Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former CEO of Binance, said he would still choose to build a crypto exchange if he were starting over from zero, adding that his biggest blind spot in 2017 was legal compliance and international politics rather than product design or engineering.
Zhao, widely known as CZ, made the remarks in a short interview with Jacquelyn Melinek of the Talking Tokens Podcast during Binance’s ninth anniversary event. The episode aired on July 16, 2026, under the title “Binance Founder CZ on what it took to build the world's largest crypto exchange and stay #1.” The MarsBit article says the notes were compiled and translated by TechFlow. It also carries a disclosure stating that CZ is Binance’s founder and major shareholder, and that his views on the industry and the platform inevitably reflect that position.
Looking back at 2017
Asked what was missing from the exchange market when he launched Binance, Zhao said his entire career before starting the company had been spent building order execution and exchange systems. From his perspective in 2017, exchanges could do much better on product, technology, matching speed, security and customer support.
He said many platforms at the time were not truly putting users first, which convinced him there was room to improve the market. He also acknowledged that Binance benefited from timing, as it launched into the ICO boom and caught that wave.
Melinek asked whether the CZ of 2017 and the CZ of 2026 were the same person. Zhao said they were not. He said he is much older now, not necessarily smarter, but shaped by far more challenges, with both his mindset and physical state changed over the past nine years.
What he would tell his younger self
If he could go back and give advice to his 2017 self, Zhao said the first message would be to spend more time learning about legal compliance and politics.
He said that before 2017 he was “just a tech person,” focused on building products and protecting users, and that he underestimated the importance of the legal side. He added that he also did not understand international law well enough and did not realize that some U.S. laws have global reach and long lookback periods.
The second piece of advice would be to move faster. Zhao said founders should bring products to market earlier and get real feedback instead of waiting too long. He gave Binance futures as an example, saying the product was launched two years after the exchange went live and that, if he had the chance to do it again, he would launch it much earlier.
How Binance reached No. 1 in five months
Zhao said Binance climbed to the top in its first year. “In the first five months we became No. 1 globally, and every day after that we stayed in that position,” he said.
He attributed that result to several factors rather than one. A company needs a strong product and strong customer service, he said, but it also needs a mission. For Binance, that mission was to increase the freedom of money, and one of its core values was protecting users.
According to Zhao, user protection helped Binance defend its position after it became the largest exchange.
He also said 2017 included an element of luck. It was the first year of the ICO boom, Binance was a new exchange, and it supported ICO listings quickly. Many other exchanges were still largely Bitcoin exchanges at the time, and he said some of the biggest U.S. platforms had not even listed Ether yet.
At the same time, he said the competition was fierce. Bittrex and Poloniex were major players, and he said Binance needed all of the following at once: product quality, service quality, strong user protection and the right market moment.
Why Zhao sees community as more resilient than a company
Binance’s ninth anniversary theme this year is “Built by You.” Zhao said that when Binance started nine years ago, crypto was still a very niche industry. Bitcoin was around $2,000 to $3,000, the user base was small, and many of those users were early adopters with a deep understanding of the products they used.
He said those users knew Binance was protecting them, and that loyalty mattered. As the community grew, Binance continued trying to protect users through action, and many volunteers contributed to the wider ecosystem.
Some were known as Binance Angels, while others had no formal title at all. Zhao said the platform was genuinely community-driven and that the anniversary slogan was meant to reflect that.
When Melinek asked what a community can do that a company cannot, Zhao said that if you treat a community well, its members will follow you anywhere. A company, especially a centralized one, can come under attack from regulators, legal systems and geopolitics. A community, by contrast, is almost immune to that sort of pressure because it is distributed and, in Binance’s case, spread across the world.
He added that it is hard to launch an effective attack on a globally distributed community. He also said the community can push back, often with a louder voice on social media than mainstream media outlets, which gives it a large amount of collective power.
Crypto penetration is still below 1% by wealth, Zhao says
On where the market can still improve, Zhao pointed to several areas. Fiat on-ramps and off-ramps still have too much friction, he said, so the platforms that lower fees, reduce that friction and serve more regions will have an edge.
He also described a split in the stablecoin market. The most popular stablecoins do not pay interest to users, while the products that do offer interest are often not easy to trade. A stablecoin that can offer attractive yield and still trade freely would represent a clear improvement, he said.
On broader asset tokenization, Zhao said real-world assets and tokenized markets are still at a very early stage. Only a small number of stocks are truly tokenized today, and the market remains centered on the United States. He asked why other countries would not want to tokenize their own stock markets and open them to global participation.
From that perspective, Zhao said crypto penetration is “probably less than 1%” when measured by wealth and that the market is nowhere near saturated.
The industry’s biggest misunderstanding
Melinek noted that the market has spent years talking about the “next billion users” without even reaching the first billion, then asked what the biggest misunderstanding around mainstream adoption is.
Zhao said too many people still see crypto as a speculative asset instead of a foundational technology. In his view, people buy Bitcoin and then immediately think about when to exit, but he argued that this framing misses the point. People do not talk about exiting the internet or exiting AI, he said, and crypto should be viewed in the same way.
He described crypto and blockchain as one of the three core technologies of his lifetime, alongside the internet and AI, and said people should judge projects on their long-term outlook.
AI agents and crypto payments
The most forward-looking part of the interview focused on the overlap between AI and crypto. Zhao said AI will eventually handle payments on behalf of people, and he does not think that shift is years away.
He said AI can already search for the best hotels and flights, but it still cannot place the order for the user. That ability, he said, will arrive within months, “absolutely” not years.
Once AI starts transacting for people, it will need a native currency, Zhao said. Credit cards are too clumsy for that use case, while crypto is the natural option.
He argued that traditional fiat payments work reasonably well inside one country, but break down in global contexts. As more people need to pay someone on the other side of the world or book services across regions, crypto payments become much more practical. Zhao called crypto payments the biggest unlock for AI.
Other intersections, such as using blockchain to verify training data, are still far away in his view. He said AI companies are large, profitable and highly valued, and for now they are unlikely to care much about decentralization.
Pressed on whether crypto payments for AI are near term or three to five years away, Zhao said his guess is one to two years. Once people start using AI to make payments through crypto, he said, they will notice how much faster it is. He also said early adopters in crypto and AI overlap heavily.
AI, security and blockchain throughput
Asked how AI is affecting Binance’s internal operations and crypto infrastructure more broadly, Zhao said he thinks about AI much as he thinks about the internet. Every company and every person should use it as much as possible, he said, though it should not be abused.
He said AI is very good at writing code, debugging and code analysis, and also useful in design and video. But he said not everything should be turned over to AI because people still live in a human world and still want a human touch. AI is strong in creativity, he said, but original creativity is still stronger in humans.
Beyond payments, Zhao said AI will “completely change the security landscape.” He said AI is very effective at finding vulnerabilities and can help developers identify weak points in systems much faster. He specifically mentioned Anthropic’s Methuselah model, describing it as extremely powerful and saying he hopes a developer-accessible version arrives soon so it can be used to harden systems.
He added that there may be some hacking incidents in the short term, but over the long run systems should become far more secure.
Zhao also said blockchain throughput is still not high enough and that the market needs faster, larger-capacity chains to reduce costs. AI, he said, will play an important role in accelerating that development.
At a more basic level, he argued that AI will push the world into a much deeper stage of digitization than the internet did, perhaps by a factor of ten or even a hundred. The more digital the world becomes, the more it will need digital money. In his words, the concept of paper cash is already outdated, and AI will push the trend past a tipping point.
After stepping down as CEO, Zhao says he missed stablecoins
Zhao said his perspective changed after leaving the CEO role. When he was running Binance, almost everything in his day revolved around the company. He said he used to have 25 meetings a day and was constantly responding to new problems, which narrowed his field of vision.
Stepping back forced him to look at the industry as a whole, he said, and gave him time to learn about new areas including AI, biotech and new directions inside crypto itself.
He said plainly that he “missed stablecoins” while serving as CEO. At the time, he viewed them as a transitional technology mainly used to bridge between exchanges. He did not expect them to become as large as they did.
Now, Zhao said he spends a lot of time on real-world assets and tokenization, and is also advising governments in that area. In his telling, stepping back has actually helped him learn faster.
If he had to start over, he would still build an exchange
At the end of the interview, Melinek asked what Zhao would do if he were starting from zero today with no Binance and no reputation, only experience.
Zhao said that if he had to build something new, he could only choose what he knows best, and his experience points in one direction: an exchange.
He said he often tells people to find the overlap among three things: what they are good at, what they are interested in and what creates value for others. In his case, that strength is trading systems. Running an AI team, he said, would probably be “a disaster.”
One financial system, not two
Melinek ended by asking whether traditional finance, on-chain finance and trading ecosystems will eventually merge. Zhao’s answer was direct: yes.
He said there should not be a divide between crypto finance and traditional finance. To explain that point, he compared the shift to postal mail and email. People do not think of those as two permanent parallel systems, and most people no longer rely on postal mail for everyday messages.
In Zhao’s view, blockchain is simply a new technology inside the financial system. Because it is new, it first created a specialized segment, but integration is already happening. Stocks are being tokenized on-chain, and traditional banks and financial institutions are already using blockchain.
In the end, he said, there will not be two parallel tracks. There will be one financial system.