From the Richest Chinese Man to the "Wealthiest Prisoner", Changpeng Zhao: Life Is Not Absolutely Fair
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From the Richest Chinese Man to the "Wealthiest Prisoner", Changpeng Zhao: Life Is Not Absolutely Fair
Crypto Big Shot Actually Has a Taiwanese Accent!
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Lin Lishan
Compared to the warlords of the cryptocurrency empire, Changpeng Zhao is more like an engineer who treats life as a game to be cleared. Low-key, introverted, always attending various occasions wearing a hoodie. The Binance he built single-handedly saw trading volume in 2025 surpass the total annual stock trading volume of the New York Stock Exchange, with users approaching 300 million. Three years ago, however, due to a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice, he stepped down as CEO, served 4 months in prison, becoming what financial media called "the richest prisoner in U.S. prison history," and wrote the first draft of his memoir "The Binance Life" on a computer in prison that could not copy and paste. He believes in the "Simulation Theory," believing life is like a game where every solved problem yields a reward; this philosophy makes him exceptionally calm when facing crises. After being pardoned, this 49-year-old engineer is redefining the next step of his life.
Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, typed out the memoir "The Binance Life" character by character on an offline computer in prison.
Image source: Provided by Binance
Seeing Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, via video call, one would not associate him with the warlord dominating the crypto world or the former richest Chinese person.
Wearing polite thin-rimmed glasses, and similarly wearing a T-shirt with the Binance logo, he looks more like a low-key and practical engineer—before founding Binance, he indeed was one.
However, since founding Binance in July 2017, his life has drifted further and further from low-key. Within months of establishment, Binance became the largest exchange in the world. In 2021, he appeared on the cover of Forbes. In 2025, Binance's total trading volume reached 34 trillion USD, exceeding the total annual stock trading volume of the New York Stock Exchange; users reached 300 million, nearly the number of Netflix subscribers.
"The first 40 years of my life were unremarkable," he said straightly. Founding Binance, he was lucky to become the startup that achieved 1 billion USD in profit fastest in history. "Later, maybe it was the photos of me wearing a hoodie that made people interested in me. My life indeed started to change, even becoming incredible, to the point where I feel movies lack imagination. My reality is much crazier."
His Reality is Crazier than Movies, Speaks Chinese with a Taiwanese Accent
Changpeng Zhao's life is indeed more full of twists than many movies. Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Binance and him personally, with charges including violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA, U.S. regulations requiring financial flow operators to register and prevent money laundering), operating money transmission business without a license, violating International Emergency Economic Powers Act sanction regulations, etc. At that time, Binance had already moved from Shanghai, Tokyo, Singapore, to Dubai.
"I voluntarily flew to the United States and admitted to violating one clause of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act. Simply put, Binance served U.S. users in the early days but did not register in the United States. This is my entire crime," Changpeng Zhao explained. He believes he committed no fraud, no money laundering, had no victims, and no users suffered losses. But the U.S. court sentenced him to 4 months in prison, becoming the first prisoner in history to be imprisoned for BSA violations.
Ironically, one year after he completed his sentence, paid his fines, and was released, U.S. President Trump, who likes cryptocurrency, pardoned the conviction records of Binance and Changpeng Zhao personally, and will terminate the originally planned 3-year regulatory period by the Department of Justice.
Changpeng Zhao, whose life continues to fast-forward, was forced to slow down and press the pause button during the long legal entanglement. Inspired by prison consultant Michael Santos, he began conceiving writing a book. In prison, he used a shared computer that could not connect to the internet and did not even have copy and paste functions, 15 minutes a day, typing out the draft of the new memoir "The Binance Life" character by character. The Traditional Chinese version was published in mid-July.
Changpeng Zhao accepted an exclusive interview with "CommonWealth." We unexpectedly discovered that this crypto tycoon from Qingkou Town, Ganyu County, Jiangsu Province, speaks Chinese with a quite affectionate "Taiwanese accent." "Most of my good friends during my teenage years were Taiwanese, and my first girlfriend was also Taiwanese," he proudly opened. He has visited Taiwan no less than 30 times, knowing it from north to south like the back of his hand.
At 12 years old, relying on his father who was studying for a PhD in Canada, Changpeng Zhao's whole family moved to Vancouver. In the Chinese community he was in, most were wealthy Taiwanese immigrant families, many fathers were doctors, and mothers brought children to study in Canada. Therefore, his English is more fluent than his Chinese, and his Chinese accent has a bit of a Taiwanese tone. Even, when choosing a major in university, he once listened to the advice of a Taiwanese friend's mother and chose biology, aiming to become a doctor, but ultimately gave up and went to write code instead.
"Hardcore" Binance, Managing Global Team with Results-Oriented Approach
Before founding Binance, Changpeng Zhao was already a financially free engineer. He worked at a well-known software company in Tokyo; led a 60-person development team doing futures trading systems at Bloomberg in New York; later returned to Shanghai to start a business establishing a financial technology company, doing system contracting for many large exchanges.
Because he was familiar with the ins and outs of large exchange systems, Changpeng Zhao founded Binance, surpassing competitors at the time in system stability, trading interface, and speed. Relying on one BNB token, one BNB Chain, and one exchange, he stirred up the entire huge Binance ecosystem.
He is more mature than passionate young entrepreneurs, so his style is also very different from crypto circle entrepreneurs. He is neither like the idealistic mathematical genius represented by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, nor like the early crypto circle entrepreneurs in China who carried some rough energy of mining farm owners.
(Provided by Binance)
He considers himself an introvert, low-key and cautious, with low material desires. When nothing is happening, he rarely engages in verbal sparring on Twitter to win oral battles.
The Binance culture he shaped is called extremely "hardcore" by employees, whether it is working hours, decision speed, or work intensity. "Late nights on weekdays and most weekends, basically all soaked in work," an early Binance member stated directly.
"From the first day, Binance established a set of organizational operation logic that does not rely on physical boundaries," said Zhang Ling, head of Yzi Lab. Physical boundaries include countries and time. In plain language, no matter which country, no matter day or night when problems occur, there will be Binance people on Earth to help you solve them.
"Based out of planet earth." Before cryptocurrency was regulated in various countries, the Binance team would even describe themselves this way. In an industry without regulation and mostly without precedents to follow, this team's cohesion and execution rely on shared mission, trust, and values of responsibility for results.
Zhang Ling co-founded the venture capital incubator Binance Labs with Changpeng Zhao in 2018, spawning many important industry infrastructures and representative projects like public chains Polygon, Injective, Kava, etc. Last year it was renamed Yzi Labs, expanding the investment scope. It is also one of the few projects Changpeng Zhao continues to be deeply involved in related to Binance after stepping down as Binance CEO.
She observed that Changpeng Zhao looks at things extremely sharply, decisions are fast, ruthless, and accurate; and under high-pressure environments, emotions are exceptionally stable, completely not kidnapped by market noise or short-term panic. This stability is very rare among entrepreneurs.
"Most of the time, I am thinking about how to solve problems," Changpeng Zhao analyzed himself, because "future opportunities are always more than the past."
How Did Prison Time Change Changpeng Zhao? Rethinking Life Positioning
An engineer who is extremely calm professionally and always thinking about how to solve problems and clear levels, always looking forward. But in this autobiography by Changpeng Zhao, a large portion describes memories and interactions with family. It seems that in the slow time of prison, he looked back, re-awareing what life positioning he expects for himself.
He wrote about his father in memory, who was the first college student in the village. The Cultural Revolution forced him to interrupt his college studies, but he never gave up learning even in a village with only kerosene lamps. 10 years later he re-tested into the University of Science and Technology of China 500 li away from home for graduate school, and further applied to the University of British Columbia for a PhD, becoming a professor, allowing the whole family to move to Vancouver.
This made Changpeng Zhao always believe in the power of education. After leaving Binance, he founded the non-profit education platform Giggle Academy.
Every time separating and reuniting with his father, his father always carried a large camera that was still rare at the time, taking pictures of his son and daughter endlessly. This made Changpeng Zhao fall in love with photography too.
Once during a Binance employee trip to Hokkaido, Japan, Zhang Ling brought her husband and daughter under 3 years old together. Changpeng Zhao encountered their family in the hotel. Seeing the daughter playing, he told Zhang Ling, "Take more videos. When she grows up, these videos will be very precious."
He also specially emphasized that videos are better than photos, because when he accompanied his children before he took many photos, but after the children grew up, they found what they liked watching most was actually those videos—because videos have sound, have motion, have the appearance at that time, things photos cannot keep.
Below is an excerpt from Changpeng Zhao's exclusive interview:
When I first touched digital currency (i.e., cryptocurrency) around 2013, everyone wanted to make a virtual currency exchange, but you need the ability to do it better, faster, cheaper, and with better service than others. What was luckier is that I had been in this industry for more than ten years. Before touching virtual currency, I had already done trading systems for many years.
In 2015 I founded Bijie Technology. I already had a team, had my own system, had my own products. I just needed to turn this into an exchange, and it could go online.
At that time, we recruited He Yi as CMO, and a group of customer service. This was my first time doing consumer-facing business, realizing customer service and market operations are both very important.
When China's policy changed, we moved out of China and became a more international platform. Actually, I had worked at several cryptocurrency companies before, all distributed office. My personal experience also lived in many countries, so I don't necessarily have to be in a certain country.
How to Manage a Company Without Headquarters?
Decentralized office actually has many benefits. First is no need to waste commute time. Second is time freedom. Our kind of never-interrupted platform, people from various countries working from home fits our business needs better. Also you can recruit talent globally, talent doesn't need to move, the whole world becomes your talent pool.
Of course working from home also has a few bad places. Like one time I went to Dubai and met an employee. He said working at Binance for 3 years I am the 3rd real person he has seen. People, sometimes meeting face to face, is still important. Second, management, you need to rely completely on results, because you can't see what he is doing every day, can only communicate with him online.
To overcome these challenges, management must be results-oriented. Only then can you quickly build a global company.
As for enterprise or culture, I feel, enterprise culture and values are not just about saying, to shape values, is to implement on every decision, every action, everyone will slowly see it.
Like user protection culture, probably happens within our tens of thousands of such decisions, everyone slowly experiences it. Early because of China ban, we cleared out China ICO users, additionally spent 6 million USD subsidizing user losses. This accounted for 40% of our assets at the time. Actually this money completely didn't need to be spent, because it wasn't our responsibility. But since they are users of our platform, we still chose to do this.
Every time making decisions, the team will look. Over time, your team will know the boss might decide this way, slowly everyone will form shared culture and decision system.
(CommonWealth Data)
Is Life Fair? It Depends on How You Think
Before going to the United States to negotiate, I didn't think I would sit in jail in the United States. I thought maybe I would have to pay fines, maybe need to be under house arrest at home. Didn't think the result would be this bad. But no matter what, life will always have some unexpected surprises, and will also have some unexpected accidents.
I feel what is more important is, at that time I wanted to solve this problem, then don't worry about it anymore. What I considered was, how to minimize the negative impact on the industry, how to minimize the negative impact on our users. It was my first time (hope also the last time) handling this kind of legal dispute with law enforcement units.
At that time the U.S. government was relatively opposed to virtual currency, so this result was a bit worse than I imagined. But I feel overall, my life luck has already been very good. When luck is bad there always has to be a little bit. This world has no absolute fairness and absolute unfairness, it's all just how you think about it.
My ideal is actually quite simple. I'm not like many people having a goal, a number or wanting to complete a certain thing. I just want to contribute a bit to society according to my ability. If ability is small then contribute a little less it doesn't matter, if ability is large then try to contribute a bit more.
My goal is to be satisfied with myself when old. That is I and myself can say I did my best, right? (I used my full strength, right!) If like this, I feel I will be happy.
Life Goal: Be Satisfied with Yourself When Old
What I am doing now is basically divided into three blocks. One block is free education Giggle Academy. Over there now probably has 60-person team, they are doing quite well. I every week just have meetings with them a few times, participation time is also not particularly much, but the whole team is built up. Now platform has over 600,000 users. A free platform做不到 less than one and a half years, more users than 10 universities added together, so I feel quite happy.
Another block is YZi Labs, just doing some early investment. We do early incubation, can help other founders grow. This block衍生出来 is I did many founders' Mentor.
Third block is I help 10 to 20 government units do consulting, help them make cryptocurrency regulatory framework a bit better.
Doing these few things is also quite busy, remaining time is also not particularly much. I feel this world changes very fast. Every 1, 2 years we probably will all find it hard to predict specifically what to do 2 years later, so future probably will have some changes with time. When investing I looked at a lot of biotech or AI things, this aspect I am also learning, so later also don't rule out going to do some other new things.
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