While critics and admirers alike have marveled at Binance's 180-day success, Zhao said they didn't know years of hard work and failures he had before Binance, which was his sixth startup. The BNB token was trading at $614.15 as of 1:11 pm EST on Friday, giving it a market cap of $94 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. Within six months or around 180 days, the Binance Coin (BNB) achieved a billion-dollar market cap. The crypto exchange grew at a blistering pace and became profitable after just three months, he said. Three years later, Zhao set up Binance through a $15 million initial coin offering in July 2017. But Zhao said he has held onto nearly all of them to this day and only sold "very tiny bits" for small expenses. In 2014, he sold his apartment to buy Bitcoin, which he acquired at around $600 only to see it drop to $200 for two years. Right after the conference, he left Fusion Systems, a company that builds high-frequency trading systems for brokers that he had co-started in 2005 in Shanghai. "I couldn't catch on to that trend, I was just working as a junior guy, but I thought I definitely will not miss this one, so I just went all-in" I understood that it's going to be much bigger than the internet," he said. From the conference, he saw that the community behind Bitcoin consisted mostly of developers instead of the "drug lords" that he had read about. In December that year, Zhao flew to Las Vegas for a Bitcoin conference that was attended by the likes of Vitalik Buterin (the founder of Ethereum), Charlie Lee (the creator of Litecoin), and Matthew Roszak (an early crypto investor). "The thing I wanted to verify was if there was a community behind it." "I understood the benefits for Bitcoin very quickly," he said. In 2013, he came across the Bitcoin whitepaper, which immediately clicked for him as a developer who has always worked at the intersection of finance and technology. The limitations of fiat money in cross-border transactions were not the only thing that led Zhao to crypto. "I typically will just ask a friend and say 'hey, do you have $500 I can get from you, I'll give you some BNB ( Binance Coin),' most of them will be polite enough to say yes, so I get by that way." It takes 17 years and 180 days "I use this card very heavily, but sometimes I do need fiat cash," he said. He does that by using the Binance Visa card, which allows users to convert and spend their cryptocurrencies at more than 60 million merchants worldwide but is limited to customers living in Europe, according to its website. These days, Zhao tries to pay in crypto whenever and wherever he can. "If you exchange currency at an airport, you lose about 10% each time so the cost is very high." "If you use fiat to do cross-border transactions, it's actually very difficult and you get really creamed on the conversion rates," he said. This type of borderless living has given Zhao a front-row seat to the frictions and inefficiencies of converting fiat money, which refers to all currencies backed by government decrees. "I like to stay mobile, I like to visit more places just so that I know what's going on in different locations." "I have a habit of moving around a lot, but it gives me more exposure to the world," Zhao, who goes by "CZ," said in an interview. While the coronavirus-induced lockdown has kept Zhao in Asia for the past year, his normal schedule has been to switch locations every few months to spend time with employees and users that have sprouted up all over the world. Today, as the chief executive of the world's largest crypto exchange Binance, Zhao finds his early exposure to the world from constant traveling and moving immensely helpful. When he was 12, the family immigrated to Canada where he stayed for another decade before moving to Tokyo, New York, and then Shanghai for work. Growing up in China, Zhao had a somewhat nomadic upbringing as he followed his educator parents who moved in between cities every few years. To Changpeng Zhao, home has always been less about a physical address and more of an inner world that transcends geographical boundaries. He also breaks down why he's keeping most of his personal assets in Bitcoin and Binance Coin.In an interview, Zhao recounts how he built Binance in 180 days and continues to grow its divisions.Changpeng Zhao is the founder of Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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