald's for two years. Later in his life as a cryptocurrency tycoon, some people poked fun at Zhao's experience working at the fast food chain. But unlike some wealthy people who came from poor backgrounds, Zhao never distanced himself from his former working-class roots, even retweeting a picture of himself wearing a McDonald's outfit.

Overall, Zhao Changpeng portrays his high school years as pleasant, even describing them as idyllic. He enjoyed his four years as captain of the volleyball team and participating in the Canadian National Mathematics Competition. He got the nickname "Champion" from a physical education teacher. Zhao Changpeng's high school friend Ted Lin said that the name was likely due to the fact that many people in the school could not pronounce "Changpeng". Zhao Changpeng only adopted his current name Zhao Changpeng after entering the crypto world. He said that he had tried to use the name "CP" earlier, but abandoned it after friends online told him that it was short for "child porn" on the illegal market.

Despite his fondness for Vancouver (where he says he wants to retire) and Canada, some of his actions belie his professed fondness. He admits that he hasn’t set foot in the city in years and that he doesn’t have any active family or philanthropic connections there. Still, Zhao insists that he is Canadian not only because of his passport information but because of his character. “I think like a Canadian,” he says. “We are kind people, not aggressive, not overly competitive, and generally helpful.”

He spoke warmly of Canada, where he grew up, for the many benefits it brought him — but that pales in comparison to the achievements that would later make him a cryptocurrency billionaire.

Best-selling financial books change lives

As of early April, Zhao Changpeng ranked 46th on Bloomberg’s billionaires list, with a net worth of $29 billion (a figure Zhao has called “inaccurate” and “difficult to estimate given all the volatility”). His name is in the news every day. Last fall, many media outlets focused on his bold cryptocurrency trades at FTX that brought down his rival Sam Bankman-Fried; more recent reports have been about the ongoing conflict between Binance and regulators over Zhao’s game of rules. While many nonconformist tech entrepreneurs display their bold, provocative traits in college—think Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network—this doesn’t seem to be the case with Zhao Changpeng.

After completing high school in 1995, Zhao moved 3,000 miles to McGill University, leaving the mild climate of Vancouver for French-speaking Montreal, a place with freezing winters and much of the downtown connected by underground tunnels. According to Zhao, he had no academic or social success at McGill, even though he switched his major from biology to computer science because "in high school, biology was about humans. In college, the focus went back to animals, which didn't interest me." In his free time, he went roller skating or went out for pho with friends, and stayed up late in the campus computer lab, typing code into a rudimentary Apple desktop computer.

Changpeng Zhao's first residence at McGill University in Montreal

Towards the end of his time at McGill, Zhao did publicly display the brilliance he would later demonstrate in his career, co-authoring an academic paper on artificial intelligence in 1999 with professor Jeremy Cooperstock — a topic that would only become popular 20 years later. Sitting in a Montreal café, Cooperstock said he remembered Zhao so well, in part because he was the only undergraduate in his graduate seminar. “It wouldn’t pay well, but it would give him great experience,” he told me. He remembered Zhao as a character who was very smart, but he was surprised to find years later that his former student had become a billionaire.

During this time, Zhao Changpeng said, he read something that changed his life - not an academic paper, nor a long-winded book like "Atlas Shrugged", but a book aimed at the typical middle-class, ordinary people: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". This personal finance bestseller published in 1997 tells the story of two fathers in a fable - one is a father who worked hard all his life but got nothing in return, and the other is a father who got rich as an entrepreneur or investor. The book made Zhao Changpeng doubt his father's advice. By then, he had completed his doctorate and worked in the private sector. In the next 20 years, he would gain professional respect but not much material wealth.

"My father always taught me to work hard and find a decent job. Both my parents have this mentality. They don't like doing business. After I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I started thinking, maybe I want to own a business. It doesn't mean I have to be a CEO, but to create some meaningful business."

When Zhao Changpeng's thoughts turned to creating wealth, he did make the same choice as Zuckerberg and other genius billionaires: drop out of college. In 2000, he became a full-time employee during his summer internship at the Tokyo Stock Exchange and decided not to return to McGill University. (Many media reports said that Zhao Changpeng was a graduate of McGill University, but this is inaccurate).

His math and coding skills soon landed him a job in the financial capital of New York, where he developed futures trading software for Bloomberg Trading. But four years later, even New York couldn’t compare to Shanghai, the world’s hottest business center at the time, so Zhao Changpeng moved to China—the last time he set foot on this land was more than a decade ago.

Returnees learning social rules in Shanghai

Miu Chung Yan, a professor of social work at the University of British Columbia who studies Chinese immigration, said Shanghai, located on China's prosperous southeast coast, was the "locomotive" driving China's economic engine at the time. In 2005, the year Zhao Changpeng moved to Shanghai, the city became the world's third-busiest container shipping port, behind only Hong Kong and Singapore; at the same time, it achieved its 14th consecutive year of 11% GDP growth. China was rising, and Shanghai was at the center of it all.

Crucially, Zhao’s early days in Shanghai coincided with the golden age of Chinese technology, when domestic technology companies and industry leaders were rising rapidly. Robin Li, Jack Ma, and Pony Ma founded their companies at the beginning of the millennium and were experiencing an explosion of investment and development.

“I was taught to go where things are developing, not where things are already established,” Zhao said.

He is not the only young Canadian to return to Shanghai. Canada’s severe economic recession in the 1990s spurred a surge in reverse migration in the mid-2000s. Returnees like Zhao are known as “haigui,” a Chinese pun for people who emigrated overseas but returned to China. One study estimated that as of 2017, nearly half a million haigui had arrived in China from Canada and around the world.

For Zhao and others like him, the timing couldn’t be better. English-speaking, Western-educated returnees who are fluent in Chinese language and culture are warmly welcomed in China and are offered higher salaries than their local peers, said Miu Chung Yan.

Yet despite arriving in a city eager to accept him and speaking the language, Zhao confesses that it was difficult to navigate the murky rules and regulations of China’s fast, furious, free-wheeling business environment. “I didn’t understand the business culture and had to learn it from scratch,” he recalls. In New York, Tokyo, and Vancouver, where rules-based businesses and egalitarian ideals prevail, the critical nature of relationships, especially with state officials who might be supporters, seemed foreign to Zhao. When it comes to forging these business relationships, alcohol has a special place in Chinese culture. Baijiu, a strong Chinese liquor, often appears in business negotiations as a token of goodwill and respect.

“I’ve read books about it, heard rumors about it,” Zhao said. “But you know, when you actually do business, at dinners with government officials, they drink baijiu… they talk about relationships, and sometimes there are other things to take care of, which are all very foreign to me, so I never really liked this practice.”

Nonetheless, Zhao Changpeng quickly made a fortune in Shanghai. In 2005, he co-founded Fusion Systems, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that provided high-frequency trading systems with four other expatriates and partnered with the world’s largest banks, including Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. During this time, he quickly learned the rules—in China, he says, the rules are “intentionally vague,” giving the government enormous power in interpretation and selective enforcement. The budding entrepreneur flexed his math and coding skills, but his role at the company also taught him how to “think like a salesman” as he used his returnee status to act as a broker between East and West. As a junior partner and the only person who “looked Chinese…in the Chinese environment,” Zhao Changpeng was always thinking, “How do I sell the company’s services? How do I get the next contract?”

Then, as the legend goes, a late-night poker game in 2013 changed the trajectory of his life. During the game, China’s top Bitcoin evangelist Bobby Lee and American-educated Chinese venture capitalist Ron Cao introduced Zhao to cryptocurrencies. Zhao went all in. He sold his Shanghai apartment and invested $1 million in Bitcoin. The future billionaire left Fusion Systems and first joined cryptocurrency startup Blockchain.info — which in its early days was primarily a website for tracking Bitcoin transactions — as the head of technology. A year later, he was hired as CTO of Chinese exchange and token startup OKCoin.

OKCoin was the battleground where Zhao honed himself into a bold public cryptocurrency figure who was unafraid to engage in public battles. At first, Zhao interacted with the public on platforms such as Reddit, which was unusual for a CTO, where he politely but firmly refuted criticisms of OKCoin and cryptocurrency in general. However, in 2015, Zhao left the company after a dispute with OKCoin CEO Mingxing Xu over the direction of the company, and took to the same platforms to retract previous statements and slam his former employer.

In a 1,600-word Reddit post, Zhao detailed how, under Xu’s guidance, the company used bots to boost trading volumes, falsified proof of reserves and opaque finances. In response, Xu accused Zhao of falsifying academic credentials and other fraudulent practices. While the dispute was eventually settled, it showed Zhao’s willingness to hit hard in debates and heightened China’s efforts to regulate the nascent cryptocurrency industry.

Zhao went even further into controversy and boundary-pushing with his next company, Bijie Technology, another SaaS company that provided software to exchanges and trading platforms. Over the next two years, Bijie’s technology became the cornerstone of 30 Chinese exchanges and later powered Binance.

Trouble soon arose, however, as most of the exchanges powered by Zhao’s technology involved trading in “stamps and coins”—stamps from China’s imperial and revolutionary eras that sparked a tulip-style mania. As the stamp and coin craze spread, online exchanges and shady sellers of stamps sprang up like mushrooms. So-called “stamp teachers” and “wealth advisers” lured unsuspecting investors into investment chat rooms on messaging platforms like QQ and WeChat, where they advised investors to buy shares of stamps and collectibles through digital exchanges, promising super-high returns. But many were deliberately manipulated and dumped scams. Ordinary investors, especially elderly Chinese, lost hundreds of millions of yuan, some even their entire pensions, according to a 2016 investigation by China’s state-owned newspaper Securities Times.

Zhao Changpeng has no direct connection to stamp scams, but his technology arguably helped fuel the boom. More importantly, the rampant craze put authorities on high alert: The Chinese government quickly enacted new regulations to limit the unbridled growth of digital platforms that reward irregularities and risky behavior, and became more suspicious of digital financial innovation. In January 2017, the state ordered stamp and collectible exchanges to rectify or close; by August of that year, their operations were halted. Most of Bijie’s clients went out of business.

Meanwhile, Zhao’s ambitions began looking elsewhere. In 2017, a sharp rise in cryptocurrency prices attracted millions of new investors into the space. Zhao watched as the industry leader, San Francisco-based Coinbase, profited from it. He saw an opportunity and founded his own exchange, Binance, in July of that year in Shanghai.

In just one year, Binance surpassed Coinbase to become the world’s largest exchange, leveraging its premium trading platform, global customer base, and virtually unregulated regulatory policies. Soon after, the company became the first exchange to launch its own blockchain — a technological feat. Customers could earn token rewards for trading, and Binance added the ability to trade hundreds of digital assets, including those with unknown origins. These strategies helped Binance snatch customers from Coinbase and other competitors, as did the company’s low trading fees and policy of asking few or no questions when it comes to vetting customers.

By now, Zhao Changpeng has clearly adapted to the faster and more aggressive rules of business in Asia, which makes competing with North American companies a relative breeze. In the book "Crypto Kings," an Asian American entrepreneur scoffs at the media that marvel at Binance's sudden rise: "What's going on here is arrogance and favoritism toward companies that have risen in Western markets. Asia is not in Coinbase's DNA. I see a cultural gap that they can't bridge."

Yet despite its huge success, Binance’s time in China was running out. China first restricted banks from handling cryptocurrency transactions back in 2013. In an effort to curb capital outflows, crack down on financial fraud, and more tightly control the country’s financial system, in September 2017, Chinese authorities banned initial coin offerings (ICOs) and began shutting down cryptocurrency exchanges. In response to the move, Zhao secretly and nervously migrated data hosted on more than 200 Alibaba servers to Amazon Web Services and other servers outside the “Great Firewall” over a few weeks. The effort was successful, and Zhao and other Binance employees relocated to Tokyo, ending his 12-year career as an entrepreneur in China.

Changpeng Zhao’s power grows in exile

In some ways, leaving China helps Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao in the long run. For years, Zhao and his company have been influenced by American competitors who have portrayed Binance as allied with the Beijing government. Such an alliance would make Zhao's relationship with American regulators more difficult, especially during a period of tension between the United States and China. For years, the company has been accused of deliberately concealing its Chinese origins and business activities in China, accusations that Binance denies.

However, for a company and founder who prefer to operate outside of government regulation, no country can accommodate them for long. Binance’s stay in Japan was short-lived. In 2018, scammers used fake Google ads to trick customers into entering their Binance login information and then emptied their accounts. Binance was not directly responsible for the losses, but the scandal led Japanese regulators to require Binance to register as an exchange, which was an unsuitable choice for CZ. So, CZ decided to move his crypto empire to Malta, where then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscat was willing to welcome all things cryptocurrency-related, no questions asked.

The period in Malta was also brief, with Binance announcing that it would no longer be looking for a new headquarters location and would instead operate without one. For a while, Binance was so decentralized that Zhao seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be off the grid. In 2021, a Binance rival sued Binance in the U.S. over the delisting of its tokens. The plaintiff hired a private investigator to find Zhao. In a report on the findings, the private investigator said his team had made “tremendous” efforts to track Zhao down but had been unsuccessful, and that he suspected Binance had hired others to obscure Zhao’s past and whereabouts, making him “almost undetectable.” Recently, Fortune reached out to the private investigator, who confirmed that the statements in the report were accurate. (The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed.) It wasn’t until 2022 that Zhao surfaced in Dubai, where there are few restrictions on cryptocurrency trading.

Binance’s migratory approach has been praised among cryptocurrency believers obsessed with decentralization. Unsurprisingly, it has irked regulators in other countries, who view Binance as a lawless offshore casino. Not without reason. Over the past three years, Binance has been exposed for engaging in a series of ethically dubious or potentially outright criminal practices. These include lax “know your customer” policies, which allowed Iranian users to trade on Binance’s exchange despite the country being subject to international financial sanctions, and a failed 2018 plan to register a subsidiary in the United States, which, according to the Binance executive who proposed it, was intended to serve as a “regulatory sinkhole” to distract U.S. regulators from other parts of the company.

Binance has acknowledged engaging in questionable tactics but says it has since abandoned them. In February, the company claimed it was close to reaching a comprehensive settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice and other regulators to address past misconduct and chart a path forward, though a recent lawsuit filed against Binance by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has raised questions about the feasibility of the settlement.

Meanwhile, the company has expressed a desire to turn over a new leaf, but that desire has been complicated by widespread distrust of cryptocurrencies by regulators, particularly in the wake of the collapse of exchange FTX.

Although it was Zhao Changpeng’s tweet that revealed the FTX scandal last November, he said he was as surprised as everyone else about the fraud committed by SBF - whom he knew and had invested in FTX in its early days.

During the cryptocurrency boom of 2020 to early 2022, CZ and SBF were two of the most influential figures in the space, and their experiences have some clear similarities. Most obviously, they are both the children of academics, though CZ's father was only a marginal figure in the university community. SBF, by contrast, is the son of two Stanford law professors, owns a nice house on campus, and lives a life at the highest level of academia.

Today, the two men are in very different situations. SBF is still living in his parents’ house, awaiting trial on a slew of fraud charges that could land him in prison for life. Meanwhile, Zhao Changpeng is already a father, with two toddlers with Binance co-founder He Yi.

It’s easy to imagine Zhao Changpeng being angry about his competitor’s privilege and entitlement. SBF has mocked him on Twitter many times, including suggesting in the summer of 2022 that Zhao Changpeng would be arrested if he set foot on U.S. soil. (Binance says Zhao Changpeng has visited Canada several times in recent years, including for his father’s funeral, but has maintained a very low-key lifestyle there.) But Zhao Changpeng claims that he has no personal grudge against his former rival.

“He to me is like one of those young kids who is smart, talented but very aggressive,” Zhao Changpeng said. He told Fortune that he had met SBF three to five times and viewed him primarily as a client because the latter’s Alameda hedge fund used Binance as a trading platform.

As of mid-April, Binance appears to have weathered the dual hurdles of a crypto market crash (following the collapse of FTX) and regulators increasingly aggressively pursuing the company. While its financials remain a black box, blockchain data shows that Binance has gained market share from competitors in recent months, and its trading volume and revenue may have also increased, possibly due to a rebound in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

At the same time, Zhao Changpeng continues to insist that he and his company are decentralized and do not belong to any country. From this perspective, he has surpassed the influence of China, Canada and other countries and become a truly stateless individual.

Yet globe-trotting cryptocurrency mogul Zhao Changpeng is still a regular guy; just like the rest of us, he can never quite escape where he comes from and the forces that shaped him. For Zhao, those forces may have less to do with geography and more to do with family.

Father's Legacy

Zhao’s English isn’t perfect, as his Twitter feed shows. He’s never mastered North American idioms—last year, for example, he called “MLB umpires” “baseball referees.” But his humility and thoughtfulness feel very Canadian. Over the course of a 30-minute interview, his mannerisms suggested that—despite his new status as a billionaire roaming around Dubai with a pad of paper—he still has the inside of him of the teenager who ate French fries at a Vancouver McDonald’s 30 years ago.

Still, it’s hard to pinpoint what’s driving him. Crypto is still a cutting-edge industry, and every major player, including established institutions like Coinbase, is using cunning tactics to gain an edge or simply survive. Despite Binance’s recent promise to “get on the right track,” it may be further from the law than most of its competitors.

Still, when asked if he learned to break the rules while growing up in Vancouver, Zhao denied it: “I’ve always been a pretty close, rule-abiding citizen… I’ve always been conservative by nature, even though people might not think that,” but he said the culture of cryptocurrency changed his perspective: “And then you find out that this new thing has different rules in different places. So rather than us wanting to change the rules or even avoid the rules, we just want to find places that are more favorable.”

The argument is persuasive in some ways, but it also feels tailored to Binance’s own interests. Zhao Changpeng has clearly been able to find the rules—or where there are no rules—that work best for him and Binance. This is in stark contrast to his father, who played by the rules of a different era.

Jean Legault, a geophysicist at GeoTech in Ontario, Canada, hired Shengkai Zhao, Changpeng Zhao’s father, on the recommendation of an industry boss, with whom he had worked for six years. Legault remembers Shengkai as an outstanding geophysicist with an extraordinary technical mind. Shengkai wrote the original code that enabled GeoTech to use software to create 3D inversions of geophysical data, an invaluable tool for engineers. The company still uses his user manuals to this day. Legault added, “Other geophysicists were hired to do the same work, but they couldn’t replicate Shengkai. He was a very good guy.”

Legault believes that Shengkai lives for his work and could have reached the top in academia or business, but he is too humble. Shengkai never brags about his knowledge or achievements. Zhao Changpeng agrees, telling Fortune that his father started his career during the Cultural Revolution, had poor English skills, and had never been in business, so "it was difficult for him to commercialize the problems he solved," so his father never made any money.

Zhao recalls watching his father work from dawn to dusk in a lab or on a desktop computer, tackling complex mathematical equations. But even so, historical forces and change as an immigrant meant Shengkai toiled on the fringes of academia, never able to enjoy the prestige he would have earned if he had been born in a different time or place.

But his son Zhao Changpeng was affected by the immigration. The success of the Binance Empire may be that Zhao Changpeng has fulfilled the destiny that his father could never achieve before.

Shengkai died of leukemia last year. Thinking of him, Zhao Changpeng's tone was a little regretful, as if he was thinking of his own boyhood. "My father spent all day in his laboratory and on his computer. He never attended any of my volleyball games. I was the captain and played two games a week, but my parents never watched a game."

What rich dad and poor dad have in common may be a focus on work. Even for billionaires, this quality comes at a price. Zhao Changpeng worries that in his own role as a father, he may "inherit" this "negligence" from his parents. "I do have this trait," he said.