Zhao Changpeng, the richest man in China, and his black gold empire

Two days ago, I brushed my mobile phone and jumped out of a news, titled the standard self-media style, "The richest man in China changed owners, with a net worth of 90 billion US dollars".

Click to look at it, I want to laugh, isn't this Zhao Changpeng? This time it's going to break the circle.

This name and his "Binance" are well-known in the circle, but the friends outside the circle may not have heard of it, I will talk about it today.

Binance is now the world's largest virtual currency trading platform. Zhao Changpeng is the founder and boss of the company.

Since the outbreak of the epidemic, Binance's business has been surprisingly good, and the total profit is expected to exceed $3 billion in 2021. That number is really exaggerated, it was only $1 billion last year. That's only $500 million in 2019 and about $300 million in 2018.

Further on? Sorry no, because Binance was only established in 2017.

Speaking of which, it is estimated that the small partners are even stranger, what does this company do? Does this method of profit increase still make sense? Mining or selling mining machines?

Here are two more words, cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the essence is to use the graphics card to do a super complex and super cumbersome operation, which is called mining, there is a certain probability to calculate a string of numbers, this is the cryptocurrency, so in recent years to sell the graphics card to make a lot of money (mining context of the graphics card is called "mining machine"), most of the speculation did not earn, a small part also earned.

Back to this article, Zhao Changpeng neither mines nor sells mining machines, and both mining and mining machines can only be said to be working for Binance. Binance is an exchange that opens, and he has to take a share of virtual coins. For example, he opened a Taobao, let the people who have coins in their hands and those who want to buy coins to trade, he takes a profit.

How large is it? It is said that the daily turnover is nearly 100 billion, and it is still US dollars.

A large part of the reason why Binance has developed so rapidly in the past two years is the epidemic. First, after the occurrence of everyone's demand for safe-haven has become larger, the decentralization of virtual currency, naturally let it have the effect of "hedging" with fiat currency, so that the price that has been rising has risen and fallen in the past two years, but overall it is a surge. Second, during the epidemic period, Europe and the United States, especially young people, have a strong enthusiasm for coin speculation, using this as a "wealth freedom password", and boldly and highly leveraged bottomless coin speculation. To put it bluntly, many people clean their pockets, press all the money, and add 100 times 200 times or even higher leverage. This kind of play can be said to be a bet to the extreme.

Why? This is related to the market itself, such as stocks, which generally do not fluctuate much and are generally not leveraged. The price fluctuations in the futures market are small, but the leverage can be increased, and this psychological state is not good and cannot be played. And the virtual currency trading price, small partner you search, and roller coaster-like, this fluctuation amplitude plus hundreds of times leverage? This is not a market transaction at all, the casino actually has a double bottom, but the casino does not dare to earn this money by itself, preferring to let the stacked codes be done, pretending not to know.

Bigger than this, I thought for half a day, it was Russian roulette, I don't know what the little partner can search, it is quite exciting.

But there are many virtual currency trading platforms around the world, and the reason why Binance can become bigger. Zhao Changpeng's personal ability, or luck, played a big role in this.

This can be said to be zhao changpeng's core competitiveness.

Zhao Changpeng's resume is very simple, born in Jiangsu in 1977, the whole family immigrated to Canada as a teenager, and then it was an ordinary study. Then I went on to study computer science at McGill University (this school is very NB, the top three in Canada, and the top 50 in the world). Basically belongs to the proper academic bully design.

After graduating from university, Zhao Changpeng first went to the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Japan, and then went to Bloomberg in the United States, did software development and worked as a trader, and was promoted quickly during his work.

Then in 2005, Zhao Changpeng returned to China and started his own business. Specialized in high-frequency trading software for brokers, I will not explain what is called high-frequency trading. In a word: this thing is to make the computer fight fast, and bully people's brains in the trading market.

In August 2013, the opportunity arrived. Zhao Changpeng, like many people in the financial circle, likes to play Texas Hold'em.

One day while playing with two card players, they introduced him to Bitcoin, as well as Satoshi Nakamoto's cryptocurrency theory.

At that time, most people who had been exposed to Bitcoin thought it was a scam. Throughout 2013, Bitcoin was basically tepid around $100, and there was a big rally in the fourth quarter.

Friends suggested that he should devote himself to Bitcoin or blockchain entrepreneurship. Make software for trading and profit from it. At the same time, 10% of the net worth should be invested in it. If it goes to zero, it's losing 10% of your net worth, but it's more likely to rise.

Zhao Changpeng's approach afterwards was very surprising. He sold the house directly, and then took out his pockets, and all the money was pressed up, and I have to say that there is indeed boldness. In fact, Chinese know that buying a house has earned, in fact, in 2013, I bought bitcoin and have been holding it, and now I am really going crazy to earn.

The house is said to have sold for $1 million, a price that suggests he probably hadn't made much money at the time.

And then......

Zhao Changpeng was trapped, losing 2/3 at most. It is said that Zhao Changpeng's hair fell out in half a year at that time than he had lost in 10 years of software.

However, although the loss is very miserable, the difference between Zhao Changpeng and ordinary people is that he is still very confident in virtual coins. At that time, the transaction was also hot. Zhao Changpeng put a lot of energy into virtual coins. A dedicated company was also created to provide cloud-based trading software for exchanges.

Then it came to June 2017, when Zhao Changpeng came up with the idea of establishing Binance. He said he would set up an exchange that would only handle coin trading, bypassing strict regulation and the cost of dealing with fiat currencies. So the fundraising work began, and in less than a month, it raised $15 million.

Binance was formed, began trading on July 25, and soon rose so much that the company grew rapidly and hired a lot. Then, it was embarrassing to find that people came, there were not enough places, and everyone had to huddle together to work.

Less than a month later, Mr. Zhao began to hear rumors that the Chinese government was starting to pay attention to cryptocurrency exchanges.

At that time, virtual coins were too hot, and all kinds of rumors were hundreds or thousands a day, but mostly rumors. Zhao Changpeng believes that rumors are becoming more and more dense, and it may be that there is something substantial.

There are two roads in front of him, one is to close Binance, the customer takes the money and leaves, and has the opportunity to do it later. One is that he runs with all the money and customers.

Zhao Changpeng is said to have only considered one day, and then announced in the office: Run!

But you don't have to clean up the softness of running down. In Binance's office in those days, the only thing that changed was that everyone was working overtime. People seem to be working in crowded offices, but they're actually moving big, moving all of Binance's data from Alibaba Cloud to Amazon's cloud servers across the ocean.

Then they went to Japan, and then Japan banned them, so it slowly and completely evolved into an online company, and the employees were all working from home, and what was more exaggerated was that most of the employees stayed in China, and I knew one.

So in the past few years, Binance's business has grown by leaps and bounds. At the same time, more than 10 countries have reminded users that Binance has not obtained any authorization or is subject to supervision. Many countries and regions explicitly prohibit Binance from doing business.

However, this is not difficult for Zhao Changpeng, because Binance does not have a headquarters. As a fully online company, Binance employs employees around the world. It is said that hundreds of employees in China are all working from home, buying their own insurance, and no one needs to file taxes.

Regulators also don't know where Binance's servers are set up. Their data is said to change very frequently, moving around automatically across different clouds. Even if you find it, it is useless.

Even for two years, not many people knew where Zhao Changpeng was. Zhao Changpeng himself said in interviews that he was used to wandering and would move from time to time.

However, in the past two years, because of the epidemic, people finally know that Zhao Changpeng people stay in Singapore.

The news of the "richest man" broke out this time, which can be said to be a "senseless disaster" for Zhao Changpeng. He has always been based on the principle of "low-key work and low-key behavior". I don't know if I have offended someone and been "killed" by others.

As for the $90 billion net worth, looking at the numbers is not reliable, small partners, which rich man have you ever seen with a whole number? At least there must be zero and whole bar, which is obviously a random valuation, and this kind of data is too careless to use as ppt storytelling.

But one thing to say, Binance is dangerous right now.

Although Binance has been closed in name for a long time in the mainland, in fact, a large part of its business is in Hong Kong, and now 70% of its users are also mainlanders. What is special about Hong Kong, you must understand, it is a free port, funds can be freely exchanged, and now the mainland is still the main market of Binance. Through uncomplicated agents, it is easy to log in and trade.

And except for the speculators who "gamble" on it. There are also a large number of transactions that use the decentralization of virtual currencies to transfer funds of unknown origin, and the most critical thing is that some people want to convert our funds into cryptocurrencies and flee. In fact, the biggest benefit of cryptocurrency is here, the reason why the rich flock to it is also here, if you have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, want to go abroad, can you go out casually? Of course not, but if you keep all your wealth in mind, you can cross the sovereign state at will.

This is also why Binance has stood firm in the "pulling the network line" attack of the world's governments, and it is getting bigger and bigger, the essence is that everyone has the needs in this regard, the poor have the need to invest in getting rich, the rich have the need to hide the money, the demand is there, Binance runs where everyone chases.

It's not just China that resents the site, so it escaped early on, and since 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice has been paying attention to Binance, which nominally banned U.S. users and moved servers out of the U.S. If you register above, tick the "I am not a U.S. citizen" option.

And as Binance's business grew larger, in May of this year, the U.S. Department of Justice and inland Revenue investigated him for allegedly helping with tax evasion and providing money laundering services (something embarrassing that Binance nominally does not do American business). In recent years, many countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany have also restricted Binance's business.

That is to say, if China and the United States want to trade on Binance, they must use technical means to turn over supervision, and these two countries are Binance's largest source of business.

However, now there is a saying that Binance has become more and more harmful to China and the United States, the problem is that angering China and the United States is basically angering the world, and it is estimated that it is difficult to mix, and then Zhao Changpeng, the richest man, will be more dangerous.