As discussion around CZ’s new book Binance: My Story picked up, BlockTempo’s founder published his own account of events mentioned from a different angle. He said he first met Changpeng Zhao in Taipei in 2018, at a dinner in Xinyi District that lasted seven hours. In his telling, that meeting ended up changing the course of his life.
A meeting during the post-94 bear market
The backdrop was a weak market after the “94” shock, when sentiment across crypto had fallen sharply and many exchanges were looking overseas for growth. The founder wrote that he met CZ while Zhao was in Taiwan with Teddy_Lin, and that the gathering was originally meant to help them understand the local market and community. Only the next day, he said, did he realize CZ was also the cover figure of Forbes international edition that day.
What stood out in the conversation
His portrait of CZ focused less on status and more on how he spoke. According to the article, CZ discussed philosophy, six degrees of separation, and personal habits. The founder said CZ described his life as relatively simple, with audiobooks serving as both an energy source and a way to practice English. CZ and Ted also recommended Audible during the dinner, a small detail the author said stayed with him.
Why the Binance Angels model convinced him
The article says the turning point came when the group talked about how Binance could remain the world’s top exchange in the next cycle. In the founder’s account, CZ argued that expansion should not rely mainly on conventional corporate hiring or expensive market-entry teams. Instead, he wanted to go directly into local communities and ignite small grassroots nodes himself, an approach tied to the early Binance Angels program.
He summarized the idea in three parts: background and credentials mattered less than genuine belief in Bitcoin; people should contribute in their own way rather than follow a rigid template; and Binance would not pay participants or attach direct benefits to the role. What participants would get, he wrote, was access to CZ himself—his time, attention, and direct involvement.
Two decisions after the dinner
After that night, the founder said he made two major choices: to leave school and start a business, and to join Binance Angels. He wrote that he built Taiwan’s first Binance fan page and semi-official community the very next day. The article also recounts how he later invited CZ to speak at ABS, the Asia Blockchain Summit, and says Zhao agreed after he asked directly in the angels group.
He also linked that early connection to later milestones, including BlockTempo being invited by Binance into the UN headquarters in Geneva as one of only two crypto media outlets present for that moment. In his account, the thread running through all of it starts with that dinner in Taipei in 2018.