On September 28, Beijing time, Binance founder and former CEO CZ posted a message "GM" on Twitter, officially announcing his return. This is two days earlier than the original release date. Binance officials also immediately expressed that they are happy that CZ will be able to return home and reunite with his family.
Since CZ was imprisoned on May 1 this year, it can be said that Binance and the entire crypto industry have temporarily lacked an evangelist and leader. But four months later, CZ has returned, but at this time he has already completed the transformation of his identity and is about to start a new chapter in his life.
Looking back at the history of the crypto industry and Binance, we will find that the emergence of CZ has brought strong growth momentum to the entire blockchain industry. However, the booming crypto market has also made many people lose themselves. But CZ seems to be a sober, brave, and idealist. He has been working hard in the crypto bear market and has the courage to take all responsibilities under regulatory scrutiny. The most important thing is to stay true to his original aspiration and always uphold his mission to make crypto benefit the world.
1. Meet CZ again—a new mission
There is no doubt that CZ is a legend. He not only achieved his goal of building a successful business and becoming the world's richest man, but also rose above the adversity under the heavy pressure of regulation and misunderstanding of public opinion. His life and his Binance are destined to leave a strong mark in the history of the crypto industry.
CZ is a Chinese Canadian entrepreneur who started to invest in cryptocurrencies in 2013. In 2014, he sold his Shanghai property to cash out and invested cross margin in Bitcoin. In 2017, he left OKCoin and founded his own company, Binance, and served as its CEO. In July 2017, it raised $15 million in its initial coin offering.
In less than eight months, CZ built Binance into the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. In February 2018, Forbes Magazine listed him as the “richest person in crypto.” At the end of the same year, Binance announced the launch of its own blockchain, Binance Chain.
However, with the advent of the crypto bear market, several well-known crypto projects collapsed one after another, and investors suffered heavy losses for a time, which attracted the attention of regulators.
In June 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed 13 charges against Binance and CZ. On November 21, 2023, CZ announced that he would no longer serve as CEO of Binance and admitted that he had failed to invest more resources in the platform to meet the requirements of the U.S. Anti-Money Laundering Act. Binance will pay a fine of approximately US$4.3 billion to the U.S.
On May 1 of this year, CZ was sentenced to four months in prison in the Seattle Federal Court, and he personally paid a fine of 50 million US dollars.
During the trial, CZ bravely took full responsibility and took significant and extraordinary measures to cooperate with law enforcement investigations. He once said that the first step to taking responsibility is to fully recognize the mistakes, and Binance has recognized the importance of having a strong KYC/AML program.
The judge in the CZ case also said that after he personally read the 161 letters of support and learned about CZ's past, he believed that CZ had the ability and willingness to reform. The fact is that CZ did it.
It can be said that it was CZ who made Binance successful at the risk of losing all his assets. However, there are still voices in the outside world that misunderstand CZ.
In July this year, the Chinese version of Bloomberg Businessweek issued a statement to publicly apologize to CZ and Binance, the organization he founded, for the article "CZ's Ponzi Scheme". The publication admitted that it had made a "serious mistake" and published a "false and unfounded" headline. This belated apology once again made people examine whether they have always been biased towards the industry or CZ.
Facts speak louder than words. The collapse of LUNA, the collapse of FTX, the absconding of crypto projects, and other events have all damaged the reputation of the crypto industry. However, CZ did not evade his responsibilities under the investigation of the regulatory authorities, but instead considered the long-term interests of Binance and the entire crypto industry. His contributions and sacrifices are obvious to all.
CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju posted on social media that the cryptocurrency industry should re-examine the contributions of Binance co-founder CZ with a more objective and forward-looking perspective. He believes that CZ's achievements far outweigh his mistakes.
Ki Young Ju pointed out that emerging industries often face the challenge of mismatching intrinsic value with absorbed capital, leading to social criticism of industry leaders. He believes that as an emerging field, the cryptocurrency industry has inevitably experienced such growing pains. CZ's four-month detention is not only a punishment for personal behavior, but also represents the pain of the entire industry's development process.
CZ has also repeatedly maintained Binance's good operations in the brutal bear market and encouraged everyone: "The bull market will come sooner or later."
Now, CZ is back, but the crypto tycoon has bigger and more meaningful plans for his life.
In May this year, there were reports that CZ was actively preparing for the transformation into the fields of AI and biotechnology. In fact, CZ also mentioned that he had communicated with Altman, "They both believe that AI will greatly help technological development and the advancement of human knowledge." CZ also said that it is seeking to invest in large data centers to support AI applications.
At the same time, after being released, CZ will not be directly involved in operations in the future, but as the largest shareholder of Binance, he will influence Binance's important decisions to a certain extent, including appeasing the FOMO emotions of community users.
In addition, CZ also stated on social media that he will serve his sentence and will focus on the next chapter of his life, education, after completing this stage. This will undoubtedly continue to bring incremental growth to the crypto industry and increase industry adoption.
2. Unbinding Binance: Embracing compliance to give crypto a new lease of life
CZ’s previous criminal settlement agreement stated that he must resign as CEO of Binance and stay away from any “daily” activities of the company. At the same time, the settlement agreement also requires Binance to accept two external monitors appointed by the US government to ensure compliance.
CZ's departure has made the outside world curious about where Binance's fate will go, but the development facts in the past four months have told us that Binance has a mature corporate system and is moving forward steadily under the leadership of the platform's new CEO Richard Teng and co-founder He Yi. The number of Binance platform users has reached 230 million.
Richard Teng once said that Binance is no longer a "founder-led" model, but has transformed into "a more decentralized company" led by a board of directors. Binance has introduced three independent directors and gathered an experienced executive team to take charge of daily operations. The purpose of this transformation is to strengthen corporate governance in response to an increasingly stringent regulatory environment.
In addition, he also revealed that Binance has no plans to seek an IPO at present. Binance is in good financial condition and has been profitable since the fifth month of 2017. It does not need to raise funds through an IPO or other financing methods. Binance will not rush to return to the US market, but will carefully evaluate the regulatory environment.
Last November, CZ announced his resignation as CEO, and the new CEO was replaced by Richard Teng, the company's former global regional market head. With three decades of experience in financial services and regulation, he is committed to leading Binance into the next stage of growth and ensuring the company's development in security, transparency, compliance and growth.
After becoming the new CEO of Binance, Richard Teng said that Binance today has a more solid foundation than ever before. To ensure the company's bright future, he will focus on three aspects: 1) Assuring users of the company's financial strength, security and stability; 2) Working with regulators to maintain high standards that promote innovation globally while providing important consumer protection; 3) Working with partners to promote the growth and popularity of Web3. Teng said that Binance will continue to move forward unswervingly, and called for everyone's support, looking forward to the future.
As a comrade-in-arms with CZ, Binance co-founder He Yi has been at the core of the management platform team. He Yi is involved in all aspects of the business and is in charge of Binance’s human resources department. Richard Teng once called He Yi “a very talented and highly independent-minded person.”
He Yi himself is also very hands-on, actively running Binance's daily affairs and answering various questions from the outside world. For example, he once said that if any Binance employee accepts bribes, he is welcome to report it, Binance has management measures for zombie coins, and has set up a special department for daily monitoring, and Binance's coin listing consists of four links: business, research group, committee, and compliance review.
Under the leadership of Richard Teng and He Yi, Binance has made steady progress and achieved new milestones.
For example, on August 15, Binance officially registered as a reporting entity with the Financial Intelligence Unit of India (FIU-IND), achieving the 19th global regulatory milestone; on September 6, Binance Kazakhstan obtained a full regulatory license approved by the Astana Financial Services Authority (AFSA); previously, Binance's Indonesian CEX Tokocrypto obtained a physical cryptocurrency trader license.
In addition to compliance licensing, the Binance security team has also achieved remarkable results. As of the end of July 2024, the team has successfully recovered or frozen more than US$73 million in user funds stolen by external institutions.
In addition, it said it plans to hire 1,000 people and spend more than $200 million this year to strengthen compliance.
It can be said that the release of CZ and Binance's full embrace of compliance supervision have eliminated all previous uncertainties for the world's largest trading platform, as can be seen from the fact that it has the largest number of regulatory licenses in the industry.
Conclusion
The crypto industry has always been regarded as the Wild West and the Dark Forest, which inevitably hides various dangers. Under the constraints of traditional moral and legal standards, non-compliant behavior needs to be borne by someone. After more than a decade of development, the crypto industry has only CZ who can properly solve the problem with the strongest courage and determination, which is of great significance to both the Binance platform itself and the entire crypto industry.
CZ's responsibility, Binance's tenacity, and the future potential of the crypto industry are enough to make people believe that the gap between the Web3 world and the mainstream world will become smaller and smaller, and the crypto industry will eventually be able to provide better services to global users and promote the progress of human society.
