"You will never understand that kind of fear—one second sipping coffee in Silicon Valley talking about investments, and the next second locked in a place where even the toothbrush is a deadly weapon." In a recent interview, former Binance CEO CZ rarely revealed his thoughts from behind bars. No one expected that the Chinese tycoon, who once dominated the cryptocurrency world, would end up sharing food and sleeping with a double murderer at his lowest point.

On the day he entered prison, the 1.87-meter-tall CZ was placed in a four-person cell. He still remembers the cold sweat in his palms—on his left lay a gang boss with a back full of cross tattoos, next to him was a muscular Latino sentenced to 15 years for drug trafficking, and directly across from him was a cellmate who had taken two lives ten years ago. Such scenes, only seen in movies and dramas, became his daily life during his four months in prison.

"What scared me the most was not them, but the clock on the wall that never kept time correctly." CZ smiled wryly. This tech enthusiast, who controlled a $100 billion trading platform, suddenly realized he had been stripped of even the right to know the time. "You never know when you might be suddenly transferred or when your sentence might be extended; that feeling of being at the mercy of fate can drive a person crazy."

There were no VIP cells or special treatment in prison. This billionaire ate hard corn tortillas every day and shared a shower with drug dealers, yet he found another kind of freedom amid the daily 'greetings' from the metal detector three times a day. "When you only have half a bar of soap left in your pocket, you can hear the heartbeat of life more clearly."

The most dramatic scene occurred late at night: the godfather of blockchain, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, curled up in bed explaining Bitcoin principles to a murderer using a borrowed pencil on a napkin. "He didn’t understand private keys and public chains, but when he heard 'this ledger cannot be changed by anyone in the world,' his eyes suddenly lit up." CZ said that the uncle, who was sentenced to 28 years, became his best student in prison.

On the day he was released, Wall Street Journal reporters flocked to him but only captured him folding his wrinkled release certificate into his suit pocket. While everyone speculated when he would return to the crypto world, he flew to an island to spend three months with his daughter planting sunflowers. "Money can buy the entire crypto world, but it cannot buy what my cellmate taught me in prison—life's greatest hack is the forgetfulness of one's true self."