As a founder, I know how easy it is to maintain strong, friendly relationships with journalists. We work hard to respond to their requests quickly and accurately, and 99.9% of the time, they ultimately produce unbiased coverage. But in rare cases, relationships break down and cannot be restored. Unfortunately, this was the case with this Reuters reporter, who wrote a series of stories about us over the past few months, relying entirely on anonymous sources. Earlier this year, due to a breakdown in trust, we took the unusual step of publishing the full email transcript of our conversation with this Reuters reporter.

On Monday, October 10, they again asked us a series of new questions on a broad range of topics, primarily asking about 1) our commitment to compliance and 2) my personal leadership style. These are topics I am happy to discuss. But what was different about this reporting was that they had crossed the line into an indefensible subject—they indicated an interest in exposing my children.

Here’s why: Over the past two years, we’ve worked with law enforcement around the world to freeze the assets of criminal organizations around the world. But my toddlers are not of public interest, and this reporter knew that publishing information about them would put them in danger. This is unprincipled and intolerable.

Because we could not guarantee that this Reuters reporter would not write about my family, we once again took the unusual step of not responding directly to them. Instead, we took the story directly to the community. I will try to unpack some of the topics they were accusing us of.

Binance’s Commitment to Compliance

The crypto industry is also growing at an unprecedented rate, and regulators are also developing regulatory frameworks at a very fast pace to stand the test of time, protect consumers, and allow for innovation.

Few companies in history have faced such complex challenges. There is no playbook that explains how to instantly go from a small startup to a Fortune 100 company when your company’s market value has grown exponentially in a short period of time. You also can’t snap your fingers and instantly hire thousands of web3 engineers, security experts, project managers, etc. So, like many startups, Binance is not perfect, but we are learning fast.

Since last year alone, we have hired more than 4,000 new employees, many of whom work in compliance, investigations and security areas. Today, Binance is a very different company than when it was founded. We have been working closely with regulators around the world to restructure our organization and upgrade our systems. Our Global Security & Compliance team has grown to over 500 employees worldwide and includes professionals with regulatory backgrounds, senior investigators from renowned blockchain analytics firms, and law enforcement officers who have led a number of cyber-focused The largest ever investigation into a crime. However, this is work that never ends, so we will continue to invest in building a compliance framework that our users can trust.

We are the first major exchange outside of the United States to conduct KYC on all users to ensure that we can comply with international standards. KYC is shorthand for collecting personal data to "know your customer", which is an important key for well-managed organizations. In order to strengthen the credibility of the entire crypto ecosystem, we encourage all crypto exchanges in the world to do the same.

The narrative that crypto is a tool for criminals is greatly exaggerated. Reuters reported that at least $2.35 billion in criminal funds have been laundered through Binance, but failed to 1) provide any details on how that number was calculated and 2) point out that this represented only 0.1% of the total funds that have flowed through Binance since 2019. While the Reuters numbers are greatly exaggerated, they still show that Binance is one of the most effective financial institutions in preventing illicit funds from entering its platform. We have zero tolerance for criminal activity.

My leadership style

The Reuters reporter seemed to think I was a “bossy” and “secretive” leader who was “hard-nosed” by my employees. In fact, I consider my leadership style to be very transparent, and every Binancian has access to “CZ’s Principles,” a document I wrote to codify my leadership style and update regularly as I learn new things. I understand that not everyone will like my approach, but it works. I believe this approach works for a startup like ours, but it may also work for more established businesses. Last week, I shared these ideas for the first time outside of Binance, and I’ll let the document speak for itself.

Why don't we share office locations?

This is actually similar to the argument of why I don't want my family to appear in the media. Over the past two years, we have worked closely with global law enforcement to seize the assets of countless criminal organizations around the world, which has directly led to a safer and cleaner crypto market. Therefore, for security purposes, we are careful when disclosing our office locations, wearing Binance branding, or claiming to be Binance employees. I want to keep our employees safe. However, regulators in every jurisdiction where Binance operates have our local address and contact information on file, and we have announced major offices in Paris and Dubai. We have also set up a law enforcement request section of the Binance website specifically for law enforcement.

Tai Chi Briefing

This is an old story that I thought we had completely cleared up, but Reuters doesn't seem to want to accept the truth. The story of the so-called "Tai Chi Briefing," which was a proposal submitted by an outside consultant on how to do business in the United States. Let me be clear again: it was never implemented and I personally rejected it. The entire PPT was only seven slides, without any actionable direction, and looked like a fifth grader scribbled together. The proposal was rejected after the introduction and a subsequent round of investigation. The end result is that Binance.US was established based on the advice of a well-known US law firm. Today, Binance.US is approved to operate throughout the United States and operates independently of Binance.com.

How do we compensate our employees?

One of the great things about working in crypto is that we have more options on how to compensate our employees. In fact, you don’t even have to be in crypto, any business can pay its employees in full or part of crypto. In our case, employees can choose how they want to get paid, in fiat, crypto, or a combination of both, depending on the local laws of each jurisdiction. And importantly, they should all comply with the tax laws of their region without exception.

Final Thoughts

This is a much longer blog post than I've written before. If you read my principles above, then you know that I like to keep things short and to the point. That said, there is much more to write about many of these topics, and we will continue to write as time goes on. For now, I want to reiterate my desire to A) build strong, open relationships with journalists from all media outlets, and more importantly, B) keep my family safe. I can't commit to A without a guarantee for B.

I can tolerate occasional negative press, as long as it doesn’t affect our focus on building and improving Binance and the blockchain ecosystem. We always have and will always be committed to this. We will never push it off until tomorrow, this year, or even next year. We are building a company that we believe will last a hundred years or more.