"If a competitor can destroy your company with one tweet, then you never had a real company in the first place."
That line set the tone for a lengthy interview with Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, on the When Shift Happens podcast, where he walked through Binance’s early days, the FTX collapse, his prison sentence and later pardon, the Oct. 10, 2025 crash, and his view of Hyperliquid, decentralized exchanges and the current bull cycle.
The episode was hosted by Kevin and aired on Sept. 25, 2026.
How Binance started
Asked what shaped his drive, CZ said he did not remember any traumatic childhood event, but he grew up in a poor household after his family immigrated to Canada. His parents both earned wages close to minimum wage, while many of his friends came from wealthy immigrant families from Taiwan and Hong Kong. He said that contrast created pressure.
CZ also spoke about his sister, describing her as a technical professional who worked at a startup in Tokyo before becoming one of Morgan Stanley’s managing directors. He said the bank has roughly 400 managing directors globally and close to 100,000 employees, and that she retired at around age 42 and now counsels people dealing with depression.
On Binance’s first day, CZ said the company did not begin the way many people assume. The founding team already had 15 to 20 people and was running a business called BG Tech that sold matching engines and exchange systems to other platforms. In May 2017, he called everyone into a meeting room and proposed building a crypto-to-crypto exchange. That was the moment the team decided to switch.
He said 80% to 90% of BG Tech’s clients were not crypto exchanges but other marketplaces, including collectibles platforms. Binance, in his telling, was built on top of an existing B2B technology team and became the world’s largest exchange within six months.
CZ defined hard work in practical terms. Output and efficiency matter more than long hours, he said, adding that many people work for a long time without producing much, while highly motivated people measure themselves by the quality of what they can deliver in a short period.
He also addressed what he sees as common misconceptions about Binance. One is that Binance is a Chinese company. He said it is not, though it has many Chinese employees. Another is that centralized exchanges are inherently bad for the industry. CZ said Binance has invested heavily in decentralization and believes the long-term direction of the market is decentralized, even if most users still prefer centralized venues today.
His answer on FTX and the tweet
Kevin raised Sam Bankman-Fried’s claim that CZ’s tweet brought down FTX. CZ rejected that outright.
He said a company that can be destroyed by a rival’s single post was never structurally sound. In his account, Binance’s tweet was a disclosure tied to its earlier exit from FTX equity. As part of that exit, Binance received about $2.1 billion in cash, BUSD and FTT, and he later said Binance would liquidate the remaining FTT on its books.
CZ said he did not know at the time that FTX was in that much trouble and did not expect the consequences that followed. He pointed to a CoinDesk report published three or four days before his tweet that said FTX may have been insolvent.
What actually broke FTX, he said, was the misuse of customer money. According to CZ, the exchange lied to customers and diverted billions of dollars in customer funds into other purchases. Once the market turned down, customers could not withdraw their money. He described the sequence in blunt terms: that was the core issue, nothing more complicated than that.
He also noted that Alameda’s CEO posted on X about 20 minutes after his own tweet, and said many people believe that post revealed more than his did.
Prison and the 2025 pardon
CZ said the hardest part before entering prison was not the loss of a belief but the fear that the case would keep expanding. He worried that more charges could be added and that he could be held indefinitely.
He argued that his case was unusual in U.S. history, saying no one had gone to prison solely for a single Bank Secrecy Act violation before his case, and that even now most people in similar situations are not prosecuted.
He also said no one inside Binance disappeared when things became difficult. All of the co-founders from 2017 are still there, according to CZ, which he contrasted with parts of the crypto industry where people make sweeping promises and vanish a few months later.
On the pardon itself, CZ said he discussed the process with lawyers. He noted that Donald Trump had said during the campaign that he would pardon Ross Ulbricht, and that Arthur Hayes later received a pardon in a case CZ considered more similar to his own. Through friends, he contacted the same lawyer who had worked on those pardon matters and filed his petition in April 2025, after Hayes was pardoned in March 2025.
CZ said he never met Trump, never spoke with him by phone, never emailed him and does not have his number. The closest he came was in Davos, where Trump was on stage and CZ was in the audience. They did not shake hands, and Trump did not know he was there.
Asked about the view that a pardon proves political influence matters more than anything else, CZ said his own perspective is obviously biased and should be judged by others. He added that many people have told him he was treated unfairly and that the outcome should have been corrected.
He said the case against him centered on Binance’s KYC program not being strong enough, while he personally never handled any trades. He then pointed to current U.S. discussions around Polymarket, which does not use KYC but geoblocks international markets, and said perpetual DEXs may be viewed through a similar lens. In his view, if his conduct were judged by today’s standards, it would not necessarily be seen the same way.
The "red button" approach to exchange security
The interview also turned to exchange security. Kevin referenced a previous conversation with Bybit CEO Ben Zhou two days after Bybit suffered a $1.5 billion hack. At the time, CZ had publicly suggested pausing withdrawals, while Bybit chose not to.
CZ said there is no universal right or wrong answer in that situation. It comes down to judgment, and Ben had more information about the incident than he did. His own instinct, he said, is much more conservative: pause withdrawals first.
He recalled Binance’s own hack in May 2019, when the exchange lost $40 million. His first move was to stop all withdrawals and, in practice, halt almost all systems. He described this as a virtual big red button in his head. When a security incident happens, you hit it first, then work out what happened and how far the damage goes.
In his view, anyone at an exchange should be able to press that red button and stop everything. Only after the facts are clearer and the risks are understood should systems be reopened step by step.
During the 2019 incident, Binance paused withdrawals for a week but kept trading open so prices on the platform would not diverge from other exchanges. During that same week, CZ said, Binance also moved its architecture from servers to a serverless setup.
Would the outcome at Bybit have been dramatically different if it had followed his advice? CZ said probably not. The hack had already happened. A withdrawal pause would only have made a major difference if there had been a second attack, and fortunately there was not. He called it a difficult decision with no single correct answer.
Hyperliquid, DEXs and market expansion
CZ pushed back on the idea that Binance sees Hyperliquid as its first real threat or that his public comments were meant to slow the project down.
He said he wants more crypto exchanges to innovate because exchanges help grow the overall pie. By holder count, he estimated crypto penetration at roughly 5% to 15%. By net worth allocation, though, he said the real share of capital committed to crypto is still tiny. On that basis, he argued, penetration remains below 1%.
That is why he said he welcomes more decentralized exchanges, including Hyperliquid. Early leaders do not always become the biggest winners, he said, pointing out that Google was far from the first search engine and Binance was far from the first centralized exchange. First-mover advantage does not guarantee a lasting lead. Growing the industry matters more than maximizing one platform, in his view.
Asked where Hyperliquid is stronger than Binance today, CZ mentioned one point: it does not use KYC, though he immediately added that this is a small point.
Kevin then asked why HYPE had not been available on Binance spot for so long even though it had been one of the best-performing assets of the past two years, up about 25x and already in the top 10. CZ said that by the time HYPE took off, he had already stepped back from day-to-day management at Binance. His understanding was that for a long period the token was not circulating, while Binance had a policy requiring it to be able to hold listed tokens to manage counterparty risk. He added that this may no longer be an issue today, but said he did not know the current status.
His response to the Oct. 10, 2025 crash
Kevin brought up the sharp selloff on Oct. 10, 2025, when many altcoins went to zero or close to zero within minutes in what he described as the largest liquidation event in crypto history. He asked why markets always seem to want a villain, and why CZ became one.
CZ said the villain narrative was amplified by a competitor. According to him, the first price moves did not begin on Binance but on another specific exchange. He laid out the sequence this way: Trump announced tariffs, stocks fell, crypto fell, and only after that did Binance experience a technical issue tied to a small stablecoin.
He stressed that the token involved was neither USDT nor USDC but Athena USD, with a market capitalization in the single-digit billions of dollars. In his telling, that was nowhere near large enough to cause the broader Oct. 10 collapse.
CZ said Chinese-language media picked up the story and that a China-based competitor operating a centralized exchange tried hard to magnify it. He cited a timeline chart posted by Dragonfly’s Hasib showing that prices had already started falling after Trump’s tariff announcement, while Binance’s issue came later. He also said Cathie Wood later acknowledged that she did not believe Binance caused the entire crash, only that Binance’s technical issue was one part of the broader event.
Binance, he said, paid about $800 million to compensate users on its platform who suffered losses, despite having no obligation to do so. At the same time, he said Binance still saw net inflows during the period when criticism was loudest, and its market share did not decline.
His conclusion was simple: follow the money. Binance users, he said, did not believe Binance caused the problem.
Kevin also asked whether CZ posted his trademark "4," the shorthand he uses to ignore FUD. CZ said he did not. He usually posts "4" when a traditional media outlet runs a negative story. Smaller community media or a few KOLs posting on X, even if paid, are not enough for him to do that.
On bullish posts and market influence
CZ was also asked about his reputation for always being bullish. Kevin pointed to an Aug. 19 post, made when Bitcoin was around $60,000 to $64,000, that implied buying BTC if you wanted your future self to thank you two years later. The market then rose about 20% within days.
Could CZ move a crypto market worth about $3 trillion? He said no.
He explained that he posts bullish messages all the time, roughly five to ten times a day, and that nearly every post he makes is bullish. That particular post drew attention because it happened to come about five hours before Trump delivered positive remarks at a crypto summit. CZ said he had no idea that speech was coming.
He added that if he believes he has information that gives him an advantage, he does not post about it. In this case, he was traveling, reading a book, saw a quote and rewrote it into a crypto-positive line. Five hours later, Trump said they wanted to bring Hyperliquid into the U.S. and gave what CZ described as a very positive speech, but CZ said he knew none of that in advance.
Kevin suggested that if someone is bullish and posts five times a day, one of those posts will eventually land a few hours before positive news. CZ agreed, and added that no one complains when people are making money. He also said crypto follows a four-year cycle and that he simply did not wait until October to make that post.
Giggle Academy and what he is focused on now
Toward the end of the interview, CZ said he now spends little to no time on Binance itself, even though the exchange still exists. Instead, he said he spends his time talking with countries about crypto regulatory frameworks. He added that 70% to 80% of their investments are still in Web3 and that he also devotes time to Giggle Academy.
Asked what he is optimizing for in life now, CZ answered: positive impact. If you know you are contributing and helping people, he said, that creates a deeper kind of happiness. In the short term, that means helping countries design crypto regulation. Over the longer term, he believes Giggle Academy may become his biggest positive contribution.
He said the free education project, aimed at people around the world, has been growing quickly. At the start of 2026 it had reached about 100,000 children. By the time of the interview, that figure had climbed to about 1.3 million in less than seven months, and he described the growth as exponential.
CZ also laid out his view of education. Current systems, he said, are designed to produce average and predictable people. If a student is strong in math and weak in English, the system shifts time away from math and toward English to pull that student back to the middle. In a highly competitive future, he argued, people need to be in the top 1%, ideally the top 0.1%, in a small number of things. At the 0.1% level, he said, income can be about 10 times higher, so specialization matters.
On teachers, CZ said the system is extremely expensive and not very good. He claimed the average teacher salary in the U.S. is $30,000, the highest in the world, and said average quality is therefore low. He believes AI-driven, app-based and personalized education will be much more effective. Robots are still clumsy today, he said, but app delivery is effectively free once the product is built, whether it serves 100,000 users or 1.3 million.
