#ChangpengZhao was born in 1980 in Jiangsu province, China. He moved to Vancouver, British Columbia with his family in the late 1980s. His father was a professor in China, but was exiled from his country, branded a "bourgeois intellectual". At a young age, Zhao worked several service industry jobs, such as McDonald's, to support his family. #binance #CZBinance #BTC #ETH

Zhao earned a bachelor's degree in computer science at McGill University. After college, he took a job at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, developing software to match trading orders. He later worked at Bloomberg Tradebook and served as a futures trading software developer.

Moving to Shanghai in 2005, Zhao founded a company called Fusion Systems, known for "some of the fastest high-frequency trading systems for brokers."

Since 2013, he has worked on various cryptocurrency projects such as Blockchain.info and also served as OKCoin's chief technology officer.

In 2017, Zhao left OKCoin to found Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange. He launched the company in July 2017, raising $15 million through initial fundraising. In less than eight months, Zhao has turned Binance into the largest cryptocurrency exchange worldwide. In February 2018, Forbes Magazine ranked him third on its list of "The Richest People in Cryptocurrencies".

Zhao, 45, remains among the world's 600 richest people, with an estimated net worth of more than $4 billion, according to Forbes data.