Written by: @Merkle3sCapital
Introduction | The Overlooked Technological Foundation
When people saw CZ(CZ) top the list of richest Chinese people in 2021 with a net worth of $90 billion, the mainstream narrative attributed it to him being a "lucky one who rode the ICO wave." But this narrative overlooked a crucial fact:
Binance was able to become the world's number one trading platform in 165 days thanks to a high-frequency trading system engineer with 20 years of experience who forcefully injected Wall Street-level technical logic into the nascent and chaotic cryptocurrency industry.
Unlike many idealistic blockchain evangelists, CZ is a pure, rigorously trained trading system architect. His career did not begin at Binance, but rather at the Tokyo Stock Exchange's matching engine, Bloomberg Tradebook's futures system, and Shanghai Fuxun Information's microsecond-level high-frequency trading.
This article will discuss the part of CZ that is overlooked in the public narrative: a decade of dormancy as a trading system engineer, and how he used his technical background to make a comeback.
Chapter 1 | Bloomberg Tradebook: Engineering Training for Futures Systems (2001-2005)
In 2001, CZ joined Bloomberg New York to lead the development of the Tradebook futures trading platform.
In the financial environment at the time, the requirements for real-time performance and stability in futures trading systems were far higher than those in the spot market. Futures contracts involve leverage, real-time settlement of margin, and complex exercise rules, which required the underlying matching engine to have extremely high transaction processing capabilities.
During his four years at Bloomberg, CZ rose from a junior developer to head of Tradebook Futures Development.
His core technological contribution lies in the optimization of the "order execution system"—ensuring that buy and sell orders are executed at the best price in a volatile market environment and minimizing slippage.
This experience allowed CZ to deeply understand three core capabilities:
Redundancy design : Financial systems must not go down.
Multi-location data synchronization : Real-time consistency of global transactions
System resilience under large-scale concurrency : stability under extreme market conditions
These capabilities later became the underlying genes of Binance's matching engine.
Many people don't know that CZ's last position at Bloomberg was "Head of Futures Research." This wasn't a purely managerial role, but rather a technical leadership position that required him to personally write code and debug systems.
Chapter Two | Shanghai Fuxun Information: The Racing Logic at the Microsecond Level (2005-2013)
In 2005, CZ resigned and returned to Shanghai to found Fusion Systems.
This is the most underrated phase of CZ's technical career, and also the true source of Binance's technology.
Fuxun Information's client list includes top investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse. Its core business is providing these institutions with ultra-fast automated high-frequency trading platforms. In the high-frequency trading field, latency is the sole metric for evaluating a system's performance.
CZ spearheaded three key technological innovations:
1. In-Memory Processing. To avoid the latency of traditional hard drive data access, CZ designed an architecture that resides the entire transaction order book in memory. This design places extremely high demands on hardware cost and system stability, but it can improve data access speed by several orders of magnitude.
2. Simplified Risk Checks. Traditional banking systems involve complex compliance checks before an order is placed. CZ has simplified the risk verification process through algorithmic optimization without sacrificing security, significantly reducing the "round-trip time" of orders.
3. Server Colocation. In the market competition between Shanghai and Tokyo, CZ pioneered the strategy of physically placing trading servers next to the exchange's servers to shorten fiber optic transmission distances.
Through these methods, Fuxun Information Technology strives for latency optimization down to the 20-microsecond level. In the HFT industry standard from 2005 to 2013, the advancement of tick-to-trade latency from the 100-microsecond level to the 20-microsecond level was a significant technological breakthrough.
This obsession with speed enabled CZ to develop an engine capable of processing 1.4 million transactions per second when he returned to the crypto market in 2017. At the time, most of his competitors' systems frequently crashed when faced with peak traffic.
Binance's technological moat didn't appear out of thin air in 2017; it was honed microsecond by microsecond over eight years by Fuxun Information.
Chapter 3 | OKCoin: A Clash of Personality and Principles (2014-2015)
In 2014, CZ joined OKCoin as CTO at the invitation of He Yi.
This collaboration lasted less than a year and ended in a fierce public feud.
But it was this break that shaped CZ's management style at Binance.
The conflict between CZ and Star Xu, the founder of OKCoin (now OKX), is essentially a clash between "transparency values" and "traditional gray-market thinking."
The "contract forgery case" that erupted in 2015 was the catalyst for the complete breakdown of the relationship between the two parties. CZ, representing OKCoin, reached an agreement with Roger Ver to manage the Bitcoin.com domain, but Ver subsequently accused OKCoin of refusing to pay. CZ supported Ver's claims and implied that OKCoin had forged a version of the contract that included termination clauses.
This public feud cost CZ—he experienced a low point in the crypto, but it also established his reputation for "do no evil" in the tech world.
This hidden asset was successfully realized as a testament to investors' trust during the 2017 ICO.
CZ's "directness and principle" is not a social performance, but a logic-based engineering mindset: pursuing fairness, efficiency, and the absolute execution of contracts.
Chapter 4 | Bijie Technology: Binance's Hidden Lab (2015-2017)
Many people believe that Binance was created out of thin air in July 2017. In fact, BijieTech, founded by CZ after leaving OKCoin in 2015, is Binance's real "laboratory".
Bijie Technology's main business is providing cloud-based "white label" trading systems for various exchanges, including those dealing in stamps, coins, and collectibles. Through two years of operation, CZ has achieved three key milestones:
Technological iteration. Simplifying the expensive high-frequency system originally designed for investment banks into a cloud architecture that can be deployed on a large scale.
Talent pool. Binance's core development team in its early days was almost entirely inherited from Bijie Technology. This means that before the ICO began, Binance already had a well-established team that had been working together for two years and was well-versed in optimizing the matching engine.
Market Insight. In providing services to other exchanges, CZ saw through the vulnerabilities of the trading systems at the time—their inability to handle explosive user growth.
When the Chinese government began to crack down on various informal exchanges in 2017, Bijie Technology's business was impacted. However, this prompted CZ to focus all his efforts on cryptocurrencies and directly transform the mature Bijie system into the underlying kernel of Binance.
This "plug-and-play" technological reserve enabled Binance to achieve a performance leap that other exchanges took years to accomplish within just a few months of its launch.
Chapter 5 | Technical Analysis: Binance's Core Competitive Advantage
Binance's ability to crush its competitors in 2017 was not due to luck, but to technological superiority.
Binance early system performance metrics
Where does Binance's technological advantage come from?
Matching engine : Directly inherits Fusion Systems' microsecond-level HFT architecture, memory state machine design, and has no MySQL select latency.
Data center : Tokyo server, serving Asian users with the shortest physical distance.
Architecture design : microservices, memory matching, vs. competitors' monolithic architecture and database deadlock.
CZ's criticism : Huobi/OKCoin used floating-point numbers and timer matching in the early days, which resulted in high latency and made it easy to leave backdoors.
Technology Comparison for 2024-2025
Binance's technological moat was honed by CZ over 20 years, microsecond by microsecond.
Chapter Six | He Yi: The Overlooked Growth Engine
CZ's technical capabilities need a partner who understands operations and marketing to be fully realized. That person is He Yi.
The path from OKCoin to Binance
He joined OKCoin in 2014 as a co-founder and vice president, responsible for branding (he once placed an advertisement in Times Square, New York).
Both he and CZ resigned in 2015.
Joined Binance as CMO in August 2017.
He Yi's core contributions
BNB Token Economic Model
BNB is designed as the "fuel" for the exchange, and users can use BNB to pay transaction fees and enjoy discounts, forming an ecological cycle.
The company raised $15 million through an ICO to support early-stage expansion. A referral bonus system offers 20% commission on transaction fees, and the "Binance Angels" volunteer program fosters organic user sharing and exponential growth.
Globalization layout
Avoiding China's "94 regulation," it quickly shifted its focus to Japan, Malta, and other countries, supporting multiple languages and covering more than 180 countries.
Key data
Binance entered the global top ten in 42 days after its launch.
It took 165 days (approximately 180 days) to reach the top in trading volume.
With over 280 million users, it accounts for 41% of the market share in transaction volume.
In 2025, He Yi was promoted to co-CEO of Binance.
The "technology + operation" dual-engine approach of CZ and He Yi is the core reason why Binance was able to crush its peers within six months.
Chapter Seven | Early-Stage Capital: Chen Weixing and Zhang Liang's Gambling Spirit
Binance's success is often described as CZ's heroic act, but without the capital backing of key early investors, it would have been difficult for CZ to gain a foothold in the chaos of 2017 based solely on his technology.
Chen Weixing (Fancheng Capital): Intuitive Investing in KTVs
Chen Weixing was one of Binance's earliest angel investors. In July-August 2017, just over a month after Binance was founded, Chen Weixing quickly decided to invest after having drinks at a KTV—the amount was about 25 million RMB, acquiring about 5% of the shares.
Interestingly, He Yi didn't believe the news at first, until she confirmed that the funds had arrived in her account.
His investment logic is based on three points:
Similarity identification : Comparing CZ to Wang Xing of Meituan, believing he has a "computer-like mind."
The cross margin-in faith : CZ's act of selling his Shanghai property and going "all in" on Bitcoin in 2014 left a deep impression on Chen Weixing.
Resource exchange : Chen Weixing not only contributed money, but also mobilized all social resources to endorse Binance.
Subsequent disputes : After Binance's valuation skyrocketed (once exceeding $300 billion), Chen Weixing and CZ disagreed on issues related to share confirmation and repurchase valuation. He believed the shares were undervalued and even prepared to sue. However, this did not prevent him from becoming a legendary investor who "invested in two of the richest people in China" (Zhang Yiming of ByteDance and Zhao CZ of Binance).
Zhang Liang (Black Hole Investment): A Real Estate Tycoon's Cross-Industry Bets
Zhang Liang is the son of Zhang Li, co-founder of R&F Properties, and one of the "Four Young Masters of Beijing". Black Hole Investment participated in Binance's angel round in 2017, which is a typical example of real estate capital betting on a new track.
Incidentally, former Huobi CFO Chris Lee later became the president of TensorBlackHole Investment.
These investors share common characteristics : they are not professional VCs, but rather personal/family capital, making quick decisions and daring to take big bets. They are not investing in a PowerPoint presentation, but in CZ himself—an "all-in" investor whose extreme certainty is remarkable.
Conclusion | The Capital Miracle Under the Rule of Engineers
CZ's career is not a simple wealth-creation movement, but a classic case of "compound interest in technology" and "monetization of principles".
Technical expertise is Binance's cornerstone . Bloomberg's rigor and RichNet's lightning speed give CZ a game-changing edge in the crypto market. He introduced microsecond-level speed-based logic to a nascent market where even a one-second delay couldn't be guaranteed.
His "direct and principled" personality is a sharp weapon in capital games . Although his break with OKCoin once put him in a slump, it also established his "do no evil" technical reputation in the industry.
The logic of capital and loyalty among existing members . The entry of Chen Weixing, Zhang Liang, and others was based on the extreme certainty of CZ as an "all-in" investor. Meanwhile, Bijie Technology's technological reserves ensured that this capital investment could be quickly transformed into highly competitive products.
Ultimately, CZ's logic is that in a volatile and trust-deficient industry, the most stable and transparent technical architecture is the best marketing tool.
This pursuit of "the pinnacle of logic and computing power" constitutes the most overlooked yet core driving force in his career.
Note: Investing involves risk; please exercise caution when entering the market. This information is not intended as investment advice.
