YZi Labs on Aug. 26 released the final list for the fourth season of EASY Residency, with 24 early-stage projects selected for investments of up to $500,000 each. Total deployment for the season is about $12 million.
By sector, the lineup looks noticeably different from the market’s older impression of YZi Labs. The 24 projects are concentrated in stablecoin payments, cross-border settlement, on-chain foreign exchange, credit, digital banking, institutional liquidity, AI agents, and on-chain asset management. YZi Labs has also put “global payments” front and center as a key theme for this season.
At a time when the primary crypto market remains highly concentrated and fundraising conditions for early-stage teams are still tight, the continued rollout of Residency programs and fresh capital commitments sends a clear signal to founders.
But for YZi Labs, the harder issue may not be whether it is willing to invest. The bigger question is whether a firm with more than $1 billion under management, roots tied to Binance’s founders, and exchange-level global resources really qualifies as a top-tier venture capital firm in the fullest sense.
If the yardstick is deal count alone, the answer looks straightforward. RootData shows YZi Labs completed 34 investment rounds over the past year, second only to Coinbase Venture. But once the standard shifts from how many deals it has done to what it backed, why it won those allocations, and whether it can define the next cycle’s opportunities, the picture becomes less flattering.
Source: RootData
Looking only at two of the hottest segments over the past year — prediction markets and payments — YZi Labs has little to show beyond a few BNB Chain ecosystem names. It did not land exposure to sector standouts such as Polymarket, Kalshi, Rain, KAST, BVNK, or RedotPay.
On the surface, it is one of the market’s most active buyers. Look closer, and it resembles a firm that has not fully defined itself: part independent family office, part institution still unable to escape Binance’s gravitational pull, with structural limits in both style and scope.
Follow-on investing and the edge that also sets a ceiling
What has always made YZi Labs unusual is not just capital scale, but the fact that it once had the world’s largest crypto exchange as a backstop.
As the successor to Binance Labs, YZi Labs inherited strengths that are difficult for conventional venture firms to copy. It can connect projects with exchange users and liquidity, take part in BNB Chain ecosystem building, and source founders through Binance’s brand and global entrepreneur network.
For many early-stage teams, an investment from Binance Labs historically meant more than money. It also suggested potential liquidity, market exposure, and ecosystem support.
That helps explain one striking data point. RootData previously found that among YZi Labs’ 229 investments, 154 projects issued tokens, 150 were listed on at least one exchange, and 95 eventually reached Binance.
Those figures do not prove any simple “investment leads to listing” rule, nor do they establish a direct investment-to-listing pipeline. They do show something narrower and more concrete: a meaningful share of YZi Labs’ historical investment logic overlapped naturally with Binance’s ecosystem capabilities.
That is also where YZi Labs differs most from independent crypto VC firms such as a16z, Paradigm, and Pantera. In early 2025, YZi Labs was restructured into a family office and separated from Binance for independent operations, with capital now mainly tied to Changpeng Zhao and a small group of early Binance executives. Even so, the article argues that the firm remains deeply linked to Binance in both interests and personnel.
Its style, in fact, has been fairly consistent. YZi Labs tends to favor projects where real demand has already appeared, where products can fit into an existing ecosystem, and where platform resources can accelerate growth quickly.
In earlier years, that showed up mainly through BNB Chain investments across DeFi, trading, wallets, and infrastructure. Over the past two years, the scope expanded into stablecoin payments, real-world assets, prediction markets, and AI.
In payments, for example, YZi Labs invested this year in Better Payment Network, backing multi-stablecoin payments, cross-border settlement, and on-chain FX. In prediction markets, it entered through projects such as Predict.fun and Probable. EASY Residency now places stablecoin payments, institutional settlement, and on-chain FX among its priority themes as well.
The core of that strategy is not to create a market from scratch. It is to wait until a market is validated, then look for the next layer of infrastructure and growth inside it.
That works well for exchange-linked capital. Binance has a massive base of users, liquidity, and founders in its orbit, and YZi Labs can identify a trend quickly before using those existing channels to help portfolio companies scale.
But the same strength also marks its outer boundary. One of the rarest skills among top-tier VCs is spotting an opening before the market reaches consensus. YZi Labs looks better at moving fast after a trend is visible, then amplifying that conviction with ecosystem leverage.
So the real issue is not simply that it missed Polymarket, Kalshi, or some of the payments winners. It is that larger commitments often seem to come only after consensus has already formed.
At times, the rush to catch a wave can produce costly errors. In July 2025, during the boom in listed crypto treasury companies, YZi Labs publicly backed 10X Capital’s BNB Treasury Company plan. The deal aimed to take CEA Industries to Nasdaq through a reverse merger and create a public vehicle for direct BNB exposure in the U.S. equity market. Under the arrangement, 10X would serve as BNC’s asset manager for a BNB treasury strategy, while YZi Labs would act as the lead investor, providing about $100 million along with ecosystem support.
Half a year later, though, YZi Labs publicly accused 10X Capital of mismanagement, delayed disclosure, and governance failures. It also threatened to walk away from the original BNB treasury strategy and pivot toward other crypto assets, including SOL, a stance that sharply diverged from the strategic language used in the July PIPE financing. The two sides then entered a public dispute that lasted for months, with no disclosed resolution so far.
How team composition shapes the firm’s limits
A VC firm’s style is usually a reflection of what its core team values and understands. The article argues that YZi Labs is no exception.
Its leadership bench is highly uniform: Chinese, elite-school educated, and shaped first by traditional finance or consulting before moving into crypto. Ella Zhang came from KPCB and Stanford. Publicly available biographies for partners and directors repeatedly include Goldman Sachs, Barclays, consulting firms, and Stanford Graduate School of Business. More recent additions such as Haley Huang and Ricky Wang still come mainly from exchange growth, Asian Web3 projects, and networks of Chinese founders.
That setup is well suited to a specific set of tasks: reading pitch decks, handling cross-border transaction documents, running due diligence quickly within Asian founder circles, and plugging projects into BNB or Binance-related resource channels.
Its weaker spots are just as clear.
Its reach among Western founders is limited. Early circles for prediction markets, compliant payments, and U.S. regulatory-arbitrage businesses are concentrated in New York, Chicago, London, and the Bay Area, where information moves through the same angels, the same law firms, and the same lobbying ties in Washington. YZi Labs may be able to buy its way into later rounds, but it is less likely to be the first call those founders make. Companies such as Rain and Kalshi need more than capital; they also need partners who can translate their businesses in Washington and on Wall Street.
The article also says the firm shows weaker instinct for native on-chain products. A TradFi-trained sense of quality can overvalue licenses, channels, and brands while undervaluing whether a mechanism can survive in a public mempool. The result is a portfolio filled with infrastructure that looks sensible on paper, but fewer strange products that fuse trading, social behavior, speculation, and financial primitives into one system. Polymarket, in its early form, did not resemble a polished institutional finance pitch deck. It looked more like a market growing aggressively inside a regulatory gray area. Missing it may not have been a research failure. It may have been a matter of taste.
Externally, YZi has also produced little in the way of sustained, sharp-edged research. Firms such as a16z crypto, Pantera, and Variant use research to expand influence. YZi, by contrast, comes across more as an execution-focused shop: publish announcements, run residency programs, write checks, and add names to lists. In primary markets, a buyer that does not speak eventually risks being seen as one with money but without a point of view. Founders may take its capital without treating its judgment as a compass.
Since 2025, Changpeng Zhao has replaced He Yi as one of the most important shadow decision-makers at YZi, yet he also rarely speaks publicly about investing. The article adds that Zhao has openly said he only used on-chain automated market maker products and perpetual futures products for the first time in 2025. In this reading, a long period of success built around the centralized exchange model has turned into baggage in a new cycle. Those limits in perspective and market understanding, the author argues, are likely to weigh on YZi Labs’ investment outcomes as well.
What YZi Labs still needs to prove
YZi Labs is not short of money, deals, or ecosystem support. Quite the opposite. It holds advantages that many venture firms cannot replicate: tens of billions of dollars in managed assets, a large portfolio, the BNB Chain ecosystem, and the global network Binance built over time.
But those are mostly advantages of scale. What it still needs to build is an edge in judgment that stands apart from Binance.
That is why the next thing to watch is not how many companies YZi Labs can still back in a year, and not how many of them eventually end up on Binance. The more important question is whether it can make meaningful bets before a consensus exists.
Historically, YZi Labs has looked strongest when enlarging an opportunity after a trend becomes visible. The next step is to show that it can see the opportunity before the trend appears.
EASY Residency is becoming an important tool in that transition. If YZi Labs can repeatedly use the program to identify companies that are not fashionable at the time, but go on to become core infrastructure in new sectors a few years later, that would mark a real shift from “Binance ecosystem capital” to an independent top-tier VC.
If YZi Labs still has a larger ambition, the article’s conclusion is blunt: it has to complete that transformation. Otherwise, it may remain a very powerful capital institution, but one whose strength comes more from platform and ecosystem advantages than from distinctive investment judgment.