Arrangement & Compilation: Shenchao TechFlow
Deep Trend Introduction: From an immigrant boy in Vancouver, to the founder of the world’s largest crypto exchange, to being in jail and being pardoned by the president four months later. In this video podcast, CZ systematically reviews for the first time the rise of Binance, the tweet that crushed FTX, the truth about prison and pardon, and his true judgment on Hyperliquid, DEX and the next bull market. He has no regrets, but he has also drawn a "red line" that he will never touch.
Guest: CZ, founder of Binance
Host: Kevin, host of When Shift Happens
Podcast Source: When Shift Happens
Original title: CZ Binance Founder: This Crypto Bull Run Could Make You Rich | E187
Air date: September 25, 2026
Summary of key points
FTX wasn’t brought down by a tweet: Binance took back approximately $2.1 billion worth of cash, BUSD, and FTT when it exited its FTX stake. What really broke FTX was its misappropriation of billions of dollars in customer funds, and Coindesk reported that it might be insolvent three or four days before CZ’s tweet.
Being imprisoned for a single violation of the Bank Secrecy Act is rare in American history: CZ was sentenced to four months on this charge. The most fearful thing about going to prison was that he would be repeatedly charged with additional crimes and be detained indefinitely. In 2025, he received a pardon from President Trump, and had zero contact with Trump himself throughout the process.
Binance started with a B2B team of 15 to 20 people: its predecessor, BG Tech, sold its trading system to the collectibles market. Eighty to ninety percent of its customers were not Crypto exchanges. In May 2017, it was decided in the conference room to switch to a Crypto-to-Crypto exchange. It relied on the solid team to become the largest in the world within six months.
Press the “red button” first for security incidents: In May 2019, Binance was hacked for $40 million. CZ immediately suspended all withdrawals and reserved transactions for a week and took the opportunity to move the architecture from server to serverless. He believes that anyone in the exchange should be able to press the red button to stop everything.
The penetration rate of Crypto is less than 1%, and now we need to make the cake bigger together: from the perspective of holders, the penetration rate is about 5% to 15%, but from the perspective of net assets, the actual investment is less than 1%, so he welcomes Hyperliquid and other DEXs with open arms, and opposes treating peers as enemies.
10/10 The "villain" narrative of the plunge was amplified by competitors: the timeline is that there were Trump tariffs, the stock market and Crypto crash first, and the market value of Binance's problematic stablecoin was extremely small. During that time, Binance still had net inflows, and it also took the initiative to compensate damaged users with about 800 million US dollars, without any obligation.
CZ believes that he cannot push the US$3 trillion market: he tweets five to ten times a day, and each tweet is bullish. It is purely a chance that one time he happens to step on five hours before Trump's positive speech. He does not tweet when he has superior information.
After leaving the front line, he devoted his energy to education and supervision: Giggle Academy has reached about 1.3 million children, an exponential increase from 100,000 in early 2026. He believes that AI-customized free education is the investment with the greatest long-term positive impact.
2. Wonderful viewpoints
“If one of your competitors can take down your company with one tweet, you don’t really have a company at all.”
"As far as I'm concerned, no one has ever gone to jail in the history of the United States for just one violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, and no one has ever gone to jail to this day."
"Diligence means different things to different people. But I think producing results and being efficient are more important than working long hours."
“In Asian cultures, once people follow a leader, they follow almost blindly, so that sometimes it’s hard to get feedback on your ideas.”
"From a penetration rate perspective, we probably don't even have a 1% penetration rate. Moreover, the current market size is not the future market size."
"We see exchanges as helping to make the pie bigger. Because right now, the market is far from saturated."
"I actually really hope they will pioneer and go the way they did in the United States. That's great. That's actually good for the industry."
“If you’re bullish and you tweet five times a day, one of those tweets will happen exactly five hours before positive news.”
"Positive influence makes people happy. If you know you're contributing and helping others, it makes you happy inside."
"If you are good at math and poor at English, you will spend less time on math and more time on English, pulling you down to the average."
3. The text is as follows:
1. From the second generation of immigrants to the founding of Binance
Kevin: What happened in your life that explains how you became one of the 20 richest people in the world before you turned 50?
CZ: First of all, I don’t think that ranking is accurate. I might be in the top 100 or the top 500. And my social circle is heavily skewed toward the Cryptosphere on the high-level end.
Kevin: Where does your inner drive come from?
CZ: I don’t remember any traumatic childhood experiences, but I grew up in pretty poor circumstances. My family immigrated to Canada. Both my parents’ wages were close to the minimum wage. Many of my friends were investment immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong and were quite wealthy. This gave me a little pressure.
Kevin: You mentioned your sister, what is she doing now?
CZ: She is also a technical person. She previously worked at a startup in Tokyo and later became one of the managing directors at Morgan Stanley. There are approximately 400 managing directors worldwide and the company has nearly 100,000 employees. She retired when she was about 42 years old and now counsels people experiencing depression.
Kevin: You said that second-generation immigrants usually look at how hard their parents work and want to move forward; but the third and fourth generations will "fall". How do you prevent this from happening to your child?
CZ: I still don’t know any effective solution, and I don’t have the third or second generation. I can postpone this problem for a while. I think it’s education, but it’s hard.
Kevin: Take me back to day one of Binance, what would I see or hear if I were in your living room?
CZ: Binance started out a little bit differently. We had a team of 15 to 20 people running a company called BG Tech that sold trading systems to other exchanges. In May 2017, I called everyone into a conference room and said now might be a good time, let’s do a crypto-to-crypto exchange. That moment is that moment.
Kevin: What does “hardworking” mean to you?
CZ: Producing results and being efficient are more important than working long hours. A lot of people work long hours and get nothing done. Passionate people are not measured by hours worked, but by how committed they are and how high-quality results they can produce in a short period of time.
Kevin: What’s the biggest misconception people have about Binance?
CZ: Some people think it is a Chinese company, it is not, we just have a large number of Chinese employees. Some people think that centralized exchanges are bad and evil in the industry, but we are actually investing heavily in decentralization. Today most people prefer to use centralized exchanges, but I think the future is decentralized.
2. FTX crash and that tweet
Kevin: FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried said it was your tweet that brought down FTX. Do you have even a hint of feeling in your heart that he is right?
CZ: No, absolutely not. If one of your competitors can take down your company with one tweet, you don’t really have a company at all. If he's running a company that I can kill with a tweet, there's no way he owns that company.
Kevin: So you didn't expect it at all, or did you underestimate the impact of your tweet?
CZ: I don’t think my tweet had that big of an impact, it was more of a disclosure tweet. As part of Binance's exit from the FTX stake, we got back approximately $2.1 billion equivalent in cash, BUSD, and FTT, and I said we were going to liquidate any FTT that was left on the books. At the time I didn't actually know they were going to be a problem, and I didn't expect it to have any impact.
Kevin: What happened before you tweeted?
CZ: Coindesk put out an article saying they might be insolvent, probably three or four days before my tweet. The truth is that they lied to their customers and misappropriated their funds. Alameda's CEO tweeted 20 minutes after mine, and many people said her tweet may have revealed more information than mine.
Kevin: What’s the truth about the week FTX crashed that no one else knows?
CZ: They took billions of dollars of customer funds, used them to buy other things, and then when the market went down, customers couldn't withdraw their money. It's that simple.
3. Prison and Trump’s Pardon
Kevin: You spent a few months in jail. What beliefs did you go into prison with, only to come out without them?
CZ: It’s not a belief. I was very worried that I would be kept there forever, that they would find another crime, and that there would be endless charges. In my case, no one has ever gone to jail in American history for just one violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, and no one has ever gone to jail to this day. Most were not even prosecuted at all.
Kevin: Has anyone ever surprised you by disappearing when things got tough?
CZ: No one ever disappears in Binance. All the co-founders from 2017 are still there, no one has left, and it’s a very cohesive team. In the industry, many people promise the world, only to be gone a few months later.
Kevin: The president of the United States issues roughly 10 to 40 presidential pardons every year, and you got one of them last year. Walk me through the pardon process, from the first phone call to the final signature.
CZ: I talked to my attorney about what the process would be like. Trump campaigned on pardoning Ross Ulbricht, and later Arthur Hayes was pardoned, and his case was more similar to mine. Through a friend, I contacted the same attorney who handled their pardon and filed the petition in April 2025, which was after Arthur Hayes was pardoned in March.
Kevin: Do you need to meet Trump in person?
CZ: I’ve never met Trump in person, never spoken to him on the phone, never emailed him, don’t have his number. The closest I came to seeing him in person was at Davos, he was on stage and I was off stage, we never shook hands and he had no idea I was off stage.
Kevin: Some people see pardons as proof that political influence matters more than anything else. Where did they go wrong?
CZ: In my case, my opinion is obviously biased and I let others be the judge. Many people have said that I was treated unfairly and should be corrected. I've been accused of Binance's weak KYC program, but I've never done any trading myself. Right now this government is talking about, Polymarket doesn't have KYC, they just geo-blocked international markets, they're going to do the same thing with perp DEX. If I were judged by today's standards, that would be fine.
4. The “red button” of security incidents
Kevin: We had Ben Zhu from Bybit last year, just two days after they suffered a $1.5 billion hack. You publicly suggested suspending withdrawals at the time, but Ben chose not to do so. Looking back, was Ben right and you wrong?
CZ: I feel like there’s no right or wrong in this situation, it’s just a judgment call. Ben clearly has more information about this incident than I do. My style is to take a much more conservative approach and I will pause withdrawals first.
Kevin: What did you do when Binance was hacked for $40 million in 2019?
CZ: In May 2019, Binance was hacked for $40 million in one fell swoop. The first thing I did was pause all withdrawals, in fact all systems. I have a virtual big red button in my head that you push when a security incident occurs and then figure out what happened and what the impact was.
Kevin: How exactly does this red button work?
CZ: Anyone, anyone on an exchange platform should be able to push that red button and say stop everything. Only slowly reopen it after you have analyzed the matter more clearly and are very sure. In 2019 we suspended withdrawals for a week but kept trading going because we didn’t want the price to be disconnected from other exchanges. During that week we also converted the system from a server architecture to a serverless architecture.
Kevin: If Bybit had listened to your advice, would the outcome have been drastically different?
CZ: No, not much difference. A hacker has already happened once. Whether you suspend or not suspend withdrawals will make a huge difference only if a second hacker attack occurs. Fortunately, it didn't. That's a tough call, a matter of opinion.
5. Views on competition between Hyperliquid and DEX
Kevin: Many people in Crypto feel that Binance sees Hyperliquid as their first real competitor, and some of your public comments are an attempt to slow down their momentum. What would you say to those people?
CZ: No, they're wrong. I encourage more Crypto exchanges to innovate. We see exchanges as helping to make the pie bigger. From the perspective of penetration rate, only 5% to 15% of people hold a certain kind of Crypto, but from the perspective of net assets, the proportion they invest in Crypto is very small. In terms of capital and value, we do not even have a 1% penetration rate.
Kevin: So you welcome decentralized exchanges like Hyperliquid?
CZ: We welcome more decentralized exchanges. A pioneer in a field may not be the biggest winner in the long run. You see, Google is far from the first search engine, and Binance is far from the first centralized exchange. Even if they have a first-mover advantage, it doesn't mean they always win. It is much better to make the industry bigger than to make a single platform bigger.
Kevin: How is Hyperliquid better than Binance today?
CZ: Well, they don’t have KYC, but that’s a small point.
Kevin: Why is $HYPE still not available on Binance spot, but it is one of the best-performing assets in the past two years, rising about 25 times and entering the top 10?
(Note from Deep Trend: This podcast was recorded a few days before HYPE was listed on Binance)
CZ: When Hype came up, I had already taken a back seat from Binance and I no longer managed Binance. My understanding is that for a long time Hype tokens were not in circulation and Binance had policies that required them to hold those tokens to protect against counterparty risk. That may not be an issue today, but I don't know what it is now.
6. 10/10 Plunge and “Villain” Narrative
Kevin: Another thing happened last year, 10/10, October 10, 2025, which caused most altcoins to go to zero or almost zero in a matter of minutes, creating the largest liquidation event in Crypto history. Every financial crisis has its villain. Why do you think the market wanted a villain, and why did it choose you?
CZ: Apparently it was one of our competitors who pushed the narrative that Binance was causing the problem. In fact the price change first occurred on that particular exchange. The sequence of events is that Trump announced tariffs, the stock market collapsed, Crypto collapsed, and then there was a technical problem related to a certain small stablecoin on Binance. It was not even USDT or USDC, but Athena’s USD, with a market value in the single digits and billions. It was not the cause of the 10/10 crash at all.
Kevin: But a lot of media put the blame on Binance.
CZ: The Chinese media picked it up, and a Chinese competitor running a centralized exchange tried to amplify it very hard. Dragonfly’s Hasib posted a timeline chart, with prices starting to go down as soon as Trump announced the tariffs, while Binance had problems much later. Cathie Wood later admitted that she did not feel that Binance caused the entire crash, but mentioned that Binance had a technical issue that was part of the crash.
Kevin: What did Binance do at that time?
CZ: Binance spent about $800 million to compensate users who suffered losses on its platform, and it had no obligation at all. But in all the periods when Binance was bad-mouthed, Binance saw net inflows and didn’t lose any market share. You look at the money, Binance users know that Binance did not cause that problem.
Kevin: Did you pronounce "4"?
CZ: No. I usually only send "4" when a traditional media publishes a negative article. When it is some small media or a few KOLs in the community who may be paid to tweet, that is not enough for me to post "4".
Compiler Note: CZ’s “4” comes from his 2023 New Year’s resolution to ignore FUD (fake news and negative narratives), after which the community responded to negative reports with a “4”.
7. Long-term bullish stance
Kevin: You're known for always being bullish. On August 19th, when Bitcoin was around 60,000 or 64,000, you tweeted that if you wanted to thank yourself two years from now for what you did today, that was an obvious cue to buy Bitcoin, and the market went up maybe 20% in a matter of days. Does CZ have what it takes to drive the roughly $3 trillion Crypto market?
CZ: No. The short answer is no, I don't have that ability. I tweet so much bullishly, every tweet I make is bullish, I tweet maybe five times a day. It’s just that that tweet happened about five hours before President Trump spoke about the Crypto Summit, and I had absolutely no idea that was going to happen.
Kevin: So you knew the benefits in advance before tweeting?
CZ: Whenever I feel like I have information that is advantageous to me, I don’t tweet about that information. That tweet was from me on the road and I was reading a book and someone said a quote in it and I thought I could change it into a positive quote about Crypto. God knows, five hours later Trump said they were going to bring Hyperliquid to the United States, and the whole speech was very positive, but I had no idea what that was about.
Kevin: If you are bullish and tweet five times a day, and one of them happens exactly five hours before positive news, does that explain why the market moves?
CZ: Yes, but no one is complaining today, everyone is making money. Crypto follows a four-year cycle, I just didn’t wait until October to post that tweet.
8. Giggle Academy Educational Charity
Kevin: If Binance disappeared tomorrow, what would you hope your contribution to Crypto would be?
CZ: I don’t know, I just do what I can. Even though Binance is still around today, I don’t actually spend any time on that centralized exchange. I spend all my time talking to other countries about Crypto regulatory frameworks. 70% to 80% of our investments are still in the Web3 space, and I'm also spending time on Giggle Academy.
Kevin: What are you most optimizing for in your life right now?
CZ: Positive impact. If you know you are contributing and helping others, it will make you happy inside. In the short term, it will help different countries formulate Crypto regulatory frameworks. In the longer term, I think Giggle Academy will probably have the greatest positive impact. It is a free education for everyone in the world. It is growing very fast. At the beginning of the year, it only reached 100,000 children. Now it has reached 1.3 million, in less than seven months, and the growth is exponential.
Kevin: What do you think differently about education?
CZ: I feel like today’s education system wants to produce average, predictable people. If you are good at math but poor at English, you will spend less time on math and more time on English, pulling you down to the average level. But in tomorrow's extremely competitive world, you have to be in the top 1%, hopefully the top 0.1%, and if you are 0.1% better, you can probably make 10 times more money, so you need to specialize in a few things that you are good at.
Kevin: What about the teacher?
CZ: The teaching system is extremely expensive and not very good. The average annual salary of teachers in the United States is $30,000, the highest in the world, so the average quality is very low. I believe an AI-driven, app-driven, individually customized course would be much more effective. Today the robots are still a bit clumsy, but app delivery is free. Once it’s done, 100,000 people will still use it, and 1.3 million people will use it, and the marginal cost will be basically zero.