The Wolf Of All Streets - "I Built The World's Biggest Bitcoin Exchange Then Lost Everything... So I Told The Truth" | CZ

Episode Date: April 26, 2026

"I didn't want to play dominoes with the other inmates so I wrote a book." CZ sits down with Scott Melker for his most personal interview yet, revealing the full story behind Freedom of Money — written in federal prison with just 15 minutes a day on a shared computer. From growing up with a dirt floor in rural China to building the world's largest crypto exchange in five months, CZ opens up about choosing prison over hiding, receiving a presidential pardon from Trump, and why he's never been more optimistic about Bitcoin's future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This isn't just another crypto story. This is the man who built the largest exchange in the world and then went to prison, and is now back telling the full story for the first time. Z's memoir, Freedom of Money, just went live globally, and what's inside isn't what most people expect. From growing up in extreme poverty with no running water... I understood the impact of technology innovation, right?

So from like dirt floor to cement floor, no running water to like a pump, to like no tap with only cold water. with only cold water. The coding trading systems, the building Binance into a global giant in just months, writing parts of this book from a prison computer with just 15 minutes a day. I didn't want to play dominoes with the other e-mates. I didn't want to just do the normal things. I just want to keep myself busy.

And then I thought, you know, that might be a good time to sort of share that experience. This is the raw, unfiltered reality behind one of the most controversial figures in crypto. And here's the bigger question. What does his story tell us about the future of money at Because if he's right, in five years, we won't even be calling it crypto anymore. It'll just be the system. I'm hoping that we don't talk about crypto as crypto in five years. Just as like we don't talk about internet anymore.

I think in five years, I'm hoping that we'll just use crypto. It's just money. We're diving deep into the man, the mistakes, the mission, and what freedom of money really means for all of us. So let's get into it, C.D. The moment obviously, as I said, is finally here. Freedom of money has gone. gone live globally on Amazon and I think for months been kind of teasing this so

people have been guessing as to A what the title would be and B what the content would be so first how does it feel to finally hit publish on your life story and how did you ultimately settle on freedom of money as the title I think the title is easy because that was our mission statement for like from the beginning all right so for the whole time you know when you want to build a when you want to build something. You want to be like, you know, you want to be more than just, you know, laying bricks in your wall. You want to be like, you know, building a cathedral. You want to have a mission. You want to be like slightly less than saving the world, but, you know, kind of within your,

within your reach of what you can help as many people as you can. So freedom of money has always been the mission statement of finance and the core value. So that part is easy. Finish in the book took a long, long time. I'm just so happy, you know, press the publish button. It's done. Otherwise, we just keep editing it. And every edit is two weeks. Just like, no, if you want to edit a 350-page document, just reading it once and making edits is two weeks. So there's a lot of back and forth, et cetera.

But I'm just really glad, you know, put it out there. It is what it is. I hope people enjoy it. I think it's pretty authentic. It's pretty real. So I hope people like it. Yeah, I had no idea, really, of your story. And I kind of want to start there.

So obviously, the book opens in rural China. As a child, your home had a dirt floor, no running water. I mean, I think we talk about people being successful and coming from humble beginnings, but I had no idea that that was your backstory. It's really a long way from building the world's largest crypto exchange. So I'd like to know just how did growing up was so little shape the way that you think about money now and about financial freedom? Yeah, to be honest, I didn't understand money until I learned about Bitcoin.

I just didn't think about it. I work in the financial field, like I worked in Bloomberg, trading futures trading systems. I worked in Tokyo, doing Tokyo's exchange trading systems, etc. But I didn't really understand money. But what I did is I understood the impact of technology innovation, right? So from like dirt floor to cement floor, no running water to like a pump to like, a tap with only cold water and then with like warm water.

So all of those are technology innovations that improve. improve people's lives. So I'm always a tech guy. So I believe strongly that any technology innovation that improves efficiency without sacrificing other things are usually good. I think blockchain is a huge technology. So that's why, yeah, so I think those shaped my thinking. And I think everybody here obviously knows you from your story from Binance onwards, but you just touched on some of your earlier days at Bloomberg, Tokyo Stock Exchange. What did you learn during those years that pushed you to create finance and really made Binance possible?

I think back in those years, I didn't know I was going to build a company that was going to be as impactful as it is today. Back in those years, I was just building the technology foundations. I was a coder. Just learning the ways of life, really. Just being a good team player, team member, contributing to the project, etc. I think those years built my sort of core foundation skills, like technical skills, how to be professional at work, those type of skills.

But I think those kind of laid the foundations, but leading a company required quite a bit more. And that only came later. So I remember when you launched in 2017 and you were a small upstart, right? I know you had a small team and there were bigger names in the industry. and I think it took about 18 months to be effectively the largest, right? I mean, which is an incredibly fast process. So just walk us through that and what decisions made the differences there that nobody talks about, where there's some key moments you can point back to that really, you know, led to that success.

Yeah, I think it took us about five months from starting to become the worst largest crypto exchange by trading volume. So that rise was really quick. But we were lucky that we were in what they would call the L-Coing, 2017 ICO year. But I think the thing that really, the thing that we were able to do that others that kept our leading position over the last eight years is how we protected users. I think Bynes does a lot of things to protect users.

Some of which we talk about repeatedly, some we don't talk about. But the real users know that Bynes is the exchange that really protects the users, that goes above and beyond. They do much more than a traditional financial company. They do much more than any crypto exchange. So I think people are pretty smart. People know how you treat them. So I think that's kind of the core thing that made Biden as successful.

So he basically went from being the largest by volume in five months to being the largest by customers in 18 months. Yeah, out of which metric you were viewing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the different metrics, yeah. So at the beginning, we touched on the problem. process and the editing and all the things. But what really blew my mind was that you wrote most of this book while you're in federal

prison. And you did it on a shared computer that you only had 15 minute access to at a time. So maybe you can walk us through what your day looked like in general when you only had 15 minutes to do that work. And why did you decide to write the book when you only had 15 minutes a day on a shared laptop? Yeah. So it's just mainly to keep myself busy. You know, I knew I was going to be there for a few months. but I don't want like relatively speaking in prison terms is a short is a short term actually most judges don't give that short term but usually anything less than six to

12 months you do home confinement so but for me it was there I didn't want to play dominoes with the other inmates I didn't want to you know just do the normal things I just I worked out there's a routine there's a very fixed schedule you've got to wake up at a certain time you got to have breakfast lunch dinner at a certain time there's lockdowns at a a certain time, you get a few hours of free time. I just want to keep myself busy. And then I thought, you know, that might be a good time to sort of, you know, share that experience. I think, you know, I pleaded guilty to a federal, to a federal charge back then.

I'm pretty transparent about it. I'm pretty, I'm pretty, I'm pretty, I'm pretty comfortable sharing what I, what I went through, what I pleaded to you, what I agreed to, what I didn't agree to. So I thought, you know, number one is keeping busy. And number two is, you know, to share the story. Yeah. How bad was the food? Food was pretty bad. Actually, to be honest, it's not as bad as I imagine, but it's very plain. So, but for me, I'm not a, I'm not a foodie, so I can get, I can get on with that.

The food has a lot of, a lot of carbs, but very few protein, very few vegetables, very high in sugar, very high in carbs. But, you know, it's fine. Actually, I lost a lot of weight in prison. I lost about 10,000. 10 kilos, yeah. But you came out, like, I remember you had your push-up routine, and you were looking, you know, like a meme version of yourself. It was incredible. Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, I got like, basically the day is broken up, and then there's a yard time. I just, you know, I just go work out. And actually, that's one thing I kept out of, I kept with me even after prison, which is good, which, you know, just work out more. Yeah. Yeah.

And so going back to you said being very transparent and comfortable with what happened and sharing it, which I think people generally appreciated. You were living in a non-extradition state in the UAE. You definitely did not have to come to the United States to face the DOJ, but you chose to do that voluntarily. Can you walk me through that decision and what was in your mind at the time? Yeah, so there's a couple of factors there. One is I would be fine living in the UAE.

Like, no, I'm financially okay. I have Bitcoins. I have enough Bitcoins. I can maintain my living standard. I'll be fine. And I can stay in a home in a country for a very long time. But I thought if I didn't go, they will probably be fairly severe consequence.

They can potentially be fairly severe consequences for Binance. The company may be very, fairly, they could indict me, they could indict Binance. The company will be very affected. There will be a lot of negative effects for B&B holders. And there's like many, many of them. and then there could be a lot of negative effects for the crypto industry in general.

So I thought, and also I thought I would just deal with the issue. To be very frank, I did not expect that I would go to jail. I looked at all the history of BSA charges in the U.S. My lawyers couldn't find a single case where a single violation landed the person in jail. People who went to jail with a BSA usually has many other issues, which I don't.

So I thought, no, there was a very low chance that I would go to jail. But then I thought I might have to deal with some home confinement in the U.S., like maybe six months, like Arthur Haste did. I was fine with that. I was like, look, I can get through that. And jail was kind of unexpected. You also increased my own personal risks, security risks.

I could be harmed in jail. I could be like, so that I didn't expect. But I also thought, you know, even after that, I just got to deal with it. So luckily, I didn't get harmed. So that was okay. Yeah. I mean, how surprised were you then when you were given jail time? If, you know, in the decision process,

you had to handicap that at a very low percentage, as you said. Yeah, yeah. Throughout the process, after I got into the U.S., just things got worse and worse and worse. So the government, the U.S. DOJ, under the Biden administration, only asked for a 36-month jail term one week ahead of my sentencing hearing. So that's like on April, I don't know, 23rd or something. My hearing of it was April 30th on 2024.

So at that time, I've been in the U.S. for almost five and a half months. Right. So you kind of slowly gotten worse. And then so that was like the week where we wasn't sure what the judge is going to do, right? And my lawyer is like, look, many judges will split the baby, will split the baby, and they'll go somewhere in the middle. And also the 36 months is outrageous. even go by the most severe sentencing guidelines,

my sentence would be like 10 to 16 months, right? So the government is asking for double the punishment for any, even for the most severe cases in this case, which luckily the judge said, look, the judge has never heard the government asking the court to ignore a sentencing guideline. But the judge still gave me four months, which is kind of surprising.

But that was within the realm of possibility, is then. After that, I just got to deal with it. It's just another issue that's thrown in my way, and I just got to make the best out of it. So, yeah, so, and also at that time, physically, I was fine. I was, but mentally, there's a lot of stress. I just wasn't sure if, like, if they told me, like, four months, it's it. You're 100% sure. Four months, you're done. There's no other issues. You can, get out. You can fly out. That's fine. But in the back of my head, there's a lot of uncertainty. There could be a lot of other things that could happen. I detailed some of that thinking in the book. But that was actually the most mentally stressful part. You don't know what's going to happen next. Something worse could happen.

Yeah, I can't even imagine. I mean, you did get deeply personal in this book. And one of the stories that struck me is about when your mother tried to come visit. So obviously, she's 82 years old. She traveled six hours, I believe, is what you said in the book, to visit you at the prison. And she got there and they turned her back. So she had to make a journey back. six hours, 82-year-old woman. You also talked quite a bit about losing your father, how he raised you, teaching you about integrity and resilience. So, I mean, how is going through everything? How has that changed, I guess, how you think about family? And what would you say to other, I guess, founders and builders that are watching tonight about family? Because obviously, I would say that when you're building

a company, you don't have time for much else. And then you have these deeply personal moments. Absolutely. So I think, This experience really brought me actually closer, much closer to my family. Before, I was like most other founders, you're busy, you're running a company, and there's like a thousand things you've got to worry about every day. You kind of always think the family will be there. You can, you know, you're going to do more work. So after that, I especially spent much more time with family.

When everything's taken away from you in prison, it kind of makes you realize what you miss the most. And what you miss the most is, like, you know, you miss the food, your own. comfortable bed, your shower, like, you know, so you don't have to touch the walls. But the thing you miss the most is the people, right? It's your family. So that made me realize, okay, that's the top thing that I miss. So after I came out, I actually spent way more time with the family now. You know, I play with the kids a bit more, et cetera.

So I think that also brought me closer to, you know, my siblings, my mom, etc. I was pretty close. I had a very good relationship with them before. but that experience actually brought some of my family much closer to me. So my advice to other founders is I don't believe in life work balance, but I do believe that you need to take care of the important things in life first. So just running a company is not the only thing that a founder has to do. You have to have a supportive family.

You have to have a good family. So I do recommend people to spend quality time with your family. I'm laughing because you made the work-life balance comment. And I remember, I think last time we spoke or in one of our previous conversations, you told me that you didn't get haircuts because you didn't have time for it. Yeah, I cut my own hair. This is my own work. So, yeah, this is it.

That hasn't even changed now. No, it hasn't changed. I still value time highly. I think time is the most limited resource. I do spend quite a bit more time with a family. But everywhere else, I still cut time really, really tight. I don't go to Barbara because that's the time. It takes half an hour.

I just shave myself, and then it takes like three minutes. I don't care about how my hair looks, and nobody else cares, it seems. So that's fine with me. Yeah. So I think one of the most striking things, obviously, is that you were granted a pardon by the president of the United States, by President Trump, and I don't think that's something that most people ever experienced. So what did that moment mean to you personally? And I guess more broadly, what does it say about where the United States

now stands on crypto versus the previous administration when obviously you ended up going to jail? Yeah. So, well, number one is I want to say, very importantly, I'm super appreciative of the President Trump's pardon for me. I think that's, for me, like, no, it's a level of vindication. So I think that's really, I thought I didn't care too much about it, but I do, I do, after it happened, I do highly appreciate it. And I think that shows, that show. the US can go 180 degrees, you know, in that direction, which is really good for the US. I think the previous direction for US will leave US without a crypto blockchain industry.

I think there's really three big industries in my adult lifetime, right? That's the internet, there's blockchain, and there's AI. Any country that misses one of them is going to be severely disadvantaged. I think, you know, now the US is catching up on crypto. And US, I think it's already leading in crypto regulations. But right now, US, as I said before, misses some of the largest players in the space and liquidity. So hopefully we can help US to bridge that gap.

So are you confident that that can actually happen in this environment? I think obviously we have a Goldilocks moment where it seems like everything is in line, but I don't think we can take for granted that that could change down the road. Until it happens for sure, no, anything is possible. could happen, you could not happen. But I think there's a higher likelihood that you would happen. I think U.S. has a very strong foundation. And the thing I understood about U.S. is that, you know, U.S. sometimes going in a wrong direction, but then you were self-correct. That goes to the

strength of the Constitution, which is quite unique. At the same time, U.S. has a lot of debates because it's a two-party system. There's always like going to be debates. And the debates, And right now, my understanding of the U.S. situations, they're pretty polar extremes. So they attack each other pretty viciously. And so if the current administration is pro-Crypto, the other party will attack crypto like crazy. And you see that in the traditional media news. You see that in the political comments, et cetera. But I do think that U.S. will continue to make progress.

Before we move on, we were talking, of course, about the earlier days of Biden. and another conversation that you had, you gave with me, you gave the greatest analogy, which was like the early days of driving cars. And you sort of described that that's what developing finance was like, was that, well, when you first had a car on the road, there were no laws, there were no lines in the middle, there were no lights, but it didn't stop people from building more cars

and trying to advance the technology of the cars. And I know you ended up, obviously, as you said, very transparently, you know, pleading guilty and ending up in prison. I mean, how do you frame those early years of finance and the decisions you made that allowed you to grow so much? I just understanding the environment and how you built a business when there was no regulation laws. People viewed it as the Wild West, but you knew that eventually those laws and regulations would come. So you had to make decisions in real time about what was likely okay or what wasn't without knowing. Yeah, yeah.

I think in the early days, the biggest problem is the lack of clarity. Right. And then there was also the sort of, what's the term in English, punishing people after the fact, right? So I think the way I understood most laws in most countries that we're living is if something's not banned, then you're allowed to do it, right? That's legal. If something is not illegal, then it's legal to do it. But in this particular case, the classification of crypto, whether that's money or not, wasn't said clearly. at least for for for for me personally I didn't have a deep understanding of it and then what entrepreneurs can do or not like we technology entrepreneurs viewed this as a new technology right so you build a platform we launched it we launched it while we were in Asia we had some US users

on the platform we didn't block them strongly enough and then later on you're punished for it so I think that's the difficulty but to run a platform they're very common understanding of what's right and wrong you don't want to hurt other people you don't want to There should be no fraud. You don't want to be hurting people like doing the really bad things. There's core principles. And then you can still do the right thing. So we live in a world where some of the regulatory frameworks, even today, are still somewhat unclear.

But what's right and wrong in the sort of basic sense, in the fundamental sense, it's not that hard to judge. So I think as any platform, if you do right by your users, your users will choose you and, you know, you will grow. So that's kind of how Biden has grown in the early days. And then, you know, we did get into trouble, obviously. And then hopefully, I think, I believe that we have fixed everything. And I pay the price for it. And now that's what under the bridge, which we look forward. Yeah, I mean, speaking of looking forward,

it seemed like you didn't take one day off after you got out of prison. You came out and hit the ground completely running Giggle Academy, which is the learning platform for children, WISEI Labs, 10 billion investment vehicle for supporting builders and Web3 AI and biotech, as you mentioned. You're now advising governments around the world on blockchain, I believe. So I think most people in your position probably would have gone quiet or taken a little break. What's driving you right now? I think, well, if I go quiet completely, you'll be a boring life.

I would not be satisfied with myself. I think what I think I said in the book, right, when I get old, I want to say, look, I want to look, I want to look back on my life. I want to be able to say, look, I did my best. It's a impactful, it's a meaningful life. If I just don't do anything, then I won't be, I'm not that young. I'm 49, but I'm not very old either. So I still have energy to do stuff.

So as I said in the last sentence of the book, I believe that if you can, then you have to. You have to do it. Right. So, yeah. So I think, you know, many countries, leaders come to me asking for advice. We have common friends who refer us, etc.

And that's a great opportunity for me to do what I can do, which is give them good advice about crypto, regulatory frameworks, help them with that. I'm like all my assets in crypto. So when crypto does well, that helps me too. It helps the entire industry, but it also helps me. So I feel those are very meaningful things to do. So Giga Academy right now,

I think the meeting I had with them yesterday morning, day morning, they're reaching 240,000 students, 240,000 kids learn on the platform for free. That's 10 times bigger than many universities. So, and that's like a fairly small team. That's a 50 people team working for like a year and a half, two years. So that's very impactful for that makes me, that project has no revenue, but it makes me very, very happy. Yeah, so all of those things that, you know, I, those things make me happy.

Yeah, it's amazing. And I mean, to that end, you're donating all the proceeds from the book completely to non-profit organization. So you won't keep any money from having written this book no matter how successful it is. Not a cent. Why are you giving it all the way? Why are you giving it all way? Well, first of all, I think number one is I'm in a very lucky position that I do not need that money. Number two is I don't know how many copies the book will sell.

I think it will sell some copies, but I want to use that for a good purpose. So I'm not a professional book writer. This is not going to be my main income or any income. So I thought, look, let's move this to a good cost. And I want to encourage people to buy the books. I actually wanted to release the book for free just as a PDF, like on X or online. But then I think that may be less impactful than selling us through Amazon and donating proceeds into charitable causes.

So at some point, I may give the book away for free. Who knows? But if I give a book away for free, I can only do digital copies. So Amazon has this training thing. And Amazon probably would not like it if I give the book away for free. Then I wouldn't get a fiscal copy that Amazon can facilitate. So there's some like balances. But for me, I'm not that interested in the money from the book,

but I want to move that into a good cost. And what I'm interested in is basically for people to understand my story and for people who are interested to read it. I think, no, we said it at the standard price of $9.99. Hopefully, that's not too high for everyone, and people just contribute $10 into charity causes. So I want to ask you another question. And then we'll move on to the audience questions because we're getting some great ones and they're flooding in right now. I want to know, looking ahead, what does crypto look like to you in five years? more specifically, what role do you want to play in that future?

Sure. I'm hoping that we don't talk about crypto as crypto in five years. Just as like we don't talk about Internet anymore. We don't talk about TCP IP. We don't talk about HTML 5 or whatever JavaScript, etc. We don't talk about that stuff anymore. We'll just use it. I think in five years, I'm hoping that we'll just use crypto. It's just money. It's just the new fintech money. There will be other use cases for the blockchain, for data storage, et cetera, et cetera. So there will be other cases.

But I'm hoping in five years we stop talking about the technology. We're just using it. We're talking about the applications. And it will be used everywhere. So that's what I hope. I think five years, it will happen to a fairly large degree, especially now AI is moving everything forward very quickly. The speed of development, the speed of writing code,

is going to increase quite dramatically. And AI agents are going to use crypto a lot. and then more and more people are building more global applications that require commerce from different parts of the world, etc. So I'm hoping that blockchain will, I'm hoping, and I also kind of know that you will get there. For me, myself, I kind of see myself more as a mentor, a coach kind of guy. Like, you know, I'm sharing other founders out.

Look, I, you know, I worked really hard for like, for the last, I don't know how many years. I went through what I had to go through. I'm actually quite lucky and quite happy to be forced to step down. So now, like, other can give opportunities for other people to grow. So I want to help to help, personally, I want to help other founders to grow. Yeah. Okay.

So I love that vision. I want to jump to some questions from the audience, if you don't mind. There's quite a few. So this is a good one. Sisi, you were the first person in U.S. history to go to jail for a single BSA failure violation. You touched on this earlier. Yet in 2026, we still haven't seen any executives go to jail for the 2008 financial crisis.

How is crypto held to a different standard in the justice system? And is that fair? I think, look, okay, I said a couple of things which are kind of out there. I think this world is never completely fair, right? If you want to look for complete fairness, you're not going to find it in this world. People are subjective and people's opinions move with the times. In the 1980s, the United States government declared war on drugs. And then, you know, people got sent to prison for very long sentences by, you know, just selling weed.

And now it's legal in many states, right? So, is that fair or not, we can do, fair or not is a fairly subjective thing. And there's no common standard. And there's no common equality. Different times, different issues. The U.S. government, I think even today, some of the, some, like Elizabeth's Senator Elizabeth Warren, I think my understanding, she's still anti-crypto. So I was, you know, I was, we were the biggest,

Binance was the biggest platform. I was the leader, I was leading that platform in, in the last administration, during the, during the time of the last administration. We're the largest platform, so we were the first ones that target. Is that fair or not? I don't think it matters that much. So I think we just got to move, move past that. Yeah, so I don't, I don't worry about that. I think we are where we are. Looking forward, I think there's many good opportunities to continue to build and continue to build great things. Yeah. So I have a question from Titan Trades.

We'd like to know more about your 72 principles. It's an awesome part of the book. So I think the 72 was summarized by somebody on X. I think it's actually by a Chinese KOL on X. I didn't count them. Initially, I had the principles. blog written with numbers on it, but then I actually removed the numbers because I didn't want there to be like a fixed number of, excuse me, a fixed number of principles. And so I kind of just used the most used principles at the top. So, but I've been developing that principles article way before the book. I think I started that article in 2022 or 2021 after I met with Ray Dalio. He encouraged me to write my principles. down and then that somehow over the years turned into a blog post which I attached as an appendix on the book. So yeah, but those are those are those are kind of my unique, I thought

somewhat unique ways of doing things for people to understand me better. I shared with a team many years ago so that a team knows how I make decisions so that we can be more consistent. But yeah, I hope people enjoy it. The principles may not be for everyone, but they work for me. So Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, I think everybody knows, wrote a very complimentary quote on the cover of your book. What are your thoughts on Wall Street firms like BlackRock getting into crypto? Well, number one, I think it's fantastic. I think it's fantastic that Black Rock and also other Wall Street financial firms are getting into crypto. I think crypto is not like crypto versus traditional finance.

Crypto is just a new technology for finance. traditional, any financial company should use it and should embrace it. I think Larry is one of those interesting personalities. He openly admits that in the early years he was against Bitcoin, but then he turned around. So that's a very good example. Many people do that, right? But for people of his status and his position to openly accept that and pushing Bitcoin so hard afterwards, it's great.

So I think he's got a really big personality. Yeah, and I've been very fortunate to meet with him and chat with him. And then I said, look, I'm writing a new book. Do you want to read it? Read it. And then I asked him for a quote. So I think we're going to see, I hope to see the convergence of crypto with traditional, what we call Wall Street traditional finance.

It's just finance, really. So I think right now we're seeing many RWA's Larry think is very big on tokenization. And so we want to, we want to bring more assets in. to the crypto space and we also want to bring the crypto users into to be able to access traditional finance. You know, many people in the world cannot buy US stocks or cannot buy stocks of many countries. That shouldn't be the case. Why would you want to have a stock market and limit the number of people who can buy it?

So once you list the stock, you want liquidity. You want the world to be able to buy it. Which company wouldn't want everybody in the world to buy, to be able to buy their stock? Right. They can decide not to, but they should be able to, if they want to. But that's not the case right now. So I think we'll see the convergence there. So I'm very, yeah, so I'm thankful for Larry's quote. But I think there's a bigger picture of like, you know, the industry's merging over time soon.

Yeah, I saw a great tweet the other day. And it was in response, I think, to J.B. Morgan saying that however many trillions of dollars of assets will be tokenized by 2030 or something. And someone just said soon, tokenized assets will just be assets. It's kind of what you alluded to as your vision is that, It will just, we won't talk about it being crypto or tokenization anymore. It'll just be the standard. Absolutely.

I think that's, it's going to get there. Yeah. Yeah. So another question from the audience. In the book, CZ talks about one of his first experiences with AI, with his very own customer service agent Bob in January 2018. How has AI evolved in Binance since then? And would you say Bob paved the way for Binance on AI? Back in those days, the CS Bob was like not really an AI.

it was more of like an SQL script. So I wouldn't call it a AI back then. I think it evolved very heavily over time. I think my, I don't know the recent numbers, but the numbers I heard like a while ago was like 80% of customer support inquiries at Binance are handled by a bot from first response to resolution. So I think that's pretty good.

And hopefully they get to 99%. And with some of the newer language models, and with some of the new training data, et cetera. I think that will get there. So I think we're going to live in a world where AI is going to solve many problems for us. Right now, we're kind of solving problems for AI, but hopefully soon AI will be solving problems for us.

So that's kind of how I see it. I think AI is a big technology, as I said, right, internet, blockchain AI. There's three big technologies that we need to embrace. So there's an entire chapter of the book dedicated to your travels to Bhutan and the King of Bhutan, who you can call a good king, has a quote on the cover of your book. How is Bhutan benefiting from Bitcoin and

crypto? Oh, yeah. I think, well, number one, I think Bhutan's benefited hugely from Bitcoin, and it was a very smart decision for them to get into Bitcoin mining so early. They have excess electricity, well, they have excess hydro power, which produces electricity. And they're in the Himalaya Mountains on the sort of India side. It's very expensive and very difficult to transfer those energy from the mountains to other export them and sell them for money to keep etc so but when you use those extra power to buy bitcoins um to mine bitcoins then you know bitcoins are permanent durable easy to transport host value um the value gone up quite a lot from 2014 when they started so um i think no it's one of the best decisions for the country you also shows that the king is very progressive

in terms of his understanding of technology and his view of the world. The king's a great guy. So, yeah, so I've been very fortunate to be able to meet with him. And then it's a beautiful country. I encourage everyone to go there and visit. It's very unique. It's high in the mountains. It's just a beautiful country.

You've talked quite a bit about Giggle Academy and what you intended to accomplish there. What are some of your other philanthropic efforts you've made beyond Giggle Academy? I've done, so there's quite a few reasoned ones that are not public. I've done, actually, I've donated, I don't know, one to two million dollars to prison professors, which, you know, helped to improve the prison's education in the U.S. After going through that experience, and also Michael Santos runs that organization. He's very focused on improving the education in prison.

to prepare inmates for once before prepare inmates coming back into the society. So I donated a couple million dollars to him already. It's a full charity, which I didn't publicize before. There's also a couple other charities, publicized to some extent, not fully, donations to organizations that help sick children in Thailand, Southeast Asia, etc. So nowadays, I do quite a bit more private donations. like anonymously, I don't talk about it too much unless like I'm asked like in this kind of situation. So yeah, and I continue to work with other charity organizations.

And I think, yeah, so I'll just do whatever I can with the bandwidth I can. So here's a great question from at L-I-N-O-D-FI-I. If you were starting Binance today from zero in 2026, what would you do differently? Well, I think, well, now given what I know, I would, I would, and also now we have quite a bit more regulatory clarity than seven, than, I don't know, nine years ago. I would, like, you'll be much more careful on that front. And I think I will probably be more aggressive in terms of hiring and in terms of product development. I think in the, finance did really well and grown really fast, but we were, I was conservative in terms of product development. I want to make sure that existing product work before we launch a new.

For example, Binance didn't launch futures until almost two years in, actually just a bit over two years. It started developing futures in 2019, which is like a year and a half in. And then you only launched in September 2019, which is more than two years in. I will probably have released some of those products earlier if I were to do it again. And also, I will probably be a bit more ruthless in terms of talent retention and also bottoming out, bottom like people who doesn't contribute very much, especially in this day and age with AI, I think a small number of people

will contribute an unproportional amount of results. So you want to keep the top top guys and sort of filter out at the bottom. I don't have a better way of saying it. But that's the world we live in today. So, yeah, so I think I would do a few things differently. But on the whole, I would, many of the things, like most of the things, 80% of it, I would keep the same.

So if we have a question from Solix, is there still hope for those Web3 founders planning to build from zero? This is a deep bear market question. Is there still hope for Web3 founders trying to build now? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's always opportunities. There's always, to be honest, there's actually better opportunities in the bear market. In the bear market, you have less competition. Many founders have moved on to other things.

or have stopped, et cetera. And most of many of the strongest projects started in bear markets. So we also thought that from an easy lapse investment perspective, the investments in bare markets usually do much better than the investments in bull markets. Boar markets, the valuations high. Everyone is really, what do you call it, slightly arrogant, everything, money seems to come easy, et cetera. But the real builders building.

in bear markets. So, and I think there's plenty, plenty of opportunities in crypto. Every crypto winter, people are like, oh, what can I build? This industry is going to be dead. And two years later, it will be a bull market again. And people are like, oh, I wish I'd done that like, you know, two years or six years ago. But, you know, if you wish that two years later, you've got to start now. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to be cognizant of your time and respectful of that. I think we had some great questions, and this was a great conversation. All I can say is to everybody, go read the book. I took the time to do it, and I think that everybody should.

It's in a tweet right here. It's a sub-tweet to this conversation, which I know will be on CZ's account as well. There are links there to get a copy of the book in English and Chinese, but you can obviously just go ahead and search this directly on Amazon, and you'll be able to find this book basically everywhere. I want to thank you so much, CZ, for taking the time to do this. I know that you've been through.

quite a lot and it was very, very eye-opening for me to obviously read through the experience from your perspective and not just from the perspective of all of us discussing it from the outside for so long. I really appreciate the time and hope everyone read the book. And thank you so much for all your support. And yeah, and also write a review on Amazon if you read the book. Yeah, that would be great. Everybody, please leave a review. It's amazing to me actually how many people clearly already read the book from what I could from what we could see here in the questions it hasn't been out that long and you have a lot of people that obviously ran to get it so Cisi thank you again and we will talk hopefully very very soon thanks thank you so much Scott thank

you thank you everybody grab the book