At 5:05 a.m. on Aug. 27, Hong Kong hoisted a Red Rainstorm Warning, and all morning and full-day school classes were suspended. Changpeng Zhao’s flight got held up by the storm, and he did not reach the city until 3 a.m. About six and a half hours later, he showed up at a reader event for his new book, Freedom of Money, the English edition of Binance Life. Organizers had expected to use only half the venue. They ended up opening the whole room after the seats were gone.
Zhao, better known as CZ, spoke in a meeting room on the 40th floor of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Facing students and young attendees from the University of Hong Kong, HKUST, CUHK, Imperial College London, the London School of Economics, UC Irvine and Johns Hopkins, he spent more than an hour answering questions. The moderator was veteran media figure Xie Yafang, founder of Yafang Chuangbianpai. She opened by saying the talk would not focus on the industry, or on the rise and fall of one business, but on the deeper logic of a man who once shaped the flow of global wealth, then fell to a low point in life and spent four months in prison, and how he now looks at the world.
The book began in prison
Zhao said he wrote the first line of the book while he was in prison. When asked why, he gave a flat answer: “I was pretty bored in prison, so I thought I might as well do something and keep myself busy a bit” ("I was pretty bored in prison, so I thought I might as well do something and keep myself busy a bit"). He said his routine was simple: sleep, eat, work out, and write for 15 minutes a day. Piece by piece, those scraps piled up. Then he decided not to waste them and pushed toward publication. He added that editing and organizing took more time than the writing itself.
What weighed on him most, he said, was not the four months in prison. It was the more than five months before that, stuck in the U.S., unable to leave, preparing for court and not knowing what sentence was coming. The worst part was the uncertainty: “Would they just keep me there forever? Would some new charge show up after a while?” ("Would they just keep me there forever? Would some new charge show up after a while?"). Once he was actually in prison, things felt quieter. No internet. No timelines to check. So he wrote from memory.
After he got out, Zhao went back through all of his old posts on X to verify details and found that he really had left out a few things. Even so, he said the missing bits were less dramatic than he had expected. He joked that his memory is only a little better than a goldfish’s, though he said major moments stick. He compared it to remembering what you were doing when 9/11 happened.
The book was written by Zhao in English. He said he tried hiring professionals to rewrite parts of it, then rejected most of what they did because it no longer sounded like him. In the Chinese edition, He Yi wrote the foreword and translated some passages. Zhao said there were words in it that even he could not read, so he had them taken out. As he put it: “The Chinese in my book cannot contain characters I can’t read aloud” ("The Chinese in my book cannot contain characters I can’t read aloud").
Why he sold his home to buy BTC
One question students clearly wanted answered was why he dared to sell his house to buy BTC. Zhao broke the answer into two parts.
First: conviction about the bigger track. He said society and humanity keep moving ahead, and anything new with real value will get used sooner or later. Years ago, that track was computer hardware. Then the internet. Now it is Web3, AI and biotechnology. In his view, the broad direction is often easy to spot, so easy that “everyone will tell you.” Companies that win inside those tracks can grow by thousands or even tens of thousands of times.
But he added a caveat. Web3 may sound like a huge track, yet even now it is still narrow and is “basically only related to money,” while use cases like land rights confirmation have not really taken off. So the real question is not whether the track is right. It is what you can actually build inside it.
He repeated one line several times: 80% of success in life comes from showing up. If you do not take part, he said, you do not get the chance. Simple.
The second part was risk and personal downside. Risk, he said, is different for everyone, and the test is pretty straightforward: if the investment goes to zero, all the money you put in is gone, and you can no longer support yourself, can your life still go on, how much would your quality of life suffer, and what level of impact are you willing to accept?
Zhao said his own answer back then was clear: “Even if BTC goes to zero, it probably wouldn’t be hard for me to go back to Wall Street and get a six-figure U.S. dollar job” ("Even if BTC goes to zero, it probably wouldn’t be hard for me to go back to Wall Street and get a six-figure U.S. dollar job"). That was both his floor and his confidence. Without that cushion, he said, people probably should take less risk.
From there, he split the issue by age. Young people often have fewer family obligations and a different risk-reward setup, so they can take on more risk. Older people carry heavier social responsibilities and may have less room to gamble, but they usually have more savings and stronger networks. He noted that many founders do not get started until their 40s, and said he himself was already 39 or 40 when he started Binance.
His highest-pressure period was when BNB broke issue price
Asked about the most intense pressure point in his life, Zhao did not point to prison. He did not bring up $4.3 billion either. He said the hardest stretch was the two or three weeks after the ICO, when BNB traded below its offering price and between 20,000 and 30,000 people had bought in.
“The pressure was very high,” he said.
On why people succeed, Zhao said he does not think it is mysterious. He believes the people in the room already have high IQs, and once someone gets past a certain threshold, being even smarter does not change much. EQ matters too. But in the end, he said, persistence matters. And the ability to handle pressure matters a lot.
If he could go back, he would choose age 18
The moderator asked which point in his life he would return to if he had the chance, and what he would change. Zhao paused for a few seconds. Then he said age 18 would be best.
His reason was blunt: youth is the most valuable thing. He said that if he had to give up all of his wealth in exchange for being 18 again, he would do it right away.
What not to do matters as much as what to do
Zhao said this idea did not come from him, but he follows it closely. In his view, most people spend far too little time thinking about what they should stop doing. They feel they have to reply to every message, accept every invitation, maintain every social tie and like what their friends like.
A lot of that can be cut, he said, but usually is not. When the moderator asked whether coming to the event that day was something he truly wanted to do, he said yes: he could have skipped it, but he chose not to.
For startups, product and users come first
For students already starting companies, Zhao laid out his order of priorities. At the start, only two things matter: product and users. You need users, he said, and you need to give them value. Without those two things, there is no company. Full stop.
Only after that should founders think about team building, legal and compliance work, and marketing. He drew a distinction here. Legal risk can be low early on in a pure technology startup, but financial businesses are different. Marketing, he said, is not very important in the earliest phase.
Looking back at Binance, he named two things he would change if he could do it over. First, he would put compliance first. Countries now mostly define exchanges as financial companies, which means specific licenses are needed. In his words, that looks simple in hindsight. Second, he would block all U.S. users from day one.
On delegation, Zhao said there is no stage where a founder can just let go forever. You can hand things over when you find people you trust. If you have not found them, you still have to do the work yourself. And even after you delegate, he said leaders should keep going back to the ground level, talking to users, checking product design and reviewing system performance. There is never a point where talking only to 10 executives inside the company is enough. As a practical marker, he said a founder only needs deep contact with three to five high-quality feedback users, and speaking with five a month is enough.
He asks candidates about their flaws
When the conversation shifted to hiring mistakes and misreading people, Zhao opened with a philosophical line. He said he feels as if people live in a simulated world, and the game itself is imperfect, so nobody can judge people perfectly.
He puts those mistakes into two buckets. One is just bad judgment. The other, which he said is more common, is not seeing someone’s flaws at the time. That is why he asks candidates directly: “What are your flaws?”
He said a lot of people dislike that question, but most people should understand their own weaknesses and be able to face them. Even if you do not ask a co-founder that question explicitly, you still need a very clear grasp of their flaws.
A flaw does not automatically mean someone cannot work with you. The issue is the type of flaw. Zhao drew a hard line at moral defects. If the flaw is moral, he said, cooperation is impossible. Anyone who can damage trust should be removed as fast as possible.
He also took aim at a common social calculation: staying close to someone with shaky ethics because they might be useful one day. He said that means nothing. He added that he has very few friends, but the friends he does have are highly reliable.
On what he called the world-class pitfall he personally stepped into, Zhao said that, as far as he knows, no second person in the world has gone to prison for a single violation of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act. Most people, he said, are not even charged, let alone fined or placed under house arrest. “I am the only one who went to prison,” he said. Even so, he described himself as lucky that the sentence was only four months. At the time it felt long. Looking back, he said, he got through it and kept moving.
What Binance values most in hiring: initiative
Many students in the room wanted to know how Binance picks people. Zhao boiled it down to one trait: initiative.
Because Binance is remote, he said, it is easy to slack off for a few hours a day. If someone lacks initiative, two months can pass and nothing gets done. He then described a work style that probably made more than a few people uneasy. He handles a large number of things, jumps from one issue to another, and can forget what he said right after saying it. He usually does not follow up. If the person in charge does not proactively send him updates, he may not remember either. But if he remembers the matter two months later and the answer is that progress stopped after one week, he said he would fire that person.
His line was direct: “I never follow up. I need them to push updates to me” ("I never follow up. I need them to push updates to me").
He stretched that logic into a broader view of work. If you actively push something forward, he said, you will succeed. If you sit there waiting for your boss to come check your performance before acting, you will not. The moderator added that everyone at the event had been selected only after writing emails themselves, repeatedly pushing the organizers and submitting questions.
His advice on a first job: spend 2 to 5 years at a big company
A junior student interning at Tencent asked what should be learned inside a mature organization and what can only be learned through entrepreneurship. Zhao’s answer was probably not what some people expected: go to a big company first, for at least two years and preferably two to four or five.
Inside a big company, he said, you can learn a full management system from the inside. He cited his own four years at Bloomberg as the largest company he worked at outside entrepreneurship, and said he learned a great deal there.
He was just as clear about the drawbacks. In a large company, you are often only one screw in a machine and see just your own slice of the work. Engineers do engineering. Marketers do marketing. Marketing at a large company is easier because the system is already built, and there is less need for originality.
A startup is different. It is where you roll around in the mud. You have to do everything, invent everything and operate without a ready-made model. Zhao said many young people get anxious when they see someone else succeed with a college startup and feel they need to do the same. He said there is no need to rush. Building a company takes a long time, and many founders stick with it for 10 years or more. He even joked that the student could work at Tencent for a while and then come to Binance.
Be in the top 1% at something, and do not split equity evenly
For younger attendees, Zhao offered a pretty stark framework. This is a world of global competition, and your strength in a chosen area has to be meaningfully stronger than other people’s.
He used programming as the example. There are tens of millions of programmers in the world, and one person is unlikely to be twice as good as everyone else. Usually you are only a little better than the next person. But if that slight edge puts you in the global top 1%, or even 0.1%, the payoff can be several times, tens of times or hundreds of times larger. The gap may be tiny, he said, yet first place and second place can be treated very differently.
Once someone has one clear edge, they can add networks, communication skills and the abilities they still lack if they want to build a company.
Asked how to recruit co-founders who are stronger than he is, Zhao did not sugarcoat it. At the start, he said, you may need to sell a vision, and there is no real way around that. But a pitch by itself is not enough. You also need personal magnetism so other people believe the vision is worth giving up other opportunities for.
He also pointed to a structural issue young founders often miss: do not split equity evenly. In Binance’s case, he said he was the oldest person in the group, so he brought in younger people while keeping a slightly larger shareholding and somewhat more say in decisions, which created a leader role. When three or four founders divide ownership equally, decisions can get stuck. He did not say that structure is wrong, but he said progress can slow and trade-offs are unavoidable.
On the old Sequoia dispute: he would still take the meeting
A student asked directly about the public dispute with Sequoia at the end of 2017 and whether, if he could go back, he would simply avoid the firm from the start. Zhao said no. He added that his relationship with Neil Shen is good now and described it as a case of people getting to know each other through conflict.
His reasoning was practical, not sentimental. If any investor of that profile is willing to talk to you, he said, you should take the meeting. Whether they invest is another matter. During the conversation itself, founders can learn how a top fund thinks, what it cares about and how it judges a company.
He added that networks compound. An investor may pass, but could later introduce useful people if you want to expand into India or another market. Zhao admitted he is generally not very good at maintaining networks, yet said that if he were the person he was 10 years ago, simply getting access to top-tier people like that would have been an honor.
RWA, stablecoins, DEX rules and the four-year cycle
On the industry, Zhao offered several concrete views.
First, he said he had underestimated real-world asset tokenization. The tokenization of securities has moved much faster than he expected. After thinking it through again, he said the speed actually made sense. Many people want to buy U.S. shares or A-shares, but opening a brokerage account in another country is “very, very, very difficult.” Even after that, U.S. trading hours run from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. for many users in Asia, and markets are closed on weekends. Putting assets on-chain makes access much easier.
He also looked at it from the issuer’s side. If a company issues stock, why would it want to sell only to buyers in one country instead of opening itself to a global population of 8 billion? Zhao cited one number that struck him: the entire Philippine Stock Exchange handles roughly $50 million in daily trading volume, about what a single trader in New York might trade in one day. In markets like that, some companies are already seeking places for secondary listings, and tokenization lets them move straight toward global trading access.
On stablecoins, Zhao said they can also be seen as a form of RWA, just currency put on-chain. Most stablecoins today are U.S. dollar-based, he said, with a market size of roughly $200 billion to $300 billion. He asked which country would not want its own currency to circulate more widely around the world.
As for what may be harder to put on-chain, he named real estate. Property prices do not move the same way traditional financial assets do, and without that kind of price movement, liquidity may be weaker. By contrast, intellectual property or virtual assets tied to social media may be easier candidates, though he said those markets are still relatively small for now.
On decentralized exchanges and regulation, Zhao said the door is opening. Based on what he knows, pressure in the U.S. has eased quite a bit. After separating international platforms from platforms serving U.S. users, some international structures may not need KYC. He drew a pointed contrast with his own experience: what happened to him, he said, came from claims that Binance’s KYC was not good enough, even though “we did have KYC across the board,” while now a DEX may be able to operate without KYC.
If that becomes workable, he said, the industry will grow faster.
On market cycles, Zhao said the four-year cycle still looks right, and he tied that to psychology. Human painful memory lasts about two years, he said. After two years, the pain gets forgotten. He also struck a somewhat constructive tone about current conditions, saying the industry has seen positive changes over the past week or two and that people still building now may have just come through the coldest part of winter. He stopped short of saying the next big trend has to be RWA, adding that the next hotspot may be something the market does not yet know.
AI can lift efficiency, but do not push its code straight to production
One student founder who had already raised funding said 80% of the labor at his company had already been replaced by AI. Zhao addressed that in the closing stretch and turned serious.
AI, he said, can raise efficiency. It does not mean people stop doing the work themselves. In crypto especially, sending AI-written code directly into production is “very, very, very dangerous.” The reason was specific: if code has not been audited, one bug can wipe out millions or tens of millions in funds. For many startups, that is basically fatal. More mature platforms may be able to absorb some damage, but not much.
His point was simple: AI is a tool and should be used. There is opportunity in AI startups. And there is opportunity in Web3 startups too.
Hong Kong has a strong Web3 edge, but not a clear AI edge
Zhao said he has visited Hong Kong five or six times over the past year and gave a measured read on the city. Its strengths in Web3 are obvious, he said. Hong Kong is a financial center with strong financial technology, a deep talent pool and convenient access for people coming from mainland China through travel permits and work visas. In his view, Hong Kong has a very strong advantage in this field across Asia.
Its edge in AI is less obvious. Zhao specifically pointed to electricity costs and data center infrastructure as areas where Hong Kong does not stand out.
He also warned young people rushing toward AI. Every industry runs hot early on, he said, and AI will keep developing. That part is fine. But the standard for choosing a direction should be some mix of personal interest, personal ability and actual value.
Pressed on which places besides Hong Kong are best suited to Web3 development, he named the United Arab Emirates — Dubai and Abu Dhabi — as well as the U.S. at present.
His closing warning: any token promotion has nothing to do with him
Near the end of the event, organizers wanted Zhao to write a short message for university students. He refused. The reason was not modesty. It was risk control: “I’m afraid someone will use it to launch a token” ("I’m afraid someone will use it to launch a token").
He then spent a full segment making his position plain, in a more serious tone than at any other point in the session. The English edition of the book, he said, was self-published on Amazon and has no publisher. The reader event was arranged by the publisher of the Chinese edition, and he said he appreciated that, but it was not personally planned by him.
He added that he knew many project teams had wanted to pay for access to the event to promote their projects, and that he had said no. In his words: “So any promotion of any project or any token has nothing to do with me. I strongly support sharing books, sharing content and community discussion. But if there is any project, token issuance, and so on, everyone needs to make their own judgment” ("So any promotion of any project or any token has nothing to do with me. I strongly support sharing books, sharing content and community discussion. But if there is any project, token issuance, and so on, everyone needs to make their own judgment").
Two words for founders: learning and resilience
In his final wrap-up, Zhao stood up and left the audience with just two words. The first was learning, because the world changes fast and technology keeps evolving. The second was resilience.
His definition of resilience was blunt, not inspirational. In any field, he said, the more successful you become, the more problems show up, and the bigger the platform gets, the greater the pressure becomes. That is why you need to genuinely like what you are doing and be able to stay with it. If you cannot even persist on your own, he said, then entrepreneurship is not for you.
From being a well-paid engineer at Bloomberg, to selling his home to buy BTC, to founding Binance at 39, to serving four months in federal prison, and now to sitting in Hong Kong taking questions from university students, Zhao said his own self-description has never really changed: “I’m still a very ordinary person, just luckier than most, and I’ve been through more things” ("I’m still a very ordinary person, just luckier than most, and I’ve been through more things").