by Hodler Ash 
Changpeng Zhao – Founder of Binance
If you are a person who is into business and have the knowledge of the most famous business executives, you must have heard the name Changpeng Zhao. Born in Jiangsu, China, this man is the founder and the CEO of Binance which is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, When it comes to comparing using trading volume. There are many other exchanges in the world but as of April 2018, Changpeng’s exchange is the largest. He did not come up with this exchange all of a sudden. Previously, he was a part of a team that developed Blockchain.info which gained him a lot of experience in this field as well as immense amount of knowledge. He also served as a chief Technology officer in OKcoin which was against something that is related to this cryptocurrency market and helped him a lot in the future.
Changpeng Zhao is fondly called CZ by a lot of people in the market. As already mentioned, Zhao was born in Jiangsu province which is situated in China but around the late 1980s, he and his family moved to British Columbia, Canada in a city called Vancouver. He used to work very hard ever since then and also supported the family by doing a number of service industry jobs which included being an employee in McDonald’s. His father was a professor in China.
After moving to Vancouver, he attended McGill University which is situated in Montreal, Canada. He majored in computer science which is why he has a huge knowledge about these things which has made him what he is, right now.
Early Career Of Changpeng Zhao
Completing college and getting a major in computer science, he began working for the Tokyo Stock Exchange. He was a software developer there and used to match trade orders. Apart from that, Bloomberg Tradebook is also a place where he worked as a developer of futures trading software.
After working in these companies, it was back in 2005 when he moved to Shanghai and founded Fusion Systems. The experience and knowledge that he had helped the company grow into some of the fastest high frequency trading systems available out there in the world for brokers. Undoubtedly, this was the beginning of the evolution of Changpeng Zhao.
Starting from 2013, started working for a lot of cryptocurrency projects which were already mentioned (Blockchain.info and OKCoin). That was when it struck him that he could do something of his own and in 2017, he left OKCoin and started his own cryptocurrency exchange called Binance. The company was launched in July 2017 and a total of $15 million funds were raised during ICO.
After this company was launched, there was no stopping for the growth of Changpeng Zhao. In the February 2018 edition of the Forbes magazine, he was placed at #3 in the list of the richest people in cryptocurrency. In September 2018, his net worth was estimated to be at $1.4 billion and it definitely must have increased a lot in the last year.
Binance – Changpeng Zhao’s Cryptocurrency Exchange
Traders in cryptocurrency tokens require a platform to trade their belongings for cash or some other coin. These platforms are called exchanges and Binance is a Global Cryptocurrency Exchange which gives the traders these opportunities. This is a platform for trading more than hundred cryptocurrencies and is considered the largest also, when it comes to the volume of trading. The company was founded in July 2017 and it did not take the much time to become the largest platform. It is considered largest since the early 2018 and why wouldn’t it be? In January 2018, Binance Coin (BNB) had a market capitalisation of $1.3 billion.
Before China imposed a ban on the cryptocurrency trading back in September 2017, it moved its servers and headquarters out of China and into Japan. Binance Jersey is also an independent identity which was announced in 2019 just in order to expand the European influence.
Binance is also working with three different big exchanges raising $32 million for a stable coin project. There is a notorious volatility of Bitcoin and other such cryptocurrencies which is the reason why the idea of stable coins is supposed to be great by many critics and traders. The main idea is very simple and is to provide a cryptocurrency without the volatility.
There has been downs for the company as well which includes the revelation on May 7, 2019 that it had also been a victim of the “large scale security breach” which happened back in those days. 7000 Bitcoins were hacked and stolen which was worth $40 million in total at that time and Binance suffered that loss too.
Changpeng Zhao recently opened up on the situation of cryptocurrency in China. He said that releasing China’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is actually a very good thing for the economy as well as the cryptocurrency world in whole. He also gave reasons why he believes in it. Changpeng Zhao said that China is a large country and if the central bank of such a country issues cryptocurrency, there are chances that other Central banks of other different countries are also going to follow the example and issue their own digital currencies. It was reported that the Bank of England and the Bank of Sweden actually liked the idea of the central bank of China, indeed.
These central currencies are obviously not the typical decentralized cryptocurrencies and is essentially a digital version of the country’s native fiat currency but that does not change the fact that having a digital currency is better than not having one at all. Ever since the ban of cryptocurrency in China, a lot of rumours came up but when this news of China having a digital currency of their own came up, people actually bought into it. Changpeng Zhao believes in his personal philosophy which says “more digital currencies there are, the better”. He also said that choices are very important when it comes to the market of digital currency. It is always better to have one more choice than not and Zhao completely believes in this idea that the Chinese Central Bank put up. In the future timeline, the day this digital currency will be launched is going to be marked as historic.
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