All-In Podcast: CZ (Changpeng Zhao) Interview Transcript — Binance Founder

Guest: CZ / Changpeng Zhao — Binance Founder Hosts: Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, David Friedberg Show: All-In Podcast Duration: 1 hour 57 minutes Source: YouTube Analysis: Deep Dive & Editor’s Commentary

1. Growing Up in China and Emigrating to Canada

Time: 00:00:00 - 00:02:43

Jason: CZ, welcome to the All-In Podcast.

CZ: Well, thanks for having me here.

Chamath: It’s really, really great to see you.

CZ: It’s a pleasure.

Jason: I want to go all the way back to the beginning because I think a lot of people don’t really know your background the way that they probably should. The part of the background that I really care about is there are parts of your early journey in Canada which are very similar to mine. You worked at McDonald’s, I worked at Burger King. But before that, your parents were able to emigrate from China right around Tiananmen Square.

CZ: Right. My father went to Canada to study in 1984. That’s five years before Tiananmen Square.

Jason: How did that come about? So your father stayed in Canada once he went there?

CZ: No. He could visit us about twice a year. But most of the time he was in Canada. He was a professor in China, and then he went to do an exchange program at the University of Toronto first. A couple years later he moved to UBC — University of British Columbia — in Vancouver. We were applying for passports back then. It’s actually very difficult to get a passport — it took like three or four years. We started applying in 1985 or so, and it took about two, three years to get a Chinese passport. Then after that, it takes another few years to get a visa. That’s just how long the process took back then. So we got it shortly after, in 1989.

Jason: When you look back, it almost seems fortuitous. Isn’t there a version where post-Tiananmen they shut everything down?

CZ: Actually, after that the visa got easier, but the passports got harder. They no longer issued new passports as easily. But we were lucky — we got the passports maybe a year before that. And then we were waiting for the visa, and afterwards the visa got easier. So in some ways it actually helped us get the visa.

Jason: Did that event shape your perspective in any way?

CZ: I was 12. Consciously, no, it didn’t change me that much. But subconsciously, there were discussions about democracy on the university campus. The China Science and Technology University is one of the top four universities in China, so there were a lot of discussions among the students who were seven to nine years older than me. But I was 12, so I wasn’t really clued into it. Subconsciously it may have had some kind of impact. I don’t know.

2. Immigrant Life in Vancouver

Time: 00:02:43 - 00:06:12

Jason: So you land in British Columbia?

CZ: Yeah, in Vancouver. It’s just a completely different country. Everything’s very different.

Jason: Did you know English at all?

CZ: I studied English for a couple of years in high school, but I was not fluent at all. But Vancouver is great. Canada is nice — greenery, open space, everything’s pretty clean. The fruits are bigger. It’s just a really nice environment.

Jason: Did both your parents work when the family was reunited?

CZ: My father stayed as an assistant professor at the university. He got like a thousand Canadian dollars per month — a stipend. We got some really low-cost faculty housing from UBC, so we lived on campus. I think on the third day of our arrival in Canada, my mom went to a sewing factory to work — sewing clothes. She was a math and history teacher in China, but she doesn’t speak that much English, so she could only work at a minimum-wage factory. She did that for seven to ten years.

Chamath: My mom was a nurse in Sri Lanka, and when we emigrated and got refugee status, my father was unemployed. My mom became a housekeeper. That’s what she did. And then she became a nurse’s aide.

CZ: When I was about 14 or 15, I got my first job at McDonald’s.

Chamath: Yeah, we’re the same age, so it probably would have been 14.

CZ: McDonald’s paid $4.50, below the minimum wage of $6, because they had a special exemption since a lot of young kids work there. On my 14th birthday I applied for the job, and a week later I was flipping burgers.

Jason: You’re not this precocious technical wonder kid who’s coding 24/7?

CZ: No, I wouldn’t describe me as that. I’m a technical guy. I started computer science, I was interested in programming in high school, but I wasn’t a programming wizard. I think I’m a decent coder. I wrote some decent code in my career, and then around 28 or 30, I moved away from coding into business development, sales, and so on. So there was maybe eight years of my career doing that. I was a normal immigrant kid learning to adapt in Canada. My teenager years in Canada were great — some of the best years. Those years really shaped me to be a happy person. I’m generally a happy person.

3. University and Early Career

Time: 00:06:12 - 00:13:40

Chamath: How did it feel when you weren’t able to get into my alma mater, University of Waterloo, and had to settle for McGill?

CZ: Actually, I was deciding between Waterloo and McGill and maybe U of T. I knew I wasn’t going to UBC — I wanted a different city. My friend’s mother, who I really respect, said I might want to become a doctor because doctors have a good lifestyle. I took her advice and studied biology. And Waterloo is not much of a biology school. So I went to McGill. But one semester later I said, no more biology — I’m moving to computer science.

Jason: How’d you pay for school?

CZ: I worked every summer. And I also worked part-time during the school year. No debt. The first year I still took about 6,000 Canadian dollars from my dad. The second year my sister gave me $3,000. From that point on I never took money from family at all. I was self-sustaining.

Chamath: The best thing about Waterloo was the co-op program. It was a savior for me. I still graduated with about $30,000 of debt. But I was also a pretty prolific equities trader. My boss Mike Fisher did this incredible kindness — he asked me how much debt I had. I said about 32,000. He said, go downstairs to the CIBC and pay your debt and I’ll write you a check. And he wrote me a $32,000 check. But Canada is incredible because you can get this education and it doesn’t saddle you with debt.

CZ: Even at McGill, there were people from the United States paying international student tuition, and it was still cheaper than the U.S. That’s crazy.

Jason: So you graduate from McGill in computer science?

CZ: Actually, I didn’t graduate from McGill. I went there for four years, and on my third year I got an internship job and kept extending it. I didn’t go back to finish. Later on I found out I still needed a bachelor’s degree to apply for work visas in Japan. So I went to an online education program called the American College of Computer Science and got a degree there.

Jason: So which internship did you get?

CZ: I got an internship in Tokyo at a company called Fusion Systems Japan. They were writing order execution systems for brokers on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It was a bunch of American guys with a company in Tokyo. Living in Tokyo as a college student is like a dream.

Jason: What kind of software did you write?

CZ: Mostly order execution software. The same software that moves orders — what drives Binance today. Pretty much the same style. Everything is about efficiency, making it go as fast as possible, as low latency as possible. That kind of appeals to me. I’m an efficiency-driven guy.

Chamath: When you look at high-frequency trading organizations — the Susquehannas, the Jumps — they go to such a degree to optimize for efficiency and low latency all the way down to their own circuit breakers, their own physical fiber infrastructure. How does that manifest in the software?

CZ: There are quite a few levels. First, you write your software to be efficient — no slowness. You want to remove all the database lookups, do everything in memory, reduce any additional computation. Simplify the pre-trade risk checks. Then the more advanced versions, you move to FPGA — a network chip card on the Ethernet card, so you don’t have to go all the way up to memory and back down to the processor. Back when I was still writing code, that round trip was about 100 microseconds. By avoiding that, you’d reduce down to 20 microseconds. Then you move to physical infrastructure — colocation.

Chamath: Why haven’t these organizations done their own custom silicon? I understand FPGAs, but nobody really went to the point of saying, here’s a specific ASIC.

CZ: I don’t think it exists on a very large scale. The algorithms change too often. When you go to hardware and design your own chip, it’s very efficient, very fast. But when you want to change, it takes a long time. FPGA already offers kind of the best of both worlds. Even FPGAs — when you want to reprogram them, the cycle is 10 times longer than software.

4. Tokyo, Bloomberg, and the Move to Shanghai

Time: 00:14:08 - 00:22:46

Jason: The company you worked at in Japan, was it successful?

CZ: That company got sold to a NASDAQ-listed company just before 2000 for $52 million. That was decent money. But I was too young at the time — just 20-something. Just a coder, a salaryman in Japanese terms.

Jason: What happened afterwards?

CZ: That company got acquired. There was a lot of culture clashes between the parent company and the original company. My first experience of how mergers may not work. The same partners went to do a different company called Building 2. But they spent a lot of money on a fancy office and had zero revenue. It folded within a year.

Early 2001, I was looking for new jobs. Bloomberg was hiring. I kind of got an offer before 9/11. After 9/11 happened, I called Bloomberg and asked if the job was still there. They said, do you still want to come? I said yeah. So I went to New York in November 2001. The streets were pretty quiet, but New York became lively again pretty quickly.

I worked at Bloomberg for four years doing the same thing — order execution. I joined as a senior developer on a team called Tradebook Futures. I got promoted three times in two years. Then I was leading a team of 60 people that grew to about 80. That’s when I became a manager. I no longer wrote code, and it was the worst transition. [laughs]

Jason: And then you quit and moved to China?

CZ: Beginning of 2005. The same friends I made in Japan were talking about starting a new fintech company. They said Shanghai is the most happening place for the future of fintech. So the six of us went there — four Caucasians, plus a Japanese, plus me. I’m the only one who speaks Chinese, and my Chinese was kind of rusty.

Our idea was to bring Wall Street trading technology into China to service the brokers and exchanges. But we registered as a wholly foreign-owned enterprise — a WOFE. Chinese brokers and financial institutions weren’t allowed to work with a WOFE. We found this out after we started the company. So we pivoted — we became basically work for hire. We could be fixing printers, doing SAP implementations, anything. We had automotive clients — Shanghai General Motors, Shanghai Volkswagen. Then maybe three or four years in, we started having offices in Hong Kong, dealing with Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse. The company got to about 200 people and it’s still around today.

After eight years, I invested most of my savings back into the company and didn’t cash out a penny. But the company was stable enough to pay partner salaries. My kids went to international school. That was good enough for me.

5. Discovering Bitcoin

Time: 00:22:46 - 00:32:23

Jason: So then 2013, you’re 36. Salary guy, junior partner. What happens?

CZ: I came across Bitcoin. My friends told me, “CZ, you gotta look at this thing called Bitcoin.” It took me about roughly six months to fully understand it — from roughly July 2013. I read the Bitcoin Talk forum, read the white paper again and again.

Chamath: Did you see my Bloomberg article in 2012?

CZ: Unfortunately I don’t remember.

Chamath: I wrote an op-ed for Bloomberg about Bitcoin. I said everybody should put 1% of their net worth into Bitcoin — it’s basically schmuck insurance. That’s when I got red-pilled on Bitcoin. The white paper was one of the most elegantly written pieces of non-technical prose. It’s only nine pages. You could literally give it to someone non-technical and they would understand it.

CZ: Yeah. Much harder to write it very short, and elegantly and simply.

CZ: So in a poker game, Ron Cao from Lightspeed Ventures told me to look at Bitcoin. Bobby Lee, who was about to quit Walmart to become CEO of BTC China, told me to put 10% of my net worth into Bitcoin. He said, there’s a small chance it goes to zero and you lose 10%. There’s a much higher chance it goes 10x and you double your net worth. So I started learning.

By end of 2013, I was convinced. But Bitcoin had gone from $70 in mid-2013 to $1,000 by end of 2013. I was like, I’m too late.

Chamath: When you get into Bitcoin, you always feel late. Everyone you talk to has bought before you.

CZ: In December 2013, there was a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas. 200 people. Vitalik was there, Matt Roszak, Charlie Lee. A bunch of people. The media was saying Bitcoin was only used by drug lords because of the Silk Road arrest. But when you go to the conference, it was a bunch of geeks. Very nice people.

CZ: Back then I realized there were two fundamental technologies in my life. The Internet — I was too young to do much with it. And Bitcoin. I was 35, 36. I wasn’t going to miss it. The next thing was going to come 10, 15 years later. [Today I say three — the third is AI.]

So I told my partners I’m going to quit and work in the Bitcoin industry. I sold my apartment in Shanghai for roughly $900,000 and started buying Bitcoin. Every tranche I got from the sale, I bought Bitcoin — first tranche at $800. Bitcoin dropped to $600, $400. I averaged around $600.

6. Entering the Crypto Industry

Time: 00:32:23 - 00:41:24

Jason: So now you have your Bitcoin position, but you still don’t have a job?

CZ: I was looking for a job in the Bitcoin industry. The gap from deciding to quit to finalizing a job was only two to three weeks. I first discussed with Bobby Lee at BTC China. Then Blockchain.info came along through Roger Ver. I was the third person to join — VP of Engineering. There was Ben Reeves, the founder, and Nicholas Carey, the newly hired CEO.

That didn’t go very well. Peter Smith joined as CFO wanting to raise money. Coinbase had just raised $30 million. Peter maneuvered himself into the CEO position, pushing Nicholas to a product manager role. The culture changed. I left. But I learned a lot. Ben Reeves said, “We have no company, no office, everyone works remotely. We pay everybody in Bitcoin.” That’s still heavily used at Binance today. And their entire marketing was one thread on BitcoinTalk.org — 150 pages. That’s how they grew to 2 million wallets. So I learned you can do a lot of guerrilla marketing.

Then He Yi hired me into OKCoin as CTO. OKCoin offered me 5% equity. BTC China came along and offered 10%. OKCoin matched it within three hours. I chose to go to Beijing. He Yi at that time had 1% equity; she hired me as the bigger partner.

That lasted about eight months. There were culture differences — things like advertising fee discounts that you had to ask for to actually get. I decided to leave in early 2015.

In 2015, a couple of old colleagues and I decided to do a Bitcoin exchange in Tokyo — this was a year after Mt. Gox. There was a vacuum in Japan. Two developers came to me the same day I decided to leave OKCoin. So the three of us started something. I was the CEO, responsible for fundraising, paying them from my own savings.

We whipped up a demo quickly — downloaded open-source exchange software, tweaked the UI, hooked up Bitfinex market data to make the order book look lively. When investors asked technical questions, I could go really deep. But they said, “You won’t be successful running a Bitcoin exchange in Japan — you don’t speak Japanese. Why don’t you sell this technology to other exchanges?” Two weeks later, we signed a contract with a Japanese exchange — they paid $360,000. That was enough for me to stop paying salaries from my own pocket.

Chamath: I just want to say — it’s really incredible because a lot of people think there’s some lightning-in-a-bottle origin story. But more often than not, it’s this. Meandering, learning things, iterating. And then things catalyze. People misunderstand that this is actually what entrepreneurship is — the resilience and the grit to just keep grinding.

CZ: For sure. Most people idealize entrepreneurship like the Facebook story, or Microsoft, or Google — college garage, instant success. Those are the exceptions. 99.9% of successful businesses are not like that.

7. Building Binance — The ICO and Launch

Time: 00:41:24 - 00:53:58

Jason: So get us to the founding moment.

CZ: We were licensing the exchange software. That business went pretty well — about 30 different exchange clients over two years. It was a SaaS business — Exchange as a Service. A fixed monthly fee for each client. Very steady, every new client was a step up.

But in March 2017, the Chinese government shut down most of our stamp culture exchange clients. We lost our clients. By May, we needed to pivot. I saw a guy — Ling Ke, a BTC co-founder — run an ICO in China, raising US$15 million in 10 days with just a white paper and a website, no product. I thought, if he can do that, I might be able to do that too.

Everyone was talking about ICOs. By mid-June, June 14th, I told the team, “We’re going to do an ICO. Write a white paper.”

Jason: Did you have a name in the crypto community?

CZ: I had a little bit of a name from Blockchain.info and OKCoin. I was quite active on social media. People knew me because you needed some kind of pedigree to do an ICO. So I thought, I can probably raise the same amount.

Jason: Who were the buyers of the Binance ICO?

CZ: Even to this day, I don’t know exactly. Probably 80-90% Chinese. The data shows about 20,000 people bought in the ICO.

We launched a token — BNB, which is still there today. We sold 60% of it for roughly $15 million. The main proposition: if you hold BNB, you get 50% fee discounts when you trade on Binance. Eventually it would have its own chain, its own decentralized ecosystem.

Then September 4th comes around. Seven different departments of the Chinese government issued a memo saying crypto exchanges are no longer allowed in China, ICOs are banned, mining is banned. We had to move. At the time, about 30% of users were from China, but 70% from the rest of the world. We could survive. I said, let’s move to Tokyo.

We had about 30 people. Everybody moved. Eight years ago, very few were married, nobody had kids. It was an easy move. I remember one product manager cried because her boyfriend was in China. But she moved with us.

Jason: When you first launched Binance, was it an instant hit?

CZ: The product was growing pretty well, but the token price dropped 30-40% at first. It took about three weeks to recover. The product-market fit was there — it wasn’t a new idea, just a crypto-to-crypto exchange. And the ICO was critical because those people already owned the token and got fee discounts.

But it was also architecturally better. Even using your eyeballs, you could see that placing an order on Binance was much faster than competing platforms.

Jason: Who were the big competitors?

CZ: Poloniex and Bittrex were the biggest. Then Huobi, OKCoin. In the Western world, Coinbase, Bitstamp, Bitfinex.

There were some surreal moments. I asked our finance person, what’s our revenue? She said, a couple hundred bitcoins. I was like, that can’t be right. We double-checked, triple-checked. Correct.

And for two or three weeks, every time you went to sleep and woke up, BNB was up 20%. Go to a meeting, come back — up 20%. Go to the bathroom — up 20%.

8. Wealth, Values, and Running an Empire

Time: 00:53:58 - 01:02:42

Jason: In early 2018, Forbes put you on the cover. What does money mean to you?

CZ: I didn’t go through the stepwise process of getting rich. I didn’t go from 1 million to 10 million to 100 million. I just went from relatively okay to being on the cover of Forbes. So I didn’t develop those fancy spending habits.

Money doesn’t mean very much to me. Number one, you need food and shelter — that’s very minimal. I don’t have a luxury life, but I have a very comfortable life. I’m function-driven. If it functions, I’m okay. I don’t care about fanciness, style, colors, glittering gold.

My house — the living room has water leaks every month because it’s old. But it’s the right size and the right location. It works for me. Things break once in a while, it’s fine.

Jason: Do you ever have bouts of insecurity or ego?

CZ: Not really. I know my weaknesses and I’ve learned to deal with them. Other people’s emotions go way up and down. My amplitude is very moderated, narrower. It allows you to manage in many ways.

Jason: Did you get too addicted to the growth?

CZ: I wouldn’t say addicted to the growth, but addicted to the work. It was very satisfying. I was doing 20-plus meetings a day, plus responding on Twitter. But there’s a sense of fulfillment that’s hard to describe. It’s not the money, it’s not the growth.

Jason: What were your north star metrics?

CZ: Daily active users. Not trading volume, not revenue. As long as you keep serving more users, you’re giving them value. A product is valuable when people want to use it. I believe long-term, if you have a large number of people using your platform, that’s where you create value. Whereas you can optimize for revenue short-term and lose the long-term growth.

The double-edged sword is that some of those users are bad actors. There was a very clear moment — New Year’s Day, January 1, 2018, about five months after we started and were already the number one exchange. A U.S. Homeland Security agent emailed us asking for help tracking hackers from the EtherDelta hack. I didn’t know how to deal with it. Nobody on our team knew how to interface with law enforcement. We gave the information he requested, and I asked him to recommend someone we could hire. But the guy was U.S.-based and we didn’t have a U.S. entity. That was the day I realized we needed someone with law enforcement experience.

Jason: The claims the Biden administration made were essentially that organizations like Hamas were using Binance and you didn’t do enough.

CZ: I may have some legal restrictions on what I can say. But overall, the Biden administration was quite hostile to crypto — they openly announced war on crypto. It’s good to see the new administration change 180 degrees. They just didn’t understand. It’s fear of the new, and probably lobbying from the existing financial industry. Human nature — not ideal, but understandable.

9. Binance US and the FTX Saga

Time: 01:02:42 - 01:13:22

Jason: You eventually opened a U.S. entity in 2019.

CZ: There was news about the U.S. government going after BitMEX and Bitfinex. The government froze $600-800 million of Bitfinex’s assets when their market cap was only about $4 billion. We saw that and said, we’d better register. So we registered Binance US in 2019 — a separate entity, separate deployment, separate matching engine, separate liquidity. Binance US has been regulated from day one.

Jason: Then SBF and FTX start to pick up steam. How did you meet him?

CZ: I first met him in January 2019 at a Singapore conference Binance organized. At the time FTX didn’t exist. He was running Alameda — they were a large trader on Binance, a VIP client.

A couple months later they proposed a futures platform JV — 60/40 in our favor. We declined. They came back with better offers. Finally, in November, we did a deal — we got 20% equity and there was a swap of BNB and FTT tokens.

But almost immediately I kept hearing from friends that SBF was badmouthing us in Washington circles. They also paid five times salary to our VIP account managers who had access to our VIP database. The day after the employee left, our VIP clients got called with better rates on FTX.

About a year later, they were claiming to raise money at a $32 billion valuation. We had veto rights on future rounds. I didn’t want to use that to block them, so we exited in July 2021. That’s a full year and a half before they had issues.

Jason: The FTX restitution was suboptimal for some holders.

CZ: I don’t understand the full bankruptcy process. There’s an ongoing lawsuit trying to claw back money we received a year and a half before. But from what I read, because of crypto appreciation, in U.S. dollar terms they now have enough.

Jason: When did things get complicated for you?

CZ: They started asking for information around 2021, 2022. Late 2022 it got more hostile. Early 2023 it became clear — either we reach a deal or they indict us.

10. The DOJ Negotiations and $4 Billion Settlement

Time: 01:13:24 - 01:19:55

CZ: The negotiations were basically daily calls with 12 to 20 lawyers on call for more than a year. The most common thing I heard from my lawyers was, “We have never seen them this hostile on a case like this.”

There were a couple of points where we had to say no. Then there were weeks of silence where you don’t know what’s going to happen — you could get indicted at any moment. Those were tough periods. But interestingly, after two weeks they’d come back to negotiate again. Looking back, that two-week silence is an optimized negotiation tactic. If they leave you too long, you get used to it and you’ll say no again. They’re very skilled at this.

Jason: How did you get yourself to agree to the final terms?

CZ: After a lot of negotiations, I pleaded to a single charge of a Banking Secrecy Act violation — a registration failure. It’s a federal crime, but no one had gone to jail for it in U.S. history. Basically, we serviced U.S. users without registering as a financial services company.

Chamath: How does that relate to the public perception of money laundering?

CZ: My understanding — I’m not a lawyer — is there are levels. First: BSA violation, failure to register. Second: inadequate KYC/AML procedures. People think it’s black and white, but it’s actually about how well you do it — which systems, how many people, what procedures. Third: if you knowingly facilitated bad transactions. Fourth: if you personally handled transactions. I don’t handle any transactions myself. That’s just not my thing.

The government wanted to add two additional charges — “enhancements” — claiming I personally facilitated something. But they couldn’t provide evidence. The court outright rejected those two enhancements.

Before going to the U.S., the understanding was that no one had gone to jail for this. The worst case was Arthur Hayes of BitMEX, who got six months of home confinement, and his case involved much more direct client interactions than mine.

11. Sentencing and Prison

Time: 01:19:55 - 01:35:12

CZ: I went to court in Seattle. The first part is the plea — the judge asks if you understand each paragraph. Already negotiated extensively by the lawyers. Then they debated my bail conditions. My lawyers argued I should be allowed to go back to the UAE for three months while waiting for sentencing. The government argued I might not come back.

The magistrate judge approved me leaving the U.S. Then the government appealed — my lawyer said in 40 years he’d never seen an appeal on a bail condition. Two weeks later, the court ruled in the government’s favor. I was kept in the U.S.

I stayed with my sister, traveled around the U.S. to keep myself calm. The government requested another three-month extension. Then on April 30, 2024 — my court date — a week before, both sides submitted their requests. The government requested 36 months — twice the maximum sentencing guideline. My lawyers said the judge had never seen the government ask to ignore the sentencing guideline.

Five days before sentencing, Senator Elizabeth Warren went on TV to declare war on crypto again and wrote an open letter to the DOJ.

The judge said a bunch of really good things about me. But then came the “but.” I got sentenced to four months.

Jason: How did you deal with it?

CZ: It was difficult at first. Not just the time — but would I be safe? After the sentencing, big media wrote that I’d be the richest person to ever go to U.S. prison. My lawyers and prison consultants said I’d be the biggest target for extortion.

I talked to a lot of people — prison consultants, ex-guards, ex-wardens, former inmates. They gave advice like: if someone’s really friendly on the first day, don’t take anything from them because they’ll ask 10 times more later.

The U.S. prison system is vast — 2 million people. The government spends more on prisons than on schools. The prison I went to had 2,200 inmates. They organize by ethnicity — Chinese with Chinese, white with white. It actually reduces fighting. Each group has a representative. If there’s conflict, the reps hash it out.

The minute I walked through the gate, the guard said, “You’ll need some protection here. The Pacific Islanders are recruiting.” This guy Chino, a Filipino-German mix, said, “Welcome to our car.” Our group had six people out of 200. I was sent to low-security instead of minimum-security because I’m not a U.S. citizen — low-security is where all the drug offenders are.

Nothing too bad happened. No fights, no real extortion.

Jason: What was the first thing you did when you got out?

CZ: A good shower. In prison, the shower is a tiny box where you can’t avoid touching the wall. When you get out, taking a shower without touching the wall — that’s a luxury. And seeing a plate of fruit. There’s very limited fruit, very limited protein in prison. Lots of carbs, bread, fried stuff, very little vegetables. I hadn’t seen a whole fruit for months.

I got out on September 27, 2024. It took me 26 minutes from leaving the prison door to getting on an airplane.

Jason: What were you thinking? Vindicated? Railroad? Or just wanting it over?

CZ: I have some restrictions on what I can say. Emotionally, I just wanted it to be over. Remember, this was still the Biden administration. The election hadn’t happened. The policy was still anti-crypto. I hadn’t seen my kids in a year. I just wanted the whole thing to be over.

12. Stepping Down from Binance and the Presidential Pardon

Time: 01:35:12 - 01:40:06

Jason: Had you come to terms with stepping down?

CZ: Stepping down was really, really hard. I actually cried. The only other time I really cried was when my father passed away. But after coming back, I was actually quite happy not to run Binance. I have a lot more free time. If I’d stepped down myself, people would say I ran out of stamina. But since I can’t run Binance, it’s not my choice. There are other very useful, meaningful things I can do with my life.

Jason: Tell me about the pardon process.

CZ: I don’t think anybody knows what the process really is. You find a lawyer who writes a petition — arguments for why you were overly prosecuted, why you’re a good person. It’s really just the discretion of the president. The Constitution grants the president the power to pardon. That’s about as much detail as it says.

There’s a pardon czar in the White House — Alice Johnson. She went to prison for many years and wrote a book. Your lawyers ping her for status updates, and there’s no response. Then suddenly it happens.

Without a pardon, it’s quite hard for Binance to enter the U.S. properly. I’m the UBO of Binance and Binance US. If the U.S. wants to become the capital of crypto, you can’t not have the largest player.

The president is a pro-crypto president. He’s had his own issues — debanking, 34 criminal charges. When I was in prison, I saw on the prison TV that he got 34 charges. One of the charges was that he brought a document to his bathroom to read. The fact that he went through the Biden DOJ probably helped me get the pardon — he understands how aggressive that DOJ was.

13. Giggle Academy — Free Education for the World

Time: 01:40:06 - 01:44:37

Jason: How do you spend your time now?

CZ: I do Giggle Academy, the free education platform. I consult with many governments on crypto regulatory policies. I get involved in investments — blockchain, AI, biotech — through HZ Labs. And I mentor founders in the BNB Chain ecosystem. I’m actually pretty busy.

Jason: Tell me about Giggle Academy.

CZ: About 700-800 million adults are illiterate. Two-thirds are women. On top of that, about 500 million kids aren’t in school. That’s roughly 1.2 billion people who aren’t educated — 12-13% of the world population. These are all in poor areas with no schools or unaffordable schools.

I believe we have enough technology — gaming, understanding of human psychology, AI — that a single app can deliver all the education content you need, for free. On a phone or tablet.

Jason: Have you looked at Alpha School?

CZ: Alpha School is great, but high cost. They solve the problem of making existing education better. I’m solving the other end — making education accessible.

Jason: Will you tokenize it?

CZ: I thought really hard about this. I will for a very long time resist issuing a token on Giggle Academy. When you issue a token, you can do learn-to-earn, incentivize teachers, create content. But if I do a token, everyone focuses on the token. People would speculate. Then I can’t tell if they’re real kids learning or farmers trying to farm the token. I want Giggle to be a real free education platform, not a token platform.

A community project donated about $12 million based on a meme coin. And I’ve only spent maybe $3-4 million on the entire project so far. It’s actually hard to give money away with positive impact. My plan is to fund it for as long as needed to reach the goal of fully digitized, gamified education delivered for free.

14. AI Agents, Crypto, and Privacy

Time: 01:44:37 - 01:50:05

Chamath: You said AI is this third pillar of your life. One interesting thing about AI is the embedding layer — it’s machine-readable language, perfect for agents. It stands to reason that agents need payments, and this could be the largest use case for crypto.

CZ: It’s fairly straightforward. Soon each of us will have hundreds or thousands or millions of agents working for us in the background. They’ll be transacting, moving money. They’re not going to use banks. Banks won’t be able to support the transaction volume and rate. Agents can’t swipe a card, can’t do KYC — it doesn’t make sense.

Even investing and trading — the interface shouldn’t be clicking price levels and typing amounts. It should be, “Convert 10% of my stablecoins into BNB” and the agent figures out if it should do it slowly over time or as one market order.

Jason: What’s the most viable payment system for agents today?

CZ: I’m actually not too sure. I don’t think there’s one that’s super viable yet. It’s early days. Quite a number of people are working on it, especially recently with the AI agent social network thing.

Chamath: What is the role of privacy in crypto? My biggest issue with Bitcoin is the lack of fungibility and privacy.

CZ: I agree. It’s probably the biggest thing that will hold Bitcoin back from being ubiquitous. Privacy plays a very fundamental role in our society. Bitcoin was designed to be pseudo-anonymous, but every transaction on the blockchain can be traced. With centralized exchanges requiring KYC, it’s actually very easy to track.

There are real applications where privacy is critical. If you book a hotel and people can see the receiving address on the blockchain, they’ll know where you’ll be. That’s a physical security risk. In Japan, revealing someone’s home address is illegal. Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies currently don’t provide this. There are a few privacy-focused coins, but they don’t have much market cap.

I do think in the future we as an industry need to figure out how to evolve privacy features. No one’s really focusing on it right now.

15. The Book, Family, and What Matters

Time: 01:50:05 - 01:57:20

Jason: Tell me about the book.

CZ: It’s always a longer project than I anticipate. It started because I was bored in prison — I was typing on a very dumb terminal and sending drafts to my assistant. Once I got out, I had enough for a book. It’s about 95,000 words, around 300 pages. I’m editing both the English and Chinese versions.

The point is to get the story out. There are many misconceptions about who I am, what I went through. A lot of negative media about crypto, about CZ, about Binance. Is it important for my children? I think so. They see the media coverage and know it’s not right. But I didn’t have time to explain everything in this level of detail. The book captures as much as I can put in.

Jason: What do you want for your kids?

CZ: I want them to live a healthy and happy life. However they define it. If they’re happy being a normal person, great. If they want to do startups, great. If they want to be artistic, do humanitarian efforts — great. Whatever they figure out they want to do, I want to be there to support them.

Jason: How similar is that to what you got from your parents?

CZ: Pretty similar. My parents didn’t pressure me. Very un-Chinese. My parents said: don’t hurt yourself, don’t hurt other people. Don’t do drugs, don’t get into crime. That’s as simple as what I got.

Chamath: I think a lot of people hear this and think, “That could have been me too.” When I spend time with you, you’re just a normal guy.

CZ: A lot of people say that. And I think there’s something really valuable about working on things that you like, because the time just passes and you put your head up and think, “Wow, let’s go try something new.”

I want to say to people: I’m a normal dude. I know I’m not super smart. You don’t need to be super smart to be successful. You can’t be too dumb, but there’s a lot of other things — principles, values, emotional quotient, luck. For most people, you can’t change the situation, so you can only change yourself. Push yourself a little bit every day — not too hard or you’ll burn out. Maybe 110-130%. If you do that for 30 years and get lucky, you’ll most likely be relatively successful. You might not be a billionaire, but you’ll have a very comfortable life.

Jason: Do you think it’s important to dispel the myth that being a billionaire is not everything?

CZ: Absolutely. I picture a spiderweb graph. Money is only one thread. Once you have enough, more doesn’t help. There’s health, family, values, contribution, positive impact — all intrinsic rewards. There’s time — can you use it the way you want? Are you spending time with the people you want? Are your family healthy? Your mental health matters too.

A lot of people only chase money but sacrifice everything else. They work so hard they have no free time, don’t spend time with family, their health deteriorates after 10-20 years. Even to get something they have so much of that they don’t need.

I’m actually very grateful that I don’t have to run Binance anymore. Now I have more time. Before, even though it was enjoyable, on my other quotients I wasn’t doing well.

Jason: CZ, thanks for joining the All-In Podcast.

CZ: Thank you for having me.

Transcribed by AssemblyAI with auto chapters. Edited for readability by Claude Code video-to-article skill.