Unchained - How Binance Became the Most Popular Crypto Exchange in 5 Months - Ep.84

Episode Date: September 25, 2018

In this fast-paced and exhilarating conversation, Changpeng Zhao, aka "CZ," tells the pivotal business decisions that led users to flock to the brand-new Binance in the summer and fall of 2017, catapulting it from obscurity to become the world's most popular crypto exchange within five months. He also describes his regulatory stance, why he focuses on small jurisdictions and why he lets token teams hire their own lawyers to determine whether their coins are securities or not.  He explains the company's insider trading and market manipulation policies and how BNB coin works. Plus, he disputes the notion that stocks have better information due to disclosure rules, lays out Binance's current mission and delineates the differences in the crypto communities in North America, Europe and Asia. Thank you to our sponsors! Altlending: https://altlending.com Blockdaemon: https://blockdaemon.com/unchained/ If you're interested in sponsoring Unchained or Unconfirmed, reach out to Raelene at [e-mail]. Episode links: Binance: https://www.binance.com CZ: https://twitter.com/cz_binance Binance white paper: https://www.binance.com/resources/ico/Binance_WhitePaper_en.pdf Unchained interview with Bobby Lee: http://unchainedpodcast.co/bobby-lee-ceo-of-btcc-on-why-the-chinese-probably-arent-using-bitcoin-to-evade-capital-controls Unchained interview with Da Hongfei on China bad on ICOs: http://unchainedpodcast.co/from-blockchains-to-mooncakes-two-chinese-crypto-founders-on-the-ico-and-bitcoin-exchanges-ban Epicenter BTC's interview with CZ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaxQneanIY Binance's "creative" approach to regulation: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-28/crypto-s-billionaire-trading-king-has-suddenly-run-into-problems Unchained interview on crypto regulation in the US: http://unchainedpodcast.co/the-chamber-of-digital-commerces-perianne-boring-and-amy-kim-on-why-us-crypto-regulation-is-complicated-and-confusing Unchained interview with Coin Center: http://unchainedpodcast.co/how-coin-center-is-helping-define-the-big-fuzzy-gray-area-of-blockchain-and-cryptocurrency-law Binance's purchase of TrustWallet: http://fortune.com/2018/07/31/binance-trust-wallet-acquistion/ Binance's $1 billion investment fund: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/01/binance-1-billion-investment-fund/ Forbes cover story on CZ: https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamelaambler/2018/02/07/changpeng-zhao-binance-exchange-crypto-cryptocurrency/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Crypto collateralized altlending.com. My guest today is Changpeng Zhao, founder and CEO of Binance. Welcome, Cezzi. Hi, Laura. My pleasure to be here. Binance seems to have come out of nowhere to become the world's top crypto-to-crypto. but in a way it was actually years in the making. Describe how you learned about Bitcoin, started working in the space, and eventually came to launch Binance. Sure.

So I first came across Bitcoin in 2013, I think around September-ish. That's when my friend Bobby Lee, he used to be the CEO of BTC China. He introduced me to Bitcoin and his investor, Ron Tiao, both of my good friend of mine. I looked into it and then I went to a conference in, Las Vegas in December 2013, and that's when I really, after that conference, I quit my job. So I'm going to do this full time. And what were you doing at that time? So I was running my other startup that I've been with at that point for eight years.

So six partners, the company is still there, but I just said, I actually want to do to run a Bitcoin exchange with as part of that startup. But the other partners were not interested. So I said, that's fine. I know I was going to do blockchain what we called Bitcoin industry back then four times. So I just said, I'm going to leave. That's it. And that startup was actually focused on doing trading software. Is that correct?

Yes, what we call ultra low latency trading, ULL, yeah. And so at that point, I know you started working in this space. What were you doing? And how did you eventually come to lunch finance? Yeah. So the previous startup we were doing, we were providing ultra-lawful. low latency trading software for mostly top investment banks. All the top global, like the names you know, like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Adulcher Bank,

all use our system. But it's a very niche, high-frequency trading tool for those guys. I've been working in the financial trading space, the trading technology space for my entire career. So when I discovered Bitcoin, I just knew that was the future. So I just said I just got to be doing something in this space. And I left my previous job without knowing what to do next. But I know where I want to be. And so you eventually went to, I think you started working at blockchain.info, right?

Yes, yes. So, yes. I bumped into Roger Ver in Tokyo in end of December, early January 2014. And then we talked. And I think at that time, blockchain.Info was just the founder, Ben Reeves, and Nicholas Carey, who joined like a couple months earlier. So I was the third person to join. So, yeah. So and blockchain.comfo had a great, built up by one 22-year-old at the time.

And then a lot of users, very good feedback, very good community reputation. So I was very lucky to be able to join that company. And then you went to OKCoin? Yes. So blockchain.Info is focused on mostly a wallet and a blockchain explorer. So my background has more, I have more experience in trading systems and exchanges. So OKCoin was, I was talking with my now co-founder, He Hei. She joined OKCoin a couple of months before I did.

And she said, well, all your experiences are in trading systems. Why don't you join us as an exchange? And we talked about it for a little bit. I thought it was a pretty good opportunity. And blockchain.Info was growing very quickly at that time as well. And they were getting venture funding from the U.S. And the team grew to be a larger size. I just said, well, it's probably better.

OKCoin at the time looked like a better fit from me. So I joined OKCoyne. And what were you doing there? And then how did you eventually launch Binance? So, yeah, I was the CTO of OKCoy. And I was also helping them with the international side, because out of the three co-founders, myself Hei and the CEO, I was the more sort of an international one.

But then we had a few culture differences. My background is more international, more Western, I would say almost U.S.-centric, where there's a lot of, I would say, different style of thinking, different style of value systems. So that didn't really go well. I just thought that was not going to work long time. So I left just under a year.

And then after I left OkCoin, I actually started a different technology company with two of my other friends. And then we were doing exchange platforms as a cloud solution for other exchanges. They were about 2,000 cultures exchanges in China at the time. And we were providing systems for a number of those. So we were just a system provider. So we built a system from scratch from early 2015, yes. And then when Binance started, there was two and a half years of development on the system. That's already happened.

So Binet's platform was not building one month. Yeah. Yeah. And just to go back to how you were saying before that your background is more Western, as far as I understand, I think you moved to Canada when you were a teenager. right? And then you went to college in Canada and worked in New York and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. So I was born in China. And then I moved to Canada when I was a teenager, when I was 12. And I spent high school in Vancouver and university in Montreal. And I did an

internship in Tokyo as a summer job. And then when I graduated, the same company gave me an offer that I couldn't get a better one. So I went back to Tokyo. I really liked Tokyo. So I worked in Tokyo for four years and then went to New York, also worked in New York for four years, and then went back to Shanghai in 2005 and then worked for eight years in the previous startup that I mentioned before. And then the rest of history connects. So the story about finance is sort of incredible. You heard about ICOs at a potluck on June 14th, 2017, had the white paper written in both English and Chinese within three days after that. You began your in ICU nine days after that. Then you wrapped it up a week later and had $15 million in the bank.

Then within five months, you turned Binance into the world's number one crypto exchange. I heard that at one point, you guys had 240,000 new users in one hour. I heard that it, took you three months to get to 120,000 users, another three to get to one million, and then one week after that to reach two million. Correct any of this, if any of it's wrong. How did you handle this, you know, explosive growth in this really fast pace? Yeah, I think handle is the right word. I think we were just lucky at the right time doing the right thing. So like most of the stuff happened to us, not that's something we actually thrived or wanted to do. So I think basically we were just, it was very lucky for us that we had the system ready to be able to handle that growth near last December, early January.

The other stuff was a more random chance. I learned about ICO around last April, Mayish. I heard about the word ICO, but I never participated in one. I never read any white papers. I saw, again, I saw another friend of mine doing an ICU right in front of mine. It's early June to, like, I think it was May 30th to June 9th. He raised $15 million US within 10 days. And at that time, that was the largest ICO in China.

And I know him quite well. And I was thinking, if he can do it, I probably could do it too. And given his background, given what he has done, given his experience, reputation, etc. I was thinking maybe I have a good chance as well. And then I talked to Da Hong Fei, the founder of Neal and now ontology. So he was very, very encouraging. And that pot-locked dinner on June 14th in Chengdu in China last year, everyone's like, you got to do an ICO, you got to do an ICO.

The founder of MCO, Monarch, now they rebranded to Crypto.com. He was there. He was doing his ICO. He said, look, he only took him 15 days and he's still raising, but he's already reached like $13, 14 million. His target was 20. He's like, his preparation was only eight days. He said, no, look, he can do it.

do it. So it was that kind of environment. I said, okay, fine. And I had a team already. So I had a team of 30-something people from the technology provider startup. So we had a team and it's an international team as well. So we had what we call native English speakers. We had a larger number of them. So we just said, look, let's start a Google Doc, write both versions at the same time. And we changed the versions. We basically didn't sleep very much during those two or three weeks. Yeah. And then once you launched, how did you handle that massive growth like in five months? What were those?

Like what were some of the kind of crazy moments during that period? Oh, man, there was so many crazy moments. But initially our growth was okay. It wasn't too bad. So initially, during the ICO stage, the growth was so quick that our little website couldn't handle it. We're just buying servers and buying servers and buying servers. But that was doing the ICO stage.

Once we launched, the growth actually slowed down a little bit because at that time, everybody was chasing ICOs. And once we launched, we were a small new exchange. We didn't have that many trading pairs. We didn't have that many coins. The growth was actually just average. It was just normal. And then September came.

There was a lot of panic. There was panic selling and panic buying. Even when the market goes panic selling, really way down, the volume picks up, right? Because everyone's trying to sell. The trading volume actually goes up. And then the China, last September, around this time, there was a lot of thought or news, negative news about China. And so we had to move our servers. So we actually moved our servers from outside China into China first in July because we had a large number of Chinese users. And that was a very painful thing. And then in September, I told my team,

look, we're going to move, we're going to move them back out again. And they were like, you're crazy. Now we have a lot more servers. But they did it. They did it overnight. And wait, and that was why? Because of the ban on the crypto exchanges? Yeah. So basically, we have, I got increasing more amount of convincing information that the bank is coming. I said, okay, look, there's enough, there's enough information to make a decision already. So I'm going to make the decision. It's a really hard decision, but I'm going to make it. I'm going to ask the team to move it out. The team, after some hesitation, agreed.

And we moved it out. We moved all of our infrastructure out of China a week before the bank came out, like the news came out. So we actually did it before. But that really helped because now we can say, look, we're no longer in China. And we were moving the team out of China as well. And we said, look, that doesn't affect us anymore. And when the China ban happened, guess where all the users went? Or at least all the Chinese users went.

They came to Binance. But a couple weeks later, we got pressure so badly. We had to restrict the Chinese IPs. So we did that. And so, yeah, it was just a crazy right. There was so many crazy stuff happening. And any other crazy moments that you want to mention? Oh, sure.

I didn't know how long you want me to go on that. But for example, during that time, the Chinese government asked, anybody who's issued ICOs return the coins to the, return it. Just do the refund. Just do the reverse swap. And of course, our coin is okay because the Binance coins now 6x the ICO price at that time. And so nobody wanted to return it for the original Bitcoin's. So not that many people wanted to return the Binaz coin.

But we facilitated a couple ICOs on our platform, like five of them. And a number of them have dropped below the ICO price. And of course, for all of those users, they all want to get their original BTCs back. and we made a very hard call and the project teams already spent a little bit of money that can't return the full amount anyway we made a very tough decision

we said okay finance is going to cover the difference we did the calculation it's going to cost us about $6 million US dollars at the time that's a lot of money for us we raised $15 million dollars we spent a bunch of it already we have a little bit of left in the bank

so we got a so that was like a large chunk of money for us but we had a very quick meeting I remember I was on train outside of China. We had a call and said, look, what are we going to do? And so let's just cover it. And so we returned the full amount to all the investors that bought through our platform. And that created such huge positive publicity for us in China.

Like every Chinese user is the most trusted platform. And then when the shutdown of other exchanges happened around the September 30s, all those users came to us. So there was a lot of really tough decisions, really, really crazy times. So we basically made a lot of tough decisions and things worked out okay in the end. Yeah. Well, yeah, we're going to keep talking about that because I'm really curious about how you do make decisions. But one thing I want to ask is, so right now, how many employees do you have? So I think today or tomorrow, we're going to cross the number 300, 300 warriors.

Oh, wow. And how many users do you have? I think we're just, I haven't checked for a while, but the growth rate have slowed down recently due to the market conditions. I think we're a bit north of 10, 11 million users. Okay. And there's been a lot of news, you know, at different points this year about how much you're on track to make and profit this year. So right now at the moment, what are you projecting? I think if we stay at the current rate, if nothing goes too crazy or too low, we should target somewhere around $500 to $800 million this year in profit. Okay. All right. So yeah, then I think that means volumes must be down because earlier some said it could be as high as a billion. But maybe, you know, you've seen slower traction on the platform. So something else I wanted to ask you about was regulation. And this goes back to what I meant about decision making. Regulation has been this huge theme in crypto.

And I was just wondering in general what your philosophy regarding regulation is and how you've been approaching it as you've been building the business. Right, right. So, okay. Everybody, I think, well, my philosophy on regulations probably are different from many of the, what we call the retail investors. I think especially the people in the U.S. They seem to be very heavily focused on regulation in the U.S.

We are actually really not that focused on the U.S. We are focused on everything else other than the U.S. So in the U.S., that's Coinbase and Gemini and a bunch of other exchanges dealing with regulation over there. The rest of the world is a bigger market for us. And the regulations differ by different countries. And for most countries, how to regulate this industry, this space that we're in. is not very clear yet.

Most of the regulators admit they're still learning and adapting and adjusting or creating regulations. So it's kind of uncharted territory for most countries and most jurisdictions. And we're working very closely with a very large number of them, although most of the countries we work with are relatively small in terms of population. But what we found is smaller countries are much easier to work with in terms of regulations. We can meet with very senior people and the decision makers directly and they don't think they are above us

or it's more of a cooperative working relationship. But I do see that the regulations are becoming, there's now competitions on who has the most favorable regulations, at least in many parts of the world. And I think these countries realize that having a more favorable regulation will ensure their long-term success from economic development. view. So my view is basically we want to work with people who are willing to work with us. And it's a very simple, simple model. Whereas we are not really chasing, okay, this is the most developed

market. That's where all the money is. We got to get those money. We're not thinking like that. I think if you think like that, it's got to be U.S. market, China market, and wherever else. But we're more into, okay, let's look at this long term. Let's look at this five, 10, 20, 50 years from now where we're going to be. So let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, So that's kind of our view, yeah. But when you say that you're looking that far in the future, then I don't understand how you could imagine that the U.S. and China won't figure in. Yes.

So, yes, they will definitely fit in. But those larger countries are harder to navigate from a regulatory point of view because they're more complex. There's many, many different regulatory bodies. departments, estates or provinces, and federal. It's just a very complex environment. So if we look for, so our approach is let somebody else figure it out first. So for example, in the U.S., let Coinbase and Gemini figure it out first.

They're very strong. They got the culture background. They got the connections. They got the, they're fully embedded over there. So let them figure it out first. So long term, we would be, we would very much be interested. if we can. But I think we're not the most fitted for taking the initiative and being the first step in those jurisdictions.

Whereas we are taking the lead in a lot of other jurisdictions, such as Malta, such as Jersey, Bermuda, Uganda, and other parts of Africa and some parts of Asia. So it's really more about who takes the lead like now. From a regulatory point of view, I think the regulations will probably settle within, I don't know, a year or two to three. years. So we'll focus on where we can add more value, where we will let other people add value where they can. Well, so I find your philosophy interesting, but I guess, like to my mind, you know, some of the things that you're doing are pretty obviously in violation of securities law. For instance, Binance's coin B&B is pretty much the definition of a security, at least according to U.S. securities law.

because it's an investment of money. I like that you're laughing in a common enterprise, which is finance. And the profits of that are dependent on an identifiable party, which again is in this case, is in this case, finance. So, you know, you've got that. Then you've got the fact that finance is probably also likely listing other unregistered securities. And so in that regard, like, do you know, try to have controls to keep U.S. residents from using finance or from buying B&B? because I tested this myself and it took me like all of three seconds to create an account on Binance from here in the U.S. Right, right.

So I laugh because I think that's a very subjective view of what things are. And I appreciate that's your view. I think that's your view, not my view, to be honest. And probably not shared by most of our, most of the community. Okay, just to clarify, multiple sources said to me that, they viewed it as a security token combined with, you know, because there are other aspects, obviously, it's a multifaceted coin. But I just wanted you to know it's not only me. I discussed this with multiple people. Right, right. So the way I view it is basically just because multiple

people around the world have a view, doesn't mean that we all agree. But there's no legal definition that a certain coin, at least finance coin is at least not defined legally by anybody as a security. Many people may think themselves or they may be even a comment or opinion, you may or may not be. I think for every person you find that who thinks that way, I can find more people who are not, I can find people who thinks otherwise. So I think it's a difference in your opinion,

but it's definitely not classified legally or anywhere as far as I know. And to be honest, even if it's classified legally in some countries, it probably classified differently in other countries. And the whole discussion about whether a coin is a security or not, only came within the last, I don't know, six months or so. Before that, there wasn't any discussion about whether a crypto coin or ERC 20 coin is or is not a security. Nobody cared. Oh, no, no, no.

Just for the record, I've been discussing this issue with sources since mid-2016. So, like, people can listen to the podcast I did in September 2016 with Coin Center. We talked about that. Okay. So, I mean, yeah, this is like kind of a known thing. But, I mean, regardless, so, you know, is it, is that why, like, I mean, do you try to enforce controls to keep you as residents from using Binance or buying B&B? Not that I know of. So basically, so far, no one has told us that Binance coin is a security other than yourself, to be honest.

Many people, some people may think that, but I think the definition of security itself is debated among different parts of the world. And I think you are taking a very U.S.-centric view. And we're actually really not focused on the U.S. No, I'm saying, yeah, it's really the U.S. Yeah. Yeah. So I think yesterday, even after you created your account, you probably could not deposit the U.S. dollars in.

So you probably did not do a trade. I would probably guess if you created an account yesterday, you did not have any Binance coins right now. Am I correct? Oh, yeah. No, I didn't go that far. Right. So it's a very contentious topic.

But at the end of the day, I think the, I think you're taking a very U.S.-centric view on things where that's a market where we're really not focused on. We don't take the U.S. dollars. We don't touch U.S. dollars. I've purposely avoided doing any promotion, attending any events in the U.S. just so that we're not viewed as a U.S. company. And we don't actively our target that market. Yeah.

Well, I'm just curious, like, would you come to a conference in the U.S.? Like, would you plan to step foot in the U.S.? Is that something that you're trying to avoid, or do you have no fear? I don't think, I'm pretty sure I'm, I will not get into trouble by going to the U.S., but number one, it's kind of far. Number two, I don't really want to attract a lot of it. I don't really want people to view Bynas as a U.S.-centric or focused on the U.S. We're really not focused on the U.S.

We're doing promotions everywhere else other than the U.S. So, and to be honest, I've actually turned down a lot of interview requests, like including Yahoo Finance and a number of other media outlets in the U.S. We're very centric talking about U.S. markets precisely because of this reason. Because all the questions about U.S. and I'm not an expert. I've lived there before. I know the market. I know the language, but that's not where our core focus is.

And just out of curiosity, where do you live? Do you have a home anywhere? Well, I don't have a house. No, I don't have any property. I don't have any real estate property. I rent everywhere. I do spend about a, like, I spend quite a bit of time in Singapore, Taiwan, Mota, Switzerland. So I, so again, people have this view.

Like you've got to have a base or you've got to have somewhere in one city, right? Or you've got to have a place. I don't have that problem. Well, also, if you're a billionaire, then you can maintain a multiple homes. Actually, yeah. actually does just, I think economically I can afford it, but time-wise, I can't. It's just such a headache all the time. Yes. Okay. I actually, I agree with that. Um, so one thing that I also want to ask you about, though, just to go back to the regulatory question, I've seen other interviews where you've said things like, quote, we're okay to do things very creatively to avoid unnecessary regulation or another quote. We don't want to be in one place right now because of regulatory uncertainty. And obviously you have this history of moving Binance's offices and servers. Partly, I think, because you don't want countries to be able to easily determine if they have jurisdiction over Binance. And, you know,

those times when you moved out of China, you also moved out of Japan. I think you also had regulatory issues in Hong Kong. Like those three moves, I think, were due to regulatory issues. So some people that I spoke with said that to them, it seems like you are flouting the law. do you ever worry that you are putting yourself on this path to clash with regulators and that you could end up in jail? Again, I think you are making some random people's opinion to be the holy, to be like a legal, to be a legal enforced, I don't know, ruling or something. A lot of people, because I could think about anything. I could think, I don't know, Donald Trump's violating the law. but what I think doesn't really matter.

So I actually think the reverse. I fully respect the laws of every country, every jurisdiction. But most people have this mindset that you've got to stay in one place and work with one government. But why is that? Why can't you go to a place to work with a government that you choose, instead of always being stuck in one place and work with a government that may or may not support what you want to do? So in a brand new industry, where I'm very third, so there are fundamental laws, right, laws are different by country. But the fundamental stuff you can't do, like hurting people, stealing, scamming, stuff like that.

And there are other things like, okay, how do you classify a cryptocurrency? How do you use it as security, is it not? And this kind of things, different countries do it differently. So what's wrong with going to a country? And choosing to live in a country where those things are more favorably for you. Why do you have to be stuck in a country that are not good for this kind of stuff? Why? Like, this is like saying, look, why don't you stay?

Like, if you don't like hot places, why don't you stuck yourself in Florida and in the sun all the time? And you just don't like it, right? Why don't you go to a different city? Right. So I don't think there's anything wrong or illegal or anything or even unethical about it. I mean, that's just, it is opportunistic. but why don't you choose the good opportunities for you? We're living in a world where we seek and phrase freedom, right?

So why don't you use the freedom that you have? So it's a free world. You can choose to be in whichever country, whichever city, whichever place, and you can choose to do whatever profession you want to do within reason. I think basically cryptocurrency is a new thing. We're not doing anything strange. We're not doing anything hidden. We're not doing anything that's hurting.

people. Right. So I think that's, I'm not worried about it at all. I don't, I don't know why people think in such narrow-minded ways. Well, just for the record, you know, some people that I spoke with did kind of go down that line of thinking. And then other people said, hey, and by the way, I just, what I did was I talked with kind of a bunch of lawyers who are involved in the crypto space, because I was kind of curious. And, you know, you're right. They didn't all have the same opinion. You know, one of them was like, hey, this is a business guy. And in fact, frankly, it was kind of funny. He was a lawyer and he was like, don't talk about the regulatory stuff too much.

It's going to be boring. But anyway, he was like, oh, well, I view C. Z more as just like a business person, you know, sort of in the model of Uber, which, you know, obviously didn't follow all the regulations from its, you know, in its early days. So you're just kind of curious, like, how do you see yourself or maybe you don't have you know, some view of yourself in relationship to regulation. But I was just kind of curious, like, are you trying to make some kind of a point or, you know, do you have any particular purpose to your regulatory stance? So I don't have a, so I don't really have a stance against,

or with regulatory. But our whole point is to increase the freedom of, increase the freedom of choice, right? So we want to, we, we fully believe that the cryptocurrency, blockchain is a new technology that helps the world. And because of the new technology, it has a few uncertainties in terms of regulations, or what the regulators want to do with it. But I'm not against or for regulation. So we just want to help increase this adoption of crypto around the world where we can. There are certain parts of the world which the tax becomes very hard.

So we don't do that. or we focus on parts of the world that's easier. We do work very closely with many, many regulators and trying to help them. If they want a device from us, we will give them. If they ask us what's important to us, we will say very openly. If they ask us what other parts of the world are doing in their regulations,

we will give them what we know. So my stance is we want to help the regulations become healthier, become what you call, I wouldn't even use the word right. I just want to use the word appropriate for more growth, for healthy growth. So we want to help. We don't view regulations. I also don't view regulations against us.

I think some regulations are good, probably. And over-regulating will kill the industry, at least in those jurisdictions where those things apply. And that will be bad for them long-term. So it's actually bad for them, not bad for us. We will go elsewhere. if that happens. So I'm not against it. I just think, okay, it's a brand new game.

And we already started playing the game. And now we're trying to figure out the basic rules of the game. It's basically like a bunch of kids playing games, right? So you first start playing it, and then you try to figure out some rule. So I think that's okay. That's just how the world works. So I'm not against or for it. I just want to help people make better regulations, if we focus on regulations.

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Learn more at blockdaman.com slash unchained. This ad spot could be yours. Got a great product or service for unchained or unconfirmed listeners. Reach out to Raylene at Laura Shin Podcast at gmail.com to find out about sponsorship opportunities on unchained and unconfirmed. Again, that's Laura Shinn. in podcast at gmail.com, L-A-U-R-A-S-H-I-N podcast at g-mell.com. I'm speaking with C-Z, founder and CEO of Finance. What do you think of ShapeShift's recent decision to implement AML-K-Y-C?

They, like you were, you know, or I mean, and still are, at least at this moment, a crypto-to-crypto exchange didn't have accounts? I don't really have any. Actually, I didn't really know that until you, told me just this second. Oh, really? Oh, it was such big news last week. Actually, I did hear very vaguely, but I got distracted. I didn't read into it. But it's a business decision Eric Warhe and his team probably made for, it's a very difficult to judge a business decision from the outside without knowing all the internal factors that went into consideration. So I think

basically if they did it, they probably had some business reasons. to do it. I know Eric is a very smart guy. So I, yeah, I can't really comment on that. And for listeners who are interested in more information on that, I did do an episode of Unconfirmed on this decision with Catherine Wu of Masari. So there's more information there. I also wanted to ask, you know, just going back to this question about whether or not coins or securities, I heard on the Epicenter BTC podcast with the interview that you, you did with them, that you said that your process of legal review for listing coins is that you ask the token teams to get a lawyer to provide a statement asserting that their token is not a

security. Isn't that kind of like asking the fox to guard the henhouse? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't agree with that, but what else can we do? Like, if there's other better solutions, I'm all up for it. Oh, and just why? Like, you don't feel like, you don't feel you would have a legal team that could do that kind of review? Well, then it's still a bunch of lawyers who are doing that, right? So, how are my lawyers? But they're not being paid by the team that wants to try to get their token listed. Do you know what I'm saying?

Well, what we would do from a business perspective, we were charged the, we were charged the listing teams to pay to cover those costs anyway. So I don't think, I don't think they're going to be hugely different. I mean, basically right now, I, nobody knows. how to determine if a coin is a security or not. There's no clear guideline anywhere. I think there's a highway test, but the highly test fails for most cryptos,

even in the U.S., because most cryptos can be transferred very easily, whereas most securities can't. So, yeah, I'm not an expert in that area, and we rely on experts, and whether we hire them and charge that feedback to the coin teams, or they find somebody.

So right now we're just doing what we think are the most logical thing to do. And I know in general, like a lot of people are concerned about these exchanges, you know, not just issues about regulation, but also, you know, concerns about things like market manipulation and other things like that. So I was just curious, does Binance have its own internal policies and procedures regarding things like insider trading or auditing or any other kinds of self-regulation? Yes, we do have some rules and guidelines. So, yeah, I mean, our employees can hold crypto, but when they buy, they got at least

hope for 30 days before they sell. So this is like a policy we learn from the banks, backing the way old banking days. That's kind of our internal policy. And we don't let our employees trade, and it's not a productive thing to do anyway for most of them. And we discourage other kinds of market manipulation. We have some AI learning tools with risk management now. If a coin price fluctuards too heavily, and we have now intervention processes. But they're relatively soft.

We don't have circuit breakers because crypto is traded on multiple markets. So, yeah, we have some, but we're slowly evolving them as well. So hopefully with time, they'll get more and more mature. And some people were saying that they think that there's wash trading and market manipulation happening on Binance. They mentioned that there's often fairly high volume of trading in pretty obscure coins during short time periods that don't seem to really be tied to news. Do you try to prevent that in any way? Yes, so I think if you look at the market research done by independent community members, Bynes is probably the only one that they could not find any signs of watch training or pumping volumes or fake volumes.

So that's why that's an exchange. We're actually very, very careful about that. But on the topic of watch training and manipulation, so it's a really tricky one because basically how do you define? manipulation, how to define wash trading. So let's say Bitcoin is like, I don't know, $6,300 U.S. dollars on wine exchanges. Some guy just want to buy it all the way on Binas, all the way up to $7,000. The guy just has lots of money, he just wants to buy.

Is that manipulation or is that not? It's kind of really hard to define. And what quantity, if it just does one trade and comes back down. So it's really hard to tell at what stage does that become. manipulation. Is it a volume? Is it just a price percentage difference from other exchanges? But how, like, what about a coin that only trades on one market? So there's a lot of, when you actually, like, conceptually, yes, if Bitcoin is $6,300 in other exchanges right now and it's traded $7,000 in some other exchange, then most likely is some type of manipulation, but how do you

define it? How do you prevent it? And like, and also, and watch trading is the same thing, right? Let's say two accounts are just trading against each other at a very high percentage base. At what point do you define that as worse trading? If they do like four orders back and forth, that's worse trading? Because they will be trading with other people as well. Even if they only want to trade against each other, they will have to trade with other people in the market. So at what point do you kick in and say we lock those accounts and we'll freeze those accounts? And let's say, we say, okay, if you trade over 100K within five minutes against each other,

we define that as watch trading, guess what's going to happen? They're going to trade 99K every five minutes. And they're going to have four accounts, or three accounts, or four accounts, trading against each other. So at what point, and then we can lower it again, but it's a, it's a mouse and cat game, right? So the problem is it's very hard to define quantitative, like quantitatively, what exactly it is without them able to go around the rules. we do try. I think we're probably

one of the players, one of the exchanges that try the hardest in this regard that we actually don't advertise. But people know. So the smart traders know and the serious traders come to us and the rest follow. So that's why

we are able to maintain such a lead on the if you look at page views or unique views. We have such a lead right now. So people know. If you look at volume, a lot of the volume out there is fake, or at least have some fakeness to it. A fake is not a black and white word, as I just explained before.

So it's kind of really hard to define what exactly is fake volume. But we are definitely one of the most honest ones out there. So we try. It is a problem in this industry, and I think everybody should try. I think it's exchange operators, we should definitely all try to be ethical, to be fair about it, and to address the issue square and upfront. but also as traders as users, we should really just abandon those exchanges that have suspicious behavior and go for the legit ones.

Can you go into more detail on B&B for me? As far as I understand, people can use it to pay for trading fees and they'll get a discount. They can also participate in ICOs on the Binance Launchpad, some vendors, I guess, accepted as payment, and you're going to use it in the future. decentralized exchange that you're creating. But I was just curious, like, what rights do holders of the B&B token have in terms of information or voting or financial rights? All right. So B&B token is not a security. It's not shares of finance. So those questions about

rights are assuming that there are certain things, which are not. So the BNB token, as we define, have a few advantages. Number one, you do get discounts if you use that to pay for fees. So it's more like a discount card, a mechanism. And the discounts disappear after five years. So every year, the discount rate drops about half and disappears in year five. And the second thing about Binet's coins, every quarter, Binet will use 20% of our profits and to buy back and burn them, destroy them. So basically taking more coins out of circulation.

Financially, there's a very similar effect to giving a dividend distribution. but mechanically, we're not sending any money out. We're just destroying money we have. Or we're just destroying coins we have. And again, there's a limit to that. We will only destroy up to half of all the total issued amount, which is $100 million. The total issue amount is $200 million, and we're going to destroy $100 million eventually. Looks like it's going to take a number of years based on the current rate,

because now the price of Bitcoin went up so much. Now, the destroying rate is low, but people are happy because the price went up. And the third thing is a Binus coin will be used to pay for fees on the Binus chain, which is going to be on its own blockchain, a decentralized exchange. So in that regard, it's very similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum. It's just you can use that to pay for fees. if you do choose to use our if you do choose to use our blockchain later.

So that should come out soon as well. So we're very actively working on that. And so those are the things we promised as a part of our white paper. And in addition to that, now we're pushing very aggressively to get B&B adoption into other people's ecosystems. So you

should be able to use BNB to pay for coffee. You should be able to use BNB to buy airplane tickets, to travel to Australia to do all of these other things. So we fully force, so BNB is not, BNB does not equal to BN's shares. They, they have no, they don't have voting rights in the company or in our team. So it's not, it's not, it's not securities in my mind. There are people who may want to define it as is, but I don't think any, any official place have defined it as is. So. Well, that's kind of interesting to me, what you said about how you want to

eventually have B&B used to pay for other things because, you know, typically at least so far in the crypto space, the tokens that have been used for money are decentralized, like Bitcoin, Ether, Zcash, Monero. And here you're creating this sort of like company coin that you want other vendors to use and for people in general to use as money. Is that the vision there? No, it's actually not a company coin. So the Binance coin itself lives on the blockchain. Right now, it lives on the Ethereum blockchain. Very soon, we will have our own blockchain, which is also a decentralized platform.

So in that regards, we're the same as all the coin you just mentioned. And it's not a coin by the company. It's still a community. We are the issuers. We have issued it, and people have bought it and it's been spread out. And we do hold quite a large number of it, but we're not going to be able to issue anymore. So we no longer have a lot of control on the coin. What we could control is basically we can, as we are still the very large shareholders of the coin,

we are financially incentivized to make the coin worth more. And we're incentivized to work really hard to add more utility, to add more use cases. The more use cases the coin has, the more utility value you will have, and then since the hence the price. So we're very encouraged to do that. But other than that, it's no longer. See, it's statements like that that make me think, oh, that sounds like a security. It's like XRP. It's so similar to me. But anyway, keep going. But I think working very hard to want to trying to increase a value of something that you hold is not wrong. That doesn't make it a security. Like, for example, I evangelize for Bitcoin and because I do hold it, that doesn't make it. That

doesn't make Bitcoin a security. So, and we do not promise returns. We do not, we do not, we do not promise any returns. We do not promise you will go up in value. We're just saying that we're working very hard to, we're just saying what we do. We're working very hard to try to increase the value of Binance coin and a number of other crypto coins, to be honest at the same time, including, including Bitcoin. So that itself does not make it a security. I want to ask about the tokens that you list also. I know that there's no. one set price to have a, you know, if I want to have my token listed on finance. But what is the range of fees that I might pay for that, like, you know, low end and high end? It's usually,

it's usually around a couple hundred thousand dollars, to be honest. It's usually around that range. And what are those fees cover? Why is it that expensive? Well, number one, there is a lot of work. You go, that goes on and that, and the work's ongoing. Whenever they have an upwark, it upgrade, we got to upgrade. Whenever there's a security issue, there's a blockchain fork, we have to do a lot of work. But I would be honest that it's not a fee for work. For us, the ROI for doing that kind of work is like we basically don't have to do it at all. I think generating profits from a platform, or generating revenue from a platform is a higher return for us. Number two, we provide such value for those coins. I mean,

And that fee should be like, it's basically zero. We, like, we provide such value for coins, we're giving their liquidity, giving them, like, our large user base, giving them the credibility because now they pass bin as reviewed. It's worth way more. But, you know, we are profitable already. We don't want to destroy the market. We want the whole ecosystem to be healthy. So many people have actually wrong perceptions about us. Yeah.

But basically, if you understand the industry, if you understand how much value we're providing to those projects we list, this is why none of the projects are listed or us complain about it at all. Like nobody said after the list, oh, they paid too much in listing fees. And you have a lot more coins available than the vast majority of exchanges. And we're kind of at this point in the development of the crypto space where probably, only, you know, a handful, maybe at most a dozen of these are really going to succeed. So how do you feel about making so much money off of at least some portion of your customers who might be speculating on bad investments and losing money? Well, I think that's a very negative way to word that question.

It's a little bit of a deceiving way to do it. So most of the ICU projects are startup projects. I think everyone should know that startup projects do have a very higher failure rate. It's the same thing as if you, in the traditional investment world. So it's the same thing as the Internet, right? So how many Internet companies survive till today? But the Internet itself did not disappear. That industry did not go away.

And they're very profitable Internet companies. So it's still early stages in the industry. There's nothing that we are doing or not do. That's, it's not like we're, it's not like we're, it's not like we're, we're, it's not like we're, we're, we're, we're just, we're just, but I mean, like, you could. You could be listing fewer coins like, you know, only the highest quality or something. So you could say the same thing about NASDAQ, right? Or, or, so like, is every company that listed making money for their users? I don't think so. So why did that list so many companies? Um, not sure. So the, so the, so you're, so you're, blaming the marketplace provider for bad shops or for bad players.

We're just a platform provider, right? So a lot of people lost money investing in internet companies, but is the internet bad or is not that bad? Probably not, right? So there are risks in investing, and we're doing our best to educate users to provide them. We're by far the best platform now out there in both selection of coins, selection. projects, our internal process, our external process, our ethical values, etc. So we're by

far the best. And but I think you're looking at in terms of the NASDAQ comparison, the only difference is that, of course, because those are public offerings with those come with disclosures. But in the crypto space, obviously, you know, there isn't that kind of thing going on. So you know, the quality of the information is probably quite variable. Right. But you're assuming that I'm not even sure if I agree with that, to be honest. But you're assuming that's one situation is better than the other, which I don't agree with. But I also don't agree with the very fundamental statement that there's more information disclosure than there is in ICOs for those companies.

Because I would say there's more structured information disclosure. They're very structured because they're very structured, they were very structured in place. But how many listed companies have fudged their financial reports, moved income from the next quarter onto this quarter or this quarter onto the next? There's a lot of stuff that goes on, which are not, which are questionable, to be honest, because people, once you make the rules of the game, people figure out how to get around the rules. Whereas in the ICO space, right now, there's not a lot of rules, but it's really dependent. It's very crowd-driven. How many telegrams groups discuss about scams and other questionable behavior? If you look on Twitter, there's a lot more information about those things that happen in the community, in the crowd.

Where I personally believe, like 5,000 people openly discussing, disclosing things about a project, probably more useful than a couple analysts just sitting there getting paid very highly and providing a report. The report is more structured, yes. But I'm not sure if the information quality is higher or lower. I don't know. A lot of people I spoke with also were so curious about your decentralized exchange. How is that going to look? And why does it need its own blockchain? So basically, yeah, so it's coming along quite well, actually. And it's going to be a specialized blockchain just for trading tokens. So we want speed. So speed is a, we want speed over features.

So feature-wise, it's going to be very simple. But that's also why we can achieve higher speed. So, and I think most people don't realize that most people think of features when they talk about something, but they don't realize in order to achieve scale, you need speed. You actually don't need a lot of features. So even if you look at Binance.com, the number of order types or the features are quite simple. but we can handle large amounts of stuff. So that's also the same thing with our decentralized blockchain.

So that's basically what it is. You'll come up in a few months. And that's why the blockchain has to be, and that's why you need your own blockchain for speed? Yeah. So basically if you adapt any existing blockchain or use a general purpose blockchain that can do a lot of stuff, it's very hard to optimize for speed.

We took a lot of stuff out. We're making a more specialized. blockchain, a more special purpose blockchain that's more focused on speed. And I know you're probably tired of these questions, but I am so curious. Will your decks require K-Y-C-A-M-L procedures? I don't think so. I'm not aware of any decks that does that, right? I mean, you can't do that right now on Bitcoin or Ethereum. I think like some of them probably have relays that couldn't do that. But yeah, you're right. Well, actually, that leads me to another question. Are you guys doing your, an on-chain order book?

Kind of like an easy delta. Oh, okay. Yes. The current plan is a on-chain order book. That's still very fast. And, yeah, the KYC, when you're decentralized, who's doing it? That's the problem. Most KYC solutions are centralized, right?

You've got to have some centralized party who's doing the KYC, who's actually doing, looking at the passports that's uploaded, running criminal checks against the centralized databases. And those are very costly. We use those. Those are very expensive. So, you know, decentralized blockchain, who's going to do that? Who's going to pay for it?

You recently acquired a crypto wallet, trust wallet. Why was this your first acquisition? You did admit that it doesn't even have a lot of users. So I was curious what you're trying to accomplish with this purchase. It's a great product. It's, that's a great. So trust wallet is a great. find. It's one of those things where it's a technology team and they're very focused on

building a product, but they've done zero marketing. Only a small niche number of people know them. I have full confidence they will have a large number of users very, very quickly. The product is awesome. It's by far the best wallet out there, the best mobile wallet wallet out there. So I met with Victor, the founder of that team. He shares exactly the same visions as we do. we talked about for we I had a call with them for for for like 10 minutes and then I had another I met with them for for for another couple hours we got the deal done so I'm very very bullish on trust wallet and I think it's a great product they lack the lack a few marketing skills or or ability right now which we can which we can fully complement so I think that's

just a no-brainer and I think by working together both sides will will benefit a lot more than working separately, and we both agree. I'm going to actually collapse my next few questions into one, because you've been making these other moves, like you are working on creating a crypto bank that will be user-owned. You have this $1 billion finance ecosystem fund. So I just kind of want to hear, I mean, you have other initiatives as well, but I just kind of want to hear what your vision is of what finance will become

and what products and services users will be able to enjoy from Binance and also really what it means for them to be user owners. Sure. So basically, our goal is just to, again, increase the adoption of crypto. So to do that, we want to provide the core infrastructure services in this industry. We want to make the industry bigger. So I think our goal right now is not to take more market share in this current space. We are already the biggest exchange by most measurements.

But just taking market share off other people right now doesn't make any sense. What we should do is make the industry 10, 100, 1,000, or even 1 million times bigger. So if we do that, then if we provide, if all by necessity is provide a few infrastructure key services in this industry and we'll be pretty well off. So that's our goal. In order to grow this industry, we've got to make investments into other areas, which we're not experts in. So if we're not experts, which is just investing in others who are experts and let them do their job. So this includes wallets, faster blockchains, payment services, even gaming infrastructures, there's a lot of other infrastructure stuff going on. So that's kind of our investment arm.

And also, right now, banks are not, banks are a bottleneck for money flow. And we want to increase the freedom there as well. So we want to work closely with banks to increase the flow between, to increase the bandwidth of, to at least increase the freedom of exchange between fiat and crypto. And we can work with banks. We can acquire banks and we can try a few things ourselves. So all of those are different experiments. doing, trying to make the industry bigger. The goal is to make the industry bigger.

And just out of curiosity for this crypto bank, how is that different from a wallet exactly? I don't know if I really know what the difference is. That crypto bank holds fiat. That's a fiat bank. So that's a traditional paper money bank, whereas trust wallet, it holds only crypto. That's a wallet for holding your coins. Those two are very different things. The bank is still going to be regulated by the banking regulators, et cetera. So it's a more of a crypto-friendly or bank, but it's still a bank. Oh, okay. And so earlier I mentioned that I wanted to chat about transmining. This is kind of a really interesting phenomenon. Can you explain what that is for listeners

and also why you're critical of it? Sure. Transminding is a very innovative way for a distribution of their initial coins, which is basically a more complex. or more convoluted ICO mechanism. Basically, you pay for commission fees and get the coins, which is the same as you pay Bitcoin, buy your coin, which is just a slightly different mechanism. But the whole fundamental, it was very innovative in concept, but in reality, the economics don't work.

And it's basically everybody who did it turn out to be intentionally or unintentionally turned out to be a scam, basically on anybody who participated, most of them lost money. So it doesn't work. And all the exchanges were doing it have stopped. I've been saying that since like three or four months ago when they started, but some people believe me, some people did it. But the results are pretty clear now.

So I think that's the thing of the past and just stay off transmining. It's a short answer of it. Right. It's like the exchange would kind of basically reimburse you, your trading fee in their coin. And you were saying it was like kind of another way of doing. in ICO, right? Yes, but like they do, they do things very, so there's a few different variations of it,

but the most basic model is, okay, so you pay for, let's say, one Bitcoin in commission fees. They give you one Bitcoin equivalent in the platform coin, but at the same time, they also unlock 100% equal in value the team's portion, and they give you 20% extra for the guy who referred to you. So now there's 220% being released into market of the platform coin, but, only 100% of the Bitcoin going in. Over time, the coin price is going to drop, given that demand supply.

That's just very basic. And there's a bunch of other things. They paint very rosy pictures around it, like, dividend on commission fees, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, the model doesn't work. It's fun. It's innovative, but financially just doesn't work. last question for you you know this kind of goes back to the beginning of the interview when you were talking

about how you have spent time both in the west and in asia and i know you continue to do that obviously when you were saying that you keep rentals in malta and switzerland and i forget the Singapore i forget the other places but i'm so curious to know how would you compare and contrast asia's cryptocurrency scene with the american scene or the western scene? The crypto scene in different countries, the continents are very interesting, actually. So I think in America, it's all about anti-AML. So it's all like the regulations are really more about terrorists. So how do we control and starve those terrorists? And so doing exchanges in the US is very, very difficult because of the anti-money lulls. But US is very technology savvy. So

there's a very strong startup scene. So anything that involves technology, innovation, is highly encouraged and it's quite easy. So there's a lot of new use cases in the U.S. Different things other than exchanges. There's only a very small handful of exchanges in the U.S. Europe is quite interesting, where the user adoption is probably the highest. You can pay for food. You can pay for hotels.

You can register a company and pay lower your fees all in crypto. So Europe, given that is a U.S. European Union and they don't view their own currency as a very strong thing. And they also know cross-border transactions, et cetera. So there's a very high adoption on usability there. And in Asia, it's kind of divided. In China, there are a lot of exchanges, even though exchange are supposed to be banned. But there are, I mean, basically, what does that mean?

So you register a company offshore and your team still in China and you have like a thousand people team in China. Everybody knows where they are. Everybody knows who they're working on. But they claim to be a subcontractor of the company, of their offshore company, which they're different, of course. So then they're okay. And the Chinese mentality is very different from the rest of Asia, where they have a whole mentality of following other people who makes quick money. The making quick money mentality is very, very strong in China, I guess because of the less stability economically and politically potentially. So people are more, things change too quickly and people are very, if you have a 10-year plan,

three months later, it's going to be shuttered because the new regulation comes out. So people just focus on three months. So China's a very different market. And whereas China's completely banned payments and also the domestic traditional payments for which I pay and Ali pay are very strong. Like nobody carries cash in China. So it's all electronic money. So that's all.

also very convenient, which kind of doors the payment needs for Bitcoin, for crypto as well. Outside of China is very interesting. Japan is very interesting. Japan's very pro-cryptal, but their regulations on exchanges are too dense, which is too many rules, and it's very hard for those guys to compete. And Korea is very interesting. Korea has 100% adoption on crypto. Everybody has crypto, of some kind. And also Korea has one of those democratic and and less powerful governments, any politician that's against crypto gets voted down very quickly. Singapore's interesting. So Singapore's like kind of wait and see. They're very strict on financial controls. And they kind of, it's a smaller economy or smaller, it's a smaller country in terms of population.

But it's very open in terms of looking at new things. So the world is very interesting. Africa is just getting started. Yeah. So it's a very interesting world. I think what's going to happen in the future. is going to be more exciting than what happened in the past. You know, I actually, do you mind if we take one minute? And I just want to ask you one last question. Sure. You were on the cover of Forbes last winter for the issue covering the Forbes crypto rich list.

And at that time, it estimated your net worth was between one and two billion. And obviously this happened. What was it? It was, I guess, seven months after you launched Binance, how did it feel to amass so much wealth so quickly? To be honest, I actually don't feel that much different. I don't spend any money. That's the problem. So I actually don't spend a lot more.

I don't spend it. I don't have a car. I don't have a yacht. I don't have a private jet. I have none of those things. I buy just electronics and I fly like business class. So that's the only difference it makes for me. But what's more interesting is it does, getting on the curve of Forbes did make a mentorship for me, which is I should no longer care about money, which is what that thing taught me.

So I actually don't think about money anymore. And the most expensive resource I have now is time, which is the same for everybody. It's very fair, 24 hours a day for everybody. So time is the most limited resource, and there's no way to expand it. So that changed my thinking a little bit, but it didn't change me financially. or my spending habits, none of those things. And actually, it happened so quickly kind of destroyed my interest in money or all those other expensive hobbies or getting on yachts, getting like, I don't know, expensive food.

That kind of destroyed it for me, actually, because, or a Lambo. Because when I see guys driving a Lambo, I'm thinking, yeah, I can buy one if I want to, but do I want to? Nah. I'm never setting a Lambo in my life. And I've never taken a private, I've never taking a private, I'm never taking a private, yet in my life so far. But I know that if I want you, I could. That's all it matters. Yeah, I totally agree with you about time being the most precious resource. All right. Well,

thank you for accommodating that last additional questions because of how precious our time is. This has been an incredibly fascinating discussion. I've really, really enjoyed it. Where can people learn more about you and Binance? I think most of most of our stuff is pretty public. Google us. It's pretty simple. Okay, great. Well, thanks for coming on Unchained. All right. Thank you so much, Laura. Thank you. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about CZ and Binance, check out the show notes inside your podcast episode.

New episodes of Unchained Come up every Tuesday. If you haven't until ready, rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you liked this episode, share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. And if you're not yet subscribed to my other podcast, unconfirmed, I highly recommend you check it out and subscribe now. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Rayleigh Galapoli, fractional recording, Jenny Josephson, Rahul Say Urety, and Daniel Ness. Thanks for listening.