The Wolf Of All Streets - Why Millions Of Users Buy Bitcoin On Binance | CZ Binance

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

If running an exchange wasn't hard enough, Binance is currently taking in 10x the number of new users daily compared to 3 months ago. In this fascinating episode, Binance CEO CZ debunked a powerful BTC rumor, explained his motivation for success, and shared insight into what is really going on in the crypto market today. This episode will leave you shocked as what you know about crypto might not be true after all. In this episode CZ Binance explores: - The process of listing a token - Running out of ERC-20 addresses - 10x user demand - Managing 20-30 meetings a day - Pancake Swap and BSC - The truth behind exchange outflows - Meme coins - Spending hundreds of millions on security - Sipping martinis and playing golf - The CoinMarketCap acquisition - Finding passion and staying motivated --- Voyager This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 9.5% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Go to https://thewolfofallstreets.link/voyager and download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- Mina Mina is the world's lightest blockchain, powered by participants. Rather than apply brute computing force, Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to ensure a super-light and constant sized chain, that allows participants to quickly sync and verify the network. The team behind Mina is backed by VCs, including Coinbase Ventures, and Mina's adversarial testnet was the largest public testnet outside of ETH 2.0. To get involved ahead of Mina’s mainnet, visit https://thewolfofallstreets.link/mina --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Voyager and Mina. Stay tuned for more information on both later in the episode. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Crypto never sleeps. Millions of traders and investors around the world demand 24-7 access to exchanges, moving billions of dollars in and out of positions on a daily basis. Running an exchange has to be the hardest job in all of crypto. This task probably becomes even harder when your platform is the world's largest exchange by volume.

Fortunately for us in the crypto space, we have leaders like Changpeng Zhao, who we all know as CZ, to take on monumental tasks like these. It's my goal today to better understand what it's like to run Binance, what demand currently looks like, and what the future holds for the exchange and the broader crypto market as a whole. CZ, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's a pleasure to have you. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me here. So before we get into the questions, you are listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, art, trading, music, sports, and politics. This podcast is powered by BlockWorks.

You can visit them at blockworks.co for access to the highest quality information in the space. And if you like the podcast and follow me on Twitter, you can join my newsletter, check out everything else I have going on at thewolfofallstreets.io. Now to get into today's episode, I'm asking for a friend, how does one get their hands on a coveted Binance hoodie or that amazing jersey that you're wearing right now? Yeah. So basically we don't sell them, but for people who are supportive of the Binance community in general, it doesn't have to be the Binance centralized exchange. When they ask, we give it up. So we'll get you one. Absolutely amazing. I just remember

when there was a time when they were like more scarce and seemingly in demand than people NFTs. We try not to distribute too many of them so that they maintain a little bit of the prestigious. Yeah, you got to keep that scarcity. So your career, as I understand it, was actually built around trading and designing trading systems. Do you miss actually trading? Would you ever consider going back to it in the future? So to be honest, I've never really actively traded. And I tried it when I was between jobs.

And I'm not very good at it. So I definitely don't miss it. So I never did it as a profession. I never made money out of it. Never are able to. So I think our clients know how to do that. But I don't know how to do that. So I was never really a trader. So this is our clients know how to do that, but I don't know how to do that. So I was never really a trader. So this is the reason why we don't trade. And I don't know that profession.

I don't admire that profession. I think those guys in that profession who do well do not admire me. Running the exchange is tough in its own ways, but just different skills. So I'm not good at that and not looking forward, not planning to change careers yet. But you're providing the tools for those traders. Why do you think that you wouldn't have that positive relationship with them? So we have a positive relationship with all the clients, but this is like a blacksmith may not be a very good Kung Fu guy. There are some blacksmiths which are good at both. But there are a lot of Kung Fu guys who does not know how to make a sword

or at least not know how to make a good one. So I'm the blacksmith type of guy. So I make tools for other people to trade, but I'm not a trader. So I make swords. I don't know how to use them. I know the basics of trading. I know all the terminologies. I know different terms they use, but I was never in a position where I was able to run a trading strategy that actually makes money. So I never had that. Well, apparently

that's true for 95% of people who try to trade, they completely fail. So I guess there's no surprises there. Obviously, at the moment, the huge craze as we're recording this is the dog coins, right? The doges and the shibs of the world. And so you obviously, you listed shib and you gave a very, I thought, very reasonable warning. You said this is something that the customers want, very risky. How do you decide where the line is for what you will list and when you will list it? To be totally transparent, I totally

agree. People should be able to trade what they want and they should have access to it in a safe environment. So I don't really see what the problem is, but I'm wondering how you make those decisions. Sure. So the highest factor that we look for, the most important factor we look for is number of users. But within number of users, there's many different ways you can define that. So we can define that as number of users who, well, the number of active addresses on a blockchain, the number of daily transactions on a blockchain. You can look at Twitter followers, Telegram groups. And then once they start trading, we can look at the number of users holding the coin, the number of people depositing, trading on the Binance platform. But that's after we list.

And then we can look at number of customer support requests, who wants it. And so actually before the sheep listing, we actually had another data point, which on CoinMarketCap is one of the largest watched coins on CoinMarketCap. So now that's another data point that we can use. It's from CoinMarketCap. So it's relatively neutral and relatively reliable from our perspective. We know that data is real. And also after we listed, CoinMarketCap is actually one of the most watched coin out of all the coins on CoinMarketCap. So this is a coin that's not even listed on Binance. This is before listing on Binance. So we took that data as well. That means it's probably a very high degree of interest. And then after we listed it, it's actually the number one most active coin

traded on the first day of listing ever. So a lot of people don't like it. But the fact is, there's a lot more other people chasing it. So the markets are very segmented in terms of, well, there's so many coins, only a small number of people like a certain coin. But this particular coin is liked by the highest number of people on the first day of trading. So it shows that our data was correct. People are actively chasing this coin. I don't know why, but that's just the data. You ran out of ERC-20 addresses, correct? Yes. So this is actually the first time in our history that we ran out of Ethereum addresses for deposits. So we have Ethereum addresses. We actually have multiple machines

generating deposit addresses just to keep up with demand. But those generators were not enough for after this listing. So we had to scramble to get more generators on board. And yeah, it's a whole complicated process. So you said, obviously, and I concur, I have no idea why this is happening, why there's so much interest in this coin specifically. But do you think that it speaks to any trends in the broader market as a whole that you're seeing? So I think, to be honest, I think nobody really understands the market because I think right now in the market, there's probably more than 300 million people. It's probably bigger than many nations in the world. So with that kind of mass population now,

everybody has a different psychology. I guess right now, generally, the meme coins are very hot. Dogecoin is really hot because of Elon. And this coin, they were very generous with their token distributions. They gave Vitalik 50% of the tokens. We do not know who the funders are, how many they kept, but it's just getting traction. We don't know why, but we see the numbers and we follow users. So it's very hard to pinpoint exactly why, but right now meme coins are

really hot. I don't know why. I kind of know why. Right. You know why? Because there's FOMO and once something goes mainstream with social media, it's very easy for it to become viral and become a thing. And also, I mean, it's not that surprising, I guess, when you put it in context of the fact that we've seen actual stocks of actual companies do the same thing. You know, I think it would have been surprising if we hadn't seen GameStop, which is basically a dead brick and mortar company selling video games like the Blockbuster of 2021 having similar interest, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So basically, people think I understand markets, but we just provide a platform and I don't know why users buy or why users sell. And each one of them have their reasons. They don't tell us. They just place an order with us. So yeah, it's one of those things that people think I know, but I actually

don't. Yeah, it makes sense. But when a stock is listed, obviously on the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange, they have to concern themselves with the fundamentals, what that company does, making sure. But I guess in this space, that's not really concerned. You just need the volume and the interest. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And what do you make of the current DeFi trend in general? Do you think that that's still the direction that everything is moving? People are talking about a DeFi summer. Obviously, last summer, we saw rug pulls and kind of a bit of a bubble pop in the DeFi space. But do you think that this is a harbinger of more of this craziness to come sort of in the DeFi space?

I think DeFi will stay. DeFi is a logically valid use case. You can loan your money for other people to lend to a liquidity pool so that that's used to provide liquidity. And then the traders can trade against that. They get much better prices because of the deeper order book or deeper liquidity. And the retail traders are okay to pay for the trading fees, which are used to pay for the interest for the loans,

for the lenders. So that business model works. So I think there's a logical business model there that has been explored. It works. So I think we'll stay. And model there that has been explored. It works. So I think we'll stay. And we're seeing that the total value locked on DeFi platforms continue to grow. Last summer, I think, well, basically, Ethereum network has been congested for the last few years.

So it's already reached saturation point or maximum capacity for the past few years. And given that, you're not going to see DeFi grow beyond that. Like Ethereum can handle like 1.2 million transactions per day at max, and that's it. And because of that, more and more people want to use it. But then so the price gets pushed up, the gas fees get pushed up. But now I think with Binance Smart Chain, we're offering an alternative venue for people to have lower fees of accessing DeFi. What we've seen is that the Ethereum transaction did not decrease,

but now the Binance Smart Chain is handling 4 to 5x of Ethereum transaction volumes on a daily basis. It means that there's that much more demand even without sacrificing the demand on the Ethereum network. There was just that much more demand that they weren't able to afford

$50, $100 per transaction fees, right? We're talking about US dollars, which is super expensive. So now we're seeing DeFi growing again. So we'll see. Look, I think right now the industry is actually, the industry growth is probably limited by the capacity of the blockchains that can handle it.

So yeah, so we'll just have to continue to improve the technology and see where it goes. But I do think DeFi will stay. I paid $250 for an Ethereum transaction just today. I mean, it's a rich guy. It's really about that. No, sometimes you don't kind of don't have a choice. But like when you have to send a wire transfer to someone and you don't want to, but that's the only way that they'll accept, except payment. But yeah, I mean, those fees are obviously unsustainable. You guys have done something to fix that.

Do you think that Ethereum can scale with 2.0 or that layer two solutions can solve any of these problems? Or do you think that they've just hit their capacity and it's time for other, other options? I think the jury's out. I think that 1.0 is definitely saturated. It's like way beyond their capacity now.

So that's why the gas fees are so expensive. There's just that much more demand. And with Ethereum 2.0 and Layer 2 solutions, I think the jury's still out. I think most people don't understand that Ethereum 2.0 will take a few years to come. I think Vitalik mentioned it a few times, but most people don't get it. And with things a few years out, I I think Vitalik mentioned it a few times, but most people don't get it.

And with things a few years out, I mean, Vitalik is a genius. So he probably will figure something out eventually. But I think it's a really hard problem to solve. They want to be able to run millions of nodes on laptops with sharding to solve that problem. It's just a very difficult problem to solve to handle that kind of capacity.

But Vitalik is a genius. so who knows what he can deliver. So the jury's still out, we have to see. Layer 2 solutions, I'm somewhat skeptical, to be honest. They are much harder to use. They require much more technical expertise from the users, and they actually sometimes require a little bit of trust to certain providers for the Layer 2 solutions, which makes them somewhat more centralized, if that's a dirty word in the ecosystem. So yeah, but like, who knows? But it may work. There may be, so we never know

what kind of innovations may come. So it's possible that Layer 2 solutions may catch on and or somebody will invent a new layer two that's very easy to use, etc. But so far, the current layer two solutions are not getting that much traction. So far, the data has not proven that they're very popular. So as you said, the jury is still out. Basically, we have a lot of theoretical solutions, but no concrete answers on what's likely to happen with the Ethereum network. You're in a very unique position. So you obviously run Binance, like I said, it's the most liquidity of any centralized exchange in the

world. But you also started PancakeSwap. So you have a DEX and you're also sort of dabbling in the decentralized. Do you think after starting PancakeSwap that you see a trend in either direction that's very clear? I mean, do you think that centralized exchanges are going to lose volume to DEXs over time or the opposite? So let me make a minor correction there.

Number one, I didn't start buying a smart chain and I also did not start PancakeSwap. So most people give that credit to me, but I really don't deserve it. We did help fund the initial development budget for Binance Smart Chain. It's a community group, it's a mostly similar group to the Binance Chain developer community. They came back to me and said, well, they want to do a smart chain

enabled blockchain and it needs to be parallel. You'd be running BNB. They want a grant from us. They want funding support from us. I just said, yes. So we provided their funding, but I was not involved in any of the design decisions. The stuff they did amazed me when I was using it based on public tutorials that people publish on the stuff they did amazed me, uh, when I was using it, uh, based on public tutorials that people publish on the Binance blog, et cetera, or the Binance Smart Chain blog, et cetera. So I wasn't involved in that whole process other than just look and give a grant. Um, that's the same as giving like, that's, we, we have multiple grants for our community

development. Um, PancakeSwap is a, is a, is a, is a separate team. Um, uh, there are overlaps with some ex-Binance people have joined that team, et cetera. So I do know them and they have a good relationship with us, but I'm not in the day-to-day management. I'm definitely not aware of how they do Binance

or PancakeSwap. So that's a separate project. I do endorse it because it's one of the largest projects on Binance Smart Chain. It's actually driving a lot of significant amount of volumes. It's important. The success of PancakeSwap actually improves the success

of Binance Smart Chain, which is good for BNB, which we are a large holder. That actually in turn is good for Binance centralized exchange because when the BNB practicals goes up, it's actually good for Binance. Because when people want to trade BNB, Binance is the major venue. And a lot of the other centralized exchanges

have been hesitant to list it. So all the liquidity is still with us. So there's a lot of sort of advantages the each different Binance ecosystem projects give to each other. It's like a symbiotic ecosystem, which is great. But look, I don't run those projects. Those projects are very independently run. We give grants from time to time just to help them grow. But PancakeSwap is a very successful project.

I believe they're fairly profitable right now. They no longer need grants from us. So they're actually constantly giving grants to other projects. So that's a huge success for a project like that. And for Binance, I really want to promote DeFi. I actually think DeFi in the future will probably be bigger than centralized exchanges. And I want that to happen. I really don't like the fact that centralized exchanges like Binance.com have to hold custody of users' funds. It's bad for the users. Well, for the users that are really not able to hold their funds securely today, they have to do that with us.

It's actually better for them right now. But it also creates a lot of burden for us. It's actually the highest cost center security for us. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on that. And if we can educate users and build products where people can hold their own private keys securely, easily, then we don't need to hold custody. People just trade on DeFi.

And that's much better. That's definitely the eventual goal. So I'm not worried about disrupting Binance.com. Let's just push innovation. That makes perfect sense. It's such an interesting point. I remember in 2017 when the exchanges seemed like you almost had no security. So obviously everybody said, not your keys, not your coins.

And we're looking for ways to get their funds off exchanges. But it feels like now you guys and other exchanges have taken pretty significant leaps forward as far as the ability to secure funds. Obviously, whitelisting and multiple 2FAs to get through a transaction in your email. Do you think that people's funds are largely as secure in an exchange now than if they're trying to hold them themselves? I think it's different for different types of people. It depends on the person itself. So it's not the same. For a guy who is technically capable of holding their keys securely themselves,

then they have more control with their funds on their own. And for the guys who can do that, then great, you should hold your funds yourself. But I would say that's a tiny percent of people in the population today. You have to make secure backup of your seed or private key and hold that on

me multiple places geographically, you can't lose it. And if you become unavailable, how do you pass your kids and loved ones? Most people have not figured those kinds of solutions out. There's a few, there's ways to do it, but it's relatively technical, relatively cumbersome right now. So there's only a few guys who can do that. For the guys who can do that, then yeah, go ahead and hold your own keys. For 99% of the population, it's actually easier for them to use a centralized exchange. And it's actually safer for them because they know how to deal with email and password and 2FA. Whereas they don't know how to do secure backups, multiple places, how to do dead man switches to pass to your offsprings, et cetera. So most people don't know how to do that. So we need to come up with tools that help

people overcome those problems. And I think right now the wallets are just not strong enough to, is not easy to use enough in a secure way in that sense, but you'll improve. So I think for different people, depending on how technical you are, the different solutions are more secure for you. It's very dangerous to make generalizations. Sure. I mean, people are generally their own worst enemy. So anyone who, like you said, so anyone who doesn't understand it is more likely to kind of mess up something on their own if they can control their own funds. Being your own bank is very scary, I think, just for most people. So I'm curious, what are the biggest challenges that you're experiencing right now? Like I touched on in the introduction, you're 24-7, volume is insane,

and I can only imagine that you're seeing a massive influx of new customers and demand. How do you possibly scale to meet that? So yeah, we have a lot of scaling issues. I think on the system side, we actually spend a lot of effort and on the system side, it's actually a little bit easier to scale actually. So because we can buy more servers and it's still a lot of work.

It's not just buying more servers. We still have to configure the systems so that it's scalable. It's not just buying more servers. We still have to configure the systems so that it's scalable. It's not a purely horizontally scalable. Systems are not 100% horizontally scalable. So we can't just buy a thousand machines and somehow the system will just automatically horizontally scale. Systems don't work like that, especially centralized exchanges where all the liquidity have to come to a central order book. But on the technical side, we're actually okay. We actually done a lot of work in the past few months.

And we're able to handle all-time highs on all-time high without too much trouble. The part where we're really struggling is customer support. So you can imagine, right? So we don't have, well, we try to do automated customer support and those are not very good because we're still living in a human world. AI is not that great right now.

And with real human supporting supports, we can't hire 10X guys and have them tweet their sums and do nothing and they'll be demoralized out of the wazoo, right? But right now, compared to like even three months ago, we're handling 10X more users coming every single day. So we can't hire 10X people, customer support in three months time.

We don't have the training, we can't train them. It's just like humans, we can't scale human teams at that speed. You can't 10x your team in three months. So we're struggling quite a bit, but we recently have caught up mostly on the backlog of CS tickets.

So it took us a good three, four months to catch up, but now we tripled our team size and we also automated a lot of the product workflows. We changed the product so that we optimize the product in a lot of places. And users do not need to contact customer support. They can use self-help in a lot of different ways, including for example, if you made a deposit and forgot to put in a memo, now there's an automated way for you to get that yourself. So we do a lot of those automations to try to smooth, sort of improve, streamline the processes. But right now, customer support is definitely one of the biggest bottlenecks we're facing. And I have a daily call where I go through a number of customer support issues and look at what are we doing wrong?

Which process can we improve? So we look at a number of, so daily, every day, actually every day on the senior leadership call that I have, we go through those. So it is the number one priority for us right now. And yeah, it's a tough problem to solve. It's not that sexy, but it's important. So working on it. I mean, it seems to be problem to solve. It's not that sexy, but it's important. So working on it.

I mean, it seems to be a problem everywhere. Certainly not unique, unique to you. And I think that people have too high of expectations, don't understand how fast it's scaling. I mean, I understand if someone has a transaction stuck, how that's very personally disturbing for them, but just hearing you 10 times as many people per day, there's just nothing you can really do about that, it seems. I mean, those are crazy numbers. So do you think that that demand is a result of generally mainstream awareness and adoption

of crypto? Is it because Dogecoin went crazy and everybody wants to find a place to trade Doge? What do you think the reasons are that we're seeing such an uptick in demand? So I think it's a combination of things. I think in general, fundamentally, it's the number of people coming to crypto have increased 10x over the last three months. And even if you compare it to like a year ago, it's probably increased like 20, 30 fold. So I think we got out of the crypto winter, we're definitely in a bull market now and the market is just really hot. There's multiple reasons contributing to it. Dogecoin giving so hot does contribute to it, but not everyone trade Dogecoin. And that Dogecoin isn't a large number of our customer support requests. So it's actually traded, but it's not the majority of our volume.

So there's no single reason that stands out, but there's just a lot more activity. So we got the institutions coming in. There's multiple types of institutions. We have the micro strategies, which just buy the hold. Those guys are actually okay. They actually don't cost much load. We have the high frequency traders, which are actively trading.

We have a lot more retail guys coming in for various number of reasons. Some people coming for Dodge, some people coming for sheep, some people coming for other coins and BNBs gone up like almost 20X over the last three months. A lot of people trade BNB.

A lot of people trade ETC. A lot of people, ETH is all time high. So there's a lot of different reasons people come in. We don't specifically know why people come in. We just see like, look, we're having all time high new user registrations day after day. And it's not, and it's sustained and not dropping. So, and we know that the system load is going to be crazy. So we don't know why per se, but we can guess. But all of those are my subjective guesses. But the data shows that it's just more people come in. And it's a good problem to have.

And it's actually a great problem to have. But we still have to handle it. Many sort of early innovation companies, because they couldn't handle growth, it actually became obsolete. So we don't want to become that. So we've got to work pretty hard to solve those issues. Seems everybody's exhausted.

Every person I talk to, traders, executives, basically are like, I'll sleep in the bear market and kind of seem almost risking that we could get a break for a couple of months and things would slow down. Do you ever feel that way? Oh, absolutely. So right now, like, so from 9 a 9am, I'm a late sleeper, late riser. So I sleep around like 2 to 30am and wake up at nine. That's my daily meeting. And then

I go all the way until like 10, 11. I do half an hour meetings. I sometimes do 15 minute meetings. So I do like basically 20, 30, 30 meetings a day. And now the days are really, really packed. Every issue is relatively urgent or some urgency to it. Whereas in the bear market, I'm dealing with much more long-term important stuff, but not so urgent. So now we're kind of in the scrambling mode. Yeah, it's stressful, but at the same time, it's also very rewarding.

We know that the industry is growing and this is good problems to have. If you've been paying any attention to me or have been following me for any length of time, then you know I absolutely love Voyager. Every single time someone tweets me or asks me, hey, Scott, where do you trade and invest? The answer is always Voyager. They offer over 50 assets to trade commission free. I save so much money, it almost feels too good to be true. And that's not even my favorite part of Voyager. My favorite part is the insane interest that I earn. Up to 10% of my USDC, 6.25% of my Bitcoin, and 5.25% on my

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slash Mina to find out more. And what's really exciting is Mina just had their public token sale on April 13th with their official partner coin list. Once again, go to thewolfofallstreets.com So you're spending your time putting out fires instead of building the long-time vision a lot of the time. Yeah, so anything that requires regular operations, I don't get involved. But there's just so much new stuff that comes randomly that still gets escalated to me and I still have to handle them somehow. So yeah, so we're just growing so fast that there's new issues, new type of issues coming up all the time and I have to get involved. Just all very random. Anything that we can formalize, we can put a process around it, then we put a process around it and I'm to get involved. Just the old very random. Anything that we can formalize, we can put a process around it. Then we put a process around it

and I'm not involved. So in the bear market, I was like, I wasn't involved in the day-to-day operations at all. But now I'm more involved just due to random requests. So, I mean, I've heard you kind of comment on the fact that, for example,

you cut your own hair, not because obviously you don't want to spend money on a haircut, but because you don't want to spend the time on a haircut. Could you ever conceivably take a week vacation? I think, to be honest, so we just started instituting a block leave concept. In traditional banks, senior executives are asked to take two weeks off, switch your phone, don't check corporate email, don't check corporate chats, just stay relatively offline. Keep your phone around you in case if there's an emergency, we want to call with a phone call and get to you for emergencies. But that's a standard procedure

to check that the organization does not depend on any single individual. And during that process, if there's, we have to call somebody for emergency, then that means we have a dependency on that guy. We actually look at the process and how to optimize that. So we just started instituting this now. And actually we started with some of our key senior executives and I'm going to be pretty soon. I'll take a two

week block leave. And we'll see how it goes. I think Binance will be fine. So we are actually very consciously doing this type of thing so that we become a much stronger and much stabler organization that does not depend on any single person, and especially not on me. That's really, really interesting. So you're obviously seeing this massive influx of retail adoption. And then in the news, we see a massive influx of institutional adoption. You touched on it before the Coinbase, excuse me,

through Coinbase, but the MicroStrategies and the Teslas. You guys, are you also servicing those institutional clients and you're seeing that side of the demand or are you primarily focused on retail? So we also see a very high corresponding increase in the institutional side. So many institutions do use us. So and so we see growth on both sides. So it's not just it's not just retail. We actually have actually the institutions are very price sensitive.

They're very fee sensitive. And Binance offers the lowest fees of any market in this industry. And so they're actually very active on platform. So a lot of the institutions are on board with another exchange and eventually they migrate to us because they discover that we have the lowest fees. And for any institution that trades in high volumes,

that's a huge factor. Right. And so that's obviously even a bigger factor for the people who are actively trading. Do you guys have like white glove service for those whales or institutions, or are they basically out there trading against the rest of us? So we do have a VIP customer support team. We have VIP account managers and support teams. So we do have, we have nine levels of VIP. So, so we do, we do have better, well, we do have more specialized services for VIPs because they do, they do have, they do have slightly different needs. They trade

very high volumes. They typically want higher limits in terms of order. So if you place orders fast enough, you'll hit a limit on certain number of orders you can place in a day. And they'll constantly be asking for increasing those because they place a very large number of orders, et cetera. So it is a slightly different type of a service that we need to tailor to those guys. And so we do have a specialized VIP or VIP team

that services the sort of basically VIP account managers. So we do have that. And yeah, so we do have specific, and the institutions require different type of services. They all want sub-accounts, which means that they have a trading team or trading desk. And one guy's a manager or leader. He moves the money around between accounts.

The other guys trade, but they can't withdraw money. So they have those kind of different features to a normal user account. So yeah, we do provide them a slightly different service team. So one of the big conversations in the space constantly that you see is that there's been major outflows from exchanges, particularly of Bitcoin, of course, not speaking about other coins. There's been this mass outflow of Bitcoin from exchanges. We're seeing supply side shock. eToro ran out of Bitcoin for a weekend to sell. Is that something that you guys are actively seeing and managing? So we actually have seen inflows,

even when the news reporters are reporting that exchanges in general are seeing upflows. We have seen inflows on Bitcoin, other ERC-20 tokens, other blockchains, and also on stable coins, and to some extent, also on fiat. We actually have seen net inflows. So our user reserve is actually increasing. So when I saw the news, I actually deliberately checked with our team. We said, are we really losing a number of Bitcoins? We checked our data. We have net inflows.

Some days we have net outflows for a day or even a week or something. But over the last three months, we have definitely had way net inflows for Bitcoins and for other coins. So I actually don't know what those other, I'm questioning the validity or the detailedness of some of those analysis is quite difficult. They may not know all of our addresses, but from our perspective, we have been growing in terms of assets under custody, even in BTC numbers. David Steinberg That's really interesting, because I think that for macro bulls and maximalists, that's been interesting because i think that for for macro bulls and maximalists that's been one of the sort of calling cards for why this bull run is uh proceeding institutions or whales

come on the exchange they buy a ton of bitcoin they move it into custody or into a private wallet and it never comes back because they're going to hold it forever. Yeah. I think that happens. And that happens. But so far, there are guys who do that. There's absolutely guys who do that. But so far, we have seen a net inflow of Bitcoin. So I don't know how they did that analysis. That's really, really, really interesting. And I'm glad to hear it straight from you because I haven't been able to ask anyone who's actually in the know about that question. So we touched earlier, obviously on BNB and basically all of those things that have continued to be bullish for BNB, the price has gone absolutely astronomical. Your number three market cap, do you think that BNB could become number one?

Well, I think that's not out of the question. Anything is possible. So it's definitely something that I would, I want to work really hard to contribute to that. I want to see it happen. And I think the Binance community, when I say the Binance community, it's not just the Binance employees.

So I think the Binance community, including the Binance Smart Chain guys, they're all working super hard. And Binance Smart Chain is a big contributor to that. There's four to five X more people using Binance Smart Chain compared to Ethereum on a daily basis. Because the fees are much lower, so they need much less money to pay for the fees.

So maybe that actually did not contribute to the price increase that much. But we want to offer open access for people all around the world, not just for the guys who can afford, I don't know, $150 or $200 per transaction fees. But eventually, we believe as long as we have more users, the popularity will win. So I think it's very possible. I'm not making promises or guarantees. So this is not a prediction. I don't hope people don't read it that way, but yeah, but it's something that I absolutely hope to happen and I'm definitely biased, biased favor, favorite biased favoritism over with a BNB.

So that's, that's public. So yeah, I hopefully it happens. I think it's definitely imaginable. Yeah, absolutely. And so do you see a world where you guys ever go public like Coinbase did? Obviously, there's a lot of people in the community who say Coinbase should have minted a security token like BNB and they should have gone that route. But I don't think that could have happened in the United States under this regulatory environment. But is there a chance that you guys go public in the future? And if so, how would you establish your valuation? So I think right now, well, there's a couple of things there. I think number one, BNB is not a security token, just to clear that out. BNB has a lot of utility, very similar to Ethereum now. So it's very, very clear. Now it's easier to explain.

But back to the question though, I think, so Binance.com, we're right now with cashflow sufficient. There are many companies who does not IPO that do really well. I always use Bloomberg as an example because I used to work there and it's a private company that did really well.

It's owned by a billionaire founder, Michael Bloomberg. So that's really, you don't have to IPO. Most well-run companies actually stay private. Only a small number of them are public. Being a public company is good in some ways. That's pros and cons. Binance do have a lot of

what we call local exchanges. For example, if we look at Binance US, which services exclusively with the US market. Now Coinbase have a playbook to IPO. And if Binance US, if they do everything that Coinbase does, then it's possible they will raise VC money in the US and they may IPO.

I think it's unlikely they will issue a BNB2 or BNB US. So they will not issue additional coin. So it's conceivable that they may go that route. Again, that team is relatively independently. And there's other Binance entities. Well, there's CoinMarketCap, for example. We don't know if it can IPO.

There's other entities. We have TrustWallet. We have a There's other entities. We have Trust Wallet. We have a bunch of other things. We have many different portfolio companies. Some of them may IPO. Some of them may not. I think each project, each company is going to have their own reasons for IPO or not. But for Binance.com, we don't see a need right now.

We have cash flow sufficient enough to fund our expansion and growth. And doing an IPO takes a lot of energy and effort away from the funders. And the senior leadership team is a huge exercise that people don't really realize. And I think at this point, given that we're really not short of funds and we don't have that many early investors waiting to exit, So, and we don't have VC, we don't have that many VC investors pushing us to do that. I think Coinbase was on that course for many years ago.

So it's kind of hard to change midways. Whereas we did an ICO for BNB and we have a lot of BNB, the business making money. So yeah, we don't see the need to do that. So that's not, it's like, look, in the world, just because somebody else does something doesn't mean you have to do it. Each person has different ways of doing business.

And I think Binance can grow very healthily without doing an IPO right now. If things change, we can always say, well, we'll do an IPO. The option is there. So, yeah, that's basically the current situation. You talked about how you have sort of these sub-entities, Trust Wallet, CoinMarketCap, Binance US. What was the thinking behind the CoinMarketCap acquisition and how does that play into your overall strategy? So our fundamental thing is we want to provide access to crypto.

So we want to help people access crypto. And with access, there's multiple ways to, there's multiple definitions or subcategories of access. The exchange, for example, the Binance exchange, either centralized, the DEX, et cetera, that provides access to liquidity. So if you want to buy, sell a cryptocurrency, that's the venue you go. For example, Trust Wallet provides access to storage. So now you can store your coins securely yourself. You hold your own keys. So this is what we call a decentralized wallet, where your funds are now stored on some third-party custodian, like a centralized exchange. And so we offer that product. And for CoinMarketCap, it offers access to information.

So if you're going to learn about a coin, if if you wanna research about a coin, this is where you go. And it's actually the most popular, it was the most popular website in the industry. Now it's actually the second most popular website, actually second to Binance.com. So it's good to have the two most visited websites in the industry. And we also have Binance Academy, which is an educational portal,

which is also access to crypto information. And so we want to provide access to crypto. And so CoinMarketCap is in one of those areas. And we want to build a product where you just a lot of information on crypto. Do you think that we get to that point where crypto is, it's just a part of everyday life for every person everywhere. And just like your money or going to the ATM or using a credit card, this just becomes a part of that mainstream conversation on a day-to-day basis for your average person everywhere. Absolutely. I think absolutely we'll get there. I think in fact, it will be like a little bit like the internet where people will talk about the internet, the information superhighway for a few years. We'll build other infrastructure for it.

So for the internet, people were laying cables and you have the modems, the cables, and people talk about TCP IP, people talk about HTML, and then people don't talk about it anymore. So people just use it. It's ubiquitous, right? So people don't say, hey, I'm going to use the internet today. I'm going to use the internet to call my mom. People just say, look, I'm going to call my mom using,

I don't know, WhatsApp or some messenger app. And I think crypto will get to that point. Right now we're talking about crypto education, how to use wallets, how to use exchanges, how do you pay for stuff. So we talk about all this like really sort of fundamental technologies things, which is really hard for a layman person to understand.

Later on, the conversation in 5, 10, 20 years, the conversation should be I'm just sending some money to some guy and that's implicit crypto. He's sending some coin to some guy. And there may be a conversion involved that the guy may receive it and may get a different coin. So I think we'll absolutely get to that point. And people will just understand crypto like they understand the internet

and they actually won't talk about it anymore. So people don't mention the word internet that much today. So we'll definitely get there. So I would say, but it will take a couple of decades. Most people kind of underestimate how they're kind of eager.

That's like, well, if this is the case, why doesn't it happen tomorrow? It takes years to build this infrastructure. It takes years to build all of those things. And it takes years for mass population to understand a new technology or new environments and adopt it. So I think it's going to take a few,

I don't know, 5, 10, 20 years. Yeah, you just alluded to my next question, which was like, even if we get the mainstream awareness, we're still really far away on infrastructure, in my opinion. Yeah. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's just a part of a nascent industry growing, but I still don't think that your average person understands what they're doing when they interact with a wallet. Yeah. So it's really hard to understand, right? So that we got to, most people don't understand, did not learn a private case, public case in school. Even the tech guys, many of them don't, don't, don't learn that. And then they don't learn about elliptical encryption. They don't, they don't learn about disk encryption for backups,

all this other, all this concept that's involved. It's just very clunky right now. So in the internet days, people have to think about modems, baud rates. People have to think about like all kinds of dialogues, ADSL versus a cable or this other stuff, right? So like, so in the early days, things are very clunky. And over time things got better, but it takes time. So we're working really hard to build the infrastructure for this space.

And that's what Binance wants to be. So we want to solve some of the infrastructure problems, not just an exchange, just anything that helps people use crypto we want to do. So that's kind of what we want to do. And it will take us and the industry many years to do this well. It just takes time. I mean, another example, right, on the internet, video conferencing was like a really old concept.

But it's only really recently that it started kind of working. In the last five years, it started to work well. But before that, video conferencing wasn't used that much, and the technology wasn't there. Even today, we get like, well, hey, can you hear me? Now the internet the internet broke we still get issues like that so it's going to take many years to get there yeah yeah i think that's so interesting that so many of the ideas that are popular today have existed forever even like uber and ride sharing like ride sharing you know people invented that 20 years ago they just didn't have phones so that they could make it easy.

Right. So it kind of speaks to the same sort of thing. I think a lot of people in this industry are trying things, but probably are too early because of the infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But you got to keep trying because without the earlier failures, we don't learn the lessons to build the thing that works.

So video conferencing, video compression technology was being discussed like in 1995, right? So there's a DivX and XDV, real audio, a bunch of things that kind of work, but it took many iterations to get to the point where we actually can have a live video stream and talk about things in relatively high quality now. But even in many countries today, internet video conferencing still doesn't work. If you try to call somebody, I don't know, in some different part of the world, say Africa, China, North Korea, it still doesn't work. Yeah. It's funny because we always hear this comparison that crypto is like the dot-com bubble of the late 90s, right? And people ask me that question all the time. And I say that may be true because a lot will fail.

But to me, it's a positive because it means that we have the smartest people in the world rushing to innovate on a new technology. And of course, some will fail, but from that will rise, you know, the most important companies of the future to some degree. Do you think that we will see, you know, a mass failure of 90% of the projects that we're seeing now moving forward and that only a few will really survive and be important?

Actually, I absolutely think that will happen. That's in every industry. We've seen that in the internet industry. And we're definitely going to see that in the crypto industry. So there's a number of factors contributing to it. The main thing is network effect and economy of scale. So the successful projects attract more and more users. More users attract more users.

More liquidity attracts more liquidity. And then the larger businesses are able to invest much more on security, technology development, et cetera, because when they make that investment, they apply to say 10 or hundreds of millions of users, whereas a small startup will no longer be able to kind of

make those kinds of investments. So there's economy of scale. The small companies can be more innovative. So there's balancing forces, but I think there's definitely very strong network effects in new businesses today, given that we're living on the internet and especially with blockchain. So I think there will be, and most projects, most startups will fail. That's just the nature of startups. So I think, I do think that 90

something percent, 90 plus percent of projects that of projects that we ever see will fail. Only a small number, like how many e-commerce websites are there? How many search engines do we use? So how many social media? Well, that's a lot of social media, but how many are really big? So there's only a handful. So I think this very similar effect is going to play out in crypto for sure. What are some of the things that are exciting you that you are seeing being built?

I know, obviously, you guys have made a move into NFTs. I think that that's obviously one of the big catchphrases that everybody wants to talk about now. Is that somewhere that you see putting a lot of energy? Yeah, so we actually have multiple teams working on nft marketplaces um there's a centralized one on binance.com that's decentralized ones on chain similar to the existing solutions out there um so we're working on multiple things uh projects there um and it's been relatively decentralized i don't drive those projects different people just doing different things and we'll see uh whether succeed or not. I do think NFTs will stay.

I think NFTs now we have unlocked a new mechanism for artists or content creators to much better monetize their work using the blockchain, using NFTs. So now you can sell your work to the entire world using NFTs on the blockchain and you can get millions of dollars for it. So Beeple got 6 million and then 69 million. And they're very innovative economic

models where the content creators still get a percentage of each transfer. So the content creators actually benefit from multiple transactions over time. So that's really cool as well. So this may or may not be better than the traditional methods, but this offers another option, which I think for a lot of content creators is actually much better than the traditional methods they use.

They have to go beg a publisher. The publisher have to accept them. They have to like, I don't know the whole thing, but what I heard is very clunky. This is similar to ICOs or what I call blockchain fundraising. It unlocked a way for entrepreneurs to raise funds globally using cryptocurrencies

and is able to fund some of the fastest growing businesses in history, including Binance is one of those examples. If it wasn't for the ICO, we're probably doing six-month cycles for fundraising. We're probably growing at a much slower speed. We will not have the user base. So a lot of these new use cases, that makes sense. There's a lot of scammers using ICOs. But again, 99% or 90-something percent of the projects will fail. But there are core use cases for these new technologies, which are very valuable.

And I think NFT is one of those things that now is unlocking for artists and content creators. And there's a lot more use cases for it in the future as well that we have not imagined. But the current understanding of it, I think just based on that, it's going to stay. It's always interesting watching companies sort of pivot with the newest trends. You talk about how like many ICOs are,

I swear there's a new launch pad pitched to me every single day and companies, you know, and we saw the same thing last year. It was like, you had these companies that existed for years and then all of a sudden everybody was DeFi. Now everybody's a launchpad and everybody's NFTs. Do you think that that's just a natural progression or do you think that people are chasing? Well, there's definitely an element of people chasing the hottest topic, like hottest buzzword, and they want to put that in their pitches. And so that's definitely an element of that. But there's also always a small number of projects that are led by very strong funders. They're very serious about doing the real work, building the platform, etc. And they may succeed. So every day there's probably thousands of new exchanges coming online. And even in 2017, that's the case. In 2014, there were probably hundreds of exchanges coming online

every single day. So people try and we don't know if they're pure scams or they just fail. But sometimes you get an exchange that you get a project that do well and they become the largest in the world and they're able to provide more services to users, et cetera. And they're able to improve the service level in the industry. So once you, but all of that have to come through experiments, we can't centrally plan them. So it's actually the, the process with failures is actually important for innovation. So it's just part of it.

So I'm curious, obviously you've made a ton of money, you've built this thing. And as you talk about it, it seems like you just work and you work and you work. What keeps you going on a day-to-day basis? And what is driving you that you're seeing in the future that keeps you excited and ready to go every single day? Because I think a lot of us,

not in a position like yours, even at our own lower level are kind of burning out and trying to find that focus. Yeah. So there's a couple of different ways to explain that. The most fundamental question we ask is what do we want to do? Let's say, well, let's say if I have all the choices in the world to what I food, I food control on what I want to do or what I can do, What would I choose to do? Like it's not sipping martinis on the, on the beach. It's not playing golf because those things get boring after like a day or two or even probably even shorter. And, and so what am I going to do? So I, so you want

to do something that's meaningful and impactful. So people sometimes do get burned out, but I think it's important for people to find something meaningful for them to do. So I always use the building the cathedral as the example, right? So that's a relatively common story that people understand. You ask the first guy who's laying bricks on a wall, you ask them what they're doing. They say, well, I'm just laying, I'm laying bricks on a wall. Can't you see? You ask the next guy, what are you doing? The guy's laying bricks on the wall, but he says, well, I'm building a cathedral and he's very proud of it. So once you have that kind of for a deeper meaning and the higher goal, even if the work

you're doing is a little bit mundane, kind of boring, you actually do not get tired because your mental mindset is different. So for me, like even though I'm dealing with customer support issues, which is not sexy, we're dealing with user complaints on Twitter. But for me, I'm working to increase the freedom of money for people all around the world. I'm providing access to crypto, which could improve people's lives and financial situations. And I think that's a hugely meaningful thing for me to do. I think I'm actually very fortunate to be able to be able to have a chance to do that. Most people are not given, are not in a position to have to make somewhat of a meaningful impact. Whereas I think in the

position where Binance is, we can make a relatively meaningful contribution to that improvement of freedom of money, which I think we're just very lucky to be part of this process. So for me, I'm just, I feel fortunate to be in this position to be able to do what I do. So when I wake up in the morning, it's not, it's not so much a work for me. So if I get tired, I take, I take, I take a break. And sometimes even if I get really tired, I take a nap during the day. And then when I'm tired, I go to sleep. When I'm hungry, I eat. So it's not like I'm stressing myself out trying to do this thing. So I'm not, I'm not. So this is the thing I enjoy doing. And I don't stress myself out. I don't overwork, but I do work very hard. I think I

probably do work harder than most people on average. So, but it's me, it's, this is the thing that I'm, that this is the thing that's, that's making meaning to my life. This is the thing that's meaningful to do. There's not, that's not a whole lot else to do. I still chill out. I chill out with friends. I sometimes go play some game just to relax, sometimes take a walk, go for a swim. I still do those kinds of things, but those are not my missions in life. Those are the things I can take a break and do. And it's also, it's also okay. So I think I have a pretty healthy balance.

But yeah, so but for me, I'm just really lucky to be able to do what I think is really meaningful. So for me, I wake up doing balance and go to sleep doing balance. This is what I do. I'm curious if that sort of focus and belief in your mission is also how you overcome all of the negativity and hate and trolling. Because, I mean, we all see it to our own degree, but I see what you and everyone in your position take. And to me, I don't care how big you get, it's still not fun to be called a scammer or a crook and those things. I mean, how do you overcome that and not let it affect you? You've developed the ability to handle that over time. So,

so for me, like nowadays I don't even see them. I just, I have a much stronger, so like what, like what complaints? So I care about more about the real customer complaints where like, but they're, they're unreasonable customers. They're customers who like trade our futures and they, they, they lose money and they say, well, your system was unstable and return my money to me. I'm like, well, look, that's not what,

if we would do that, we won't have a business the next minute. So there are a lot of negative stuff, but I think for anything, once you reach a certain size, you're going to have negative comments about you. The key thing is separating the constructive negative stuff that you actually have to improve on. And versus like the guys were just trying to make your life miserable. They're just complaining, whining. So it's, there's a fine balance between there. So we don't

want to be overly arrogant and just ignore everybody who's give us negative comments. We, we actively want to listen for the constructive ones, but I have a very good filter. If I see a guy who calls me like, Hey, you're a schmuck or whatever, that's fine. I don't care. I don't, I don't care. So for me, I don't care what people call me. I don't, I don't care about people's perception on me so far. I just want to be able to make more meaningful impact on what I do. So I try to look for ways to improve. I try to look for ways to gather feedback. And, but yeah, but the negative, but I know very strongly in my core

that we're doing good things. We're doing right things. We're doing ethical things. We're not hurting anybody. We're actually going out of our way to protect users. So knowing that, the other things don't bother me. It's impressive. And you do develop that thick skin with time. I have to imagine that maybe five years ago, it was a different

conversation and maybe it hurt a little bit more. There was a little sting to it. From time to time, it still bothers me sometimes. Like sometimes you get something that gets into your skin. So you still get that. It's not a hundred percent, but yes, with practice, the thick skin comes with practice. Good to know. Good to know. So I know we're running out of time here. It went very quickly. I'm just curious. We've talked about obviously a future bear market to rest and all of those things. How this current cycle, I mean, how big do you think that this can go? I know that you're not in the business of price predictions and nobody likes to throw out a price because we don't have crystal balls. But I mean, do you think that we're in the early part of the cycle or that we, where do you think we stand?

Yeah. So a disclaimer, it's impossible to predict the future. So I don't make those kind of predictions, but based on historic patterns, we do see four-year cycles for crypto. And we see four-year cycles even in traditional stock markets, et cetera. We don't know why. And for crypto, there's a more fundamental reason. Bitcoin halvings every four years.

That's like a big factor in crypto. And so mass markets, I guess, go through this yearly or on a year horizon, four-year cycles. And we look at 2013, there was a peak. End of 2017, there's a peak. And now we're in 2021. We're not sure if it's going to be end of this year or I don't know. And there's some data we can look at.

For 2017, the peak, we saw user registrations going up like crazy and then drops. Whereas right now, we see user registrations going crazy and way past the 2017 mark, and they're maintaining it. They're still growing. So we have not seen that kind of spike, sharp drop-off, which typically marks sort of an end of a bull market, if you will, when you look back. But again, I don't know if that will happen in this cycle or not. And also, if you look at the number of users in the industry right now, we're looking at 10x or 20x more users than 2017 already.

And if we look at 2017 compared to 2013, like 2013, the peak was like $1,000. And then 2017 is $20,000. So that's a 20x increase. If you look at before that, there was a peak at $200. There was a peak at like $35. So each cycle previously goes in fairly magnitude differences. Again, it's not a prediction for this cycle will definitely go higher or lower.

I think based on the patterns, we most likely will continue to grow so we're not at the end of the bull market. I think there's a higher chance for that to happen, but it's also possible we'll just dip tomorrow and we'll go into a winter. Everything's possible. But I think based on patterns right now,

based on the number of user registrations we see, we're doing everything to prepare for more growth for the industry. So as a business, we have to prepare for that. Makes perfect sense that I know we're out of time. So where can everybody follow you and check out what you're doing after this? So, yeah, I mean, well, most people,

Twitter is a social media tool that I use to engage with the community. I just find that the sort of find that the way Twitter interacts, people can tweet at me. I sometimes see it, sometimes don't. That's probably the easiest way to do. So I do have a decent following on Twitter right now. I do check people who are trying to tweet at me. But there's a lot of noise, but so I will not see everything. But Twitter is probably the

best way to sort of follow me or just look at all the random stuff I think about during the day, stuff like that. Yeah, that's probably the best place. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time, especially after you describing your schedule. It's very flattering that you can spare an hour. So thank you very much. I look forward to catching up again down the road and seeing where you're at. Sure. Thanks, Scott. And thanks for taking the time to talk to me. And yeah, so hopefully we'll chat again soon.

We will.