Main Takeaways
In today’s culture article, you’ll read all about Binance’s critical inflection points from 2017 to our 8th anniversary today, through the eyes of 8 early Binance employees.
Binance’s original builders didn’t just survive every crypto cycle — they evolved, leveled up, and stayed to keep building.
From Singapore to Dubai, from Telegram chats to AI-powered systems, Binance’s DNA of speed and resilience turned each challenge and reinvention into its ultimate growth hacks.
Eight years since its humble beginnings, Binance has surpassed the mark of 280 million registered users, forging ahead toward its ambitious goal of onboarding the first billion into Web3. With thousands of employees representing more than 50 nationalities and working from nearly 100 different countries, Binance has become a global crypto powerhouse with a remote-first workforce.
Read on to hear all about Binance’s critical inflection points, from the 2017 inception to our 8th anniversary today, from the perspective of 8 long-serving employees: Alice, Nancy, Viet, Lyle, Echo, Shining, Flora and Torri.
Through multiple brutal market cycles, from the days of ICO mania to the most recent ETF-fueled bull run, these eight original Binancians persisted, each a living node of memory and muscle powering an exchange that has become synonymous with crypto industry’s rise. How did they do it?
They didn’t just stay the same: they leveled up, evolved, and found ownership.
2017: The Wild Birth of ICO Mania
In 2017, crypto didn’t just tiptoe into mainstream headlines: it crashed in with the force of a tidal wave. Bitcoin soared past $19,000 for the first time, and overnight, thousands of ICO projects promised to “change the world,” often backed by little more than vague white papers and hype videos. Global regulators scrambled to keep pace as investors flocked into sales of tokens that sometimes vanished as quickly as they appeared.
Against this feverish backdrop, Binance emerged like a rocket ship on a moon mission. In just 165 days, the exchange vaulted to the top global ranking by trading volume, a feat few could have imagined.
Part of this meteoric rise was fueled by Binance’s own bold bet: its initial coin offering (ICO) of BNB tokens in July 2017. The team raised $15 million in under two weeks, an impressive achievement at the time. Instead of pouring the funds into lavish offices or early cash-outs, the founding team funneled resources into engineering firepower and user-focused services.
Alice, a Security Investigations Specialist, remembers exactly when her orbit crossed Binance’s. She joined on December 1, 2017, stepping into the office at a time when the company was still a small startup. “Before Binance, I didn’t have much work experience — just a few shorter jobs,” she says. “Binance was my first serious role, and it’s where I’ve grown the most.”
Alice started her Binance journey as a Customer Service (CS) Agent specializing in security issues. Fresh off the boat, she found herself at the center of an onslaught of new user requests. It was far from a standard helpdesk gig, and she had to learn a lot about a completely new industry.
“Everything I know today, I’ve learned here,” she says. “It’s shaped not only how I approach my work, but also how I think, solve problems, and collaborate.” In a year when mainstream headlines about crypto swung between overnight millionaires and catastrophic scams, Binance was absorbing shock after shock — scaling, improvising, and still growing stronger.
What kept her there — and what still does — isn’t just the adrenaline of firefighting or the novelty of a new industry. It’s the knowledge that each solved case meant a real person regaining access to their hard-earned funds.
“It’s incredibly fulfilling to know that my work makes a real difference in people’s lives,” Alice says. “And being surrounded by such great colleagues makes the journey even more meaningful.”
2018–2019: The Crypto Winter and Trial by Fire
After the explosive highs of 2017, bitcoin slid from nearly $20,000 to just above $3,000. Media headlines screamed “death spiral,” and thousands of small projects vanished overnight. Yet, inside Binance, something different took root. While coins collapsed, everybody put their heads down and kept building. In this fog of volatility, a defining trial arrived: the 2019 security breach.
Hackers masquerading as ordinary users slipped into the system through customer service chats, uploading seemingly innocuous files that carried hidden payloads. Inside those files lurked malware designed to log keystrokes, manipulate environments, and probe for weaknesses.
When the hack finally detonated, more than 7,000 BTC vanished — a blow that could have shattered user trust forever.
“We had no playbook,” Lyle, now a Web3 Wallet Tech Lead who joined Binance as a front-end developer, recalls of the incident. “We just knew we had to protect the users, no matter what.”
The tech team tore into the system line by line, unrolling code like emergency surgeons in a dark field hospital. “In traditional finance, you might recover stolen funds. In crypto, you can’t,” he explains. “We had to suspend withdrawals and rebuild parts of our production environment from scratch. The entire engineering team worked around the clock to minimize the impact. That experience showed me how serious and high-stakes this industry is — and how hardcore and resilient our team really is. That’s why I’m still here.”
On the same day, Viet, a Vietnam community manager, faced a different kind of frontline. In Ho Chi Minh, he opened Telegram to see thousands of frenzied messages — users terrified their funds could have evaporated.
Viet, one of the longest-serving community managers at Binance. Source: Binance.
“Imagine hundreds, maybe thousands, of messages flooding in nonstop: users asking about withdrawals, panicking about their assets, venting frustration, even threatening us out of fear,” he reminisces. Alone in his apartment, Viet became a one-man triage center, hammering out hundreds of replies per night to keep the community calm enough not to flee.
“It was intense, but we managed the situation, minimized the impact, and ultimately earned back user trust,” he says. “It taught me a lot about resilience.”
Behind the scenes, the security and infrastructure teams discovered chilling details. The hackers had used advanced persistence techniques, moving laterally within the IT environment, exploring configurations, and even understanding internal logic to inject malicious code and real-time commands.
As one team member remembered, “We didn’t know if other backdoors had been left behind. We had to rebuild everything from scratch. Every line of code, every server. People worked around the clock for three weeks, almost without pause.”
To support the engineers, HR and administrative teams scrambled. They delivered nap pods so that exhausted developers could collapse for short rests before jumping back in. Food packets, spare shirts, fresh towels — a kind of battlefield logistics line materialized almost overnight.
“People would nap, then roll over and start coding again,” said one witness. “We were happy when it was over, but prouder than ever to be part of it.”
At the user level, trading continued internally, but withdrawals were frozen. Engineers meticulously stress-tested withdrawal processes to prevent a panic-driven “bank run” once services reopened. A large reserve of crypto was staged out of the company's treasury to recover the stolen amount, ready to honor every withdrawal request immediately. When the floodgates finally opened, traffic spiked, but the systems held firm.
“Through that incident, we united more than ever,” one early engineer reflected. “We knew more about the users, about each other, about the real stakes. It made us stronger, harder — but also more humble.”
In the flickering screens and the quiet rooms where people napped next to laptops, a stronger sense of loyalty was reinforced among Binancians: the loyalty to a collective sense of shared vision and mission.
2020-2021: The DeFi Explosion and Global Relocation as the Ultimate Growth Hack
While the world grappled with Covid-19 lockdowns and isolation, DeFi protocols burst onto the scene, driving volumes and pushing BTC above $60,000. For Binance, it was also the moment to embrace remote fully.
Nancy joined Binance as the new Lead of Human Resources a couple of years before, in 2018. On her third day, CZ messaged: “Have we launched the Objective Key Results (OKRs) system yet?” She was just starting to think about tools and frameworks, but by the end of week two, she launched a working OKR system. “It taught me what startup speed really meant,” Nancy shares. As regulatory headwinds shifted and the company scaled exponentially, a global relocation unfolded. In 2020, Binance led a strategic mass relocation of its employees, establishing itself as a truly global and remote-first company.
Flora, a Risk Operations team lead, who started as an early customer-service hire, has helped build many customer service tools and systems before transitioning into Risk. When it was time to relocate, Flora stuffed her life into suitcases and flew to Dubai, still processing how she had joined a company that seemed to be writing a new playbook each week. In Dubai, her team proceeded to build a new risk structure to handle complex and high-impact cases, especially those involving key users.
From its earliest days, Binance was a global experiment, a patchwork of remote hires scattered across time zones. However, it wasn’t until after the full mass relocation was completed in 2021 that Binance became truly borderless. Flora and Lyle moved to the UAE, where their engineering sprints gained new velocity and proximity to emerging tech hubs. Alice’s path took her through multiple relocations across the globe from East Asia to Europe.
Each relocation became a culturally defining point, turning the organization into a truly distributed entity: more resilient, more adaptive, and more connected to the pulse of its users around the world.
2022–2023: Terra’s Meltdown and Compliance Renaissance
The next cycle didn’t just test the industry, it almost broke it. In 2022, Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin spiraled into a death loop, vaporizing tens of billions of dollars in investor wealth, along with user trust, in days. Many popular crypto projects, funds, and exchanges were found to have misappropriated users’ funds, leading to a crisis of confidence. The climax was FTX’s spectacular implosion that torched what little faith remained in centralized platforms.
Binance emerged as one of the major cryptocurrency platforms that did not collapse or experience any bank run through this period, a testament to the soundness of its systems, investment and trading strategies, and credible treasury reserves. In the aftermath of this chaos, Binance came forward to introduce Proof of Reserves or PoR. Binance's POR is a mechanism that allows users to verify that the exchange holds enough assets to cover all customer deposits at a 1:1 ratio or more. In other words, for every 1 bitcoin that users deposit on the platform, Binance holds 1 bitcoin or more in reserves. By using Binance’s POR, anyone can verify that the amount of funds visible in Binance’s wallets corresponds to the sum of all user fund holdings, as well as check the safekeeping of their assets. Binance's implementation of PoR has set a benchmark in the industry and encouraged other exchanges to adopt similar practices.
However, this moment also called for an even greater scrutiny over the cryptocurrency industry and called for a cultural pivot, from the industry’s early “build first, ask forgiveness later” approach to a lived mantra of compliance, trust, and fortification.
Binance’s pivot here saw CZ stepping back, and Richard Teng stepping up as the new CEO, signaling to the world that compliance and transparency would become Binance’s guiding principles. Inside, the mood was a tense mix of urgency and grim determination.
Echo, a Business Intelligence Specialist in the BI team, found herself in the eye of this storm. At some point during the 2022 crypto industry crisis, amid the worsening crypto market sentiment, a core buy-crypto function failed unexpectedly, and the support chats spiraled into chaos. “The chat system was flooded with the same question over and over, and the Customer Support team was overwhelmed,” Echo recalls.
With no time for long approvals or chain-of-command hesitations, she and her team drafted a temporary Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) overnight. “It wasn’t perfect, but it worked,” she says. “With fast coordination across multiple teams, we acted quickly to contain the issue, support CS, and keep users informed.”
For Nancy, these years were a test of belief as much as endurance. “There were tough moments, especially in 2022 and 2023, as leadership changed,” she says. “The market was down, media pressure was intense, and answers weren’t always clear. But what stood out to me was how we stayed focused and kept pushing forward.”
She describes it as a period when faith had to live beyond metrics and price charts. “I never doubted the future of the industry, and deep down, I always believed Binance would pull through too,” she says. “That belief gave me the energy to keep showing up, doing the work, and supporting my team.”
As the dust settled, Binance didn’t just survive, it thrived, stronger than ever. Teams learned to build systems with audit trails as default, and to write every line of policy as carefully as every line of code.
The lesson was clear: resilience is all about the quiet conviction that the mission and your team are worth the fight, even when you don’t know the final score yet.
2024–2025: Spot ETFs, Halving Tailwinds, and the AI Wave
By 2024, the crypto world was roaring back to life. The SEC’s long-awaited approval of spot BTC ETFs in January signaled a new era: institutional investors poured in, family offices scrambled to set up new crypto funds, and financial news tickers began treating bitcoin less like a punchline and more like a respectable asset class.
April’s Bitcoin halving event further tightened supply, while a new wave of AI-driven blockchain projects started reshaping entire corners of the industry, from automated compliance tools to predictive trading bots.
Within this boom, Binance found itself reborn, not as the swashbuckling rebel of 2017, but as a hardened, battle-tested machine, tempered by crises and with strong leadership. With Richard Teng as CEO and Co-Founder Yi He as a steady cultural compass, the company doubled down on trust and operational excellence while refusing to let go of its “hardcore” edge.
In parallel, the engineering teams continue writing new chapters. Shining, an OG Backend Engineer in the Futures tech team, found himself at the center of what he called “UTA product sprint.” Just a couple of months ago, team members across regions worked around the clock to develop Futures’ unified account feature.
“We had a tight deadline, and under our team lead’s direction, people from Dubai, Bahrain, and Singapore came together within 72 hours,” Shining recounts. “We worked across time zones, side by side in the office, for nearly a month to push the feature live.” They did whatever it took to succeed, including adopting new coding languages like Rust.
Shining, a relentless OG Binance Engineer. Source: Binance.
Alice, now a seasoned security and investigations specialist, still discovers new challenges eight years down the road. Recently, she tackled a case involving a hacked user who moved stolen funds through a lesser-known coin, one Binance hadn’t yet monitored automatically.
“I had to learn how to read the blockchain explorer for that specific coin — something completely new to me — and track everything manually,” Alice explains. “For days, I had my eyes glued to the screen, refreshing constantly to see if the funds had moved.”
In the end, Alice managed to freeze over $400,000 — a decisive victory for the victim and a morale-boosting win for the team.
The main lesson from Shining and Alice’s stories isn’t just about heroics under pressure, it’s that even today, as Binance turns 8, even the longest-serving Binancians don’t stop learning. Whether it’s Shining mastering new languages and rewriting entire systems at warp speed, or Alice dissecting unfamiliar blockchains to protect a single user’s funds, each story proves that growth never ends here.
Binance itself mirrors this spirit: still hardcore, still relentless in its pursuit of speed and scale, but now tempered by experience and guided by a deep understanding of the market. It has transformed into a global leader that not only moves fast but moves wisely.
Final Thoughts: The First Billion Users and Beyond
As the cycles keep turning and the headlines swing from euphoria to despair, Torri, one of the very first Quality Assurance Engineers, now based in Japan, keeps her insight simple:
“I’ve been through multiple crypto winters, and each time, I noticed something: the team stayed committed, kept their head down, and continued to work despite all odds. I’ve been here long enough to know we’ll be okay. I’m still here, so something must be working.”
Through the booms and busts, the ups and downs, the mass relocations, mind-blowing hacks, and overnight product sprints, these Binancians keep charging forward — all hands on deck, operating the warship in all weather conditions. Ask the eight originals why they’re still here, and they’ll tell you the same thing in different words: We haven’t finished building freedom of money yet — so the work goes on.
The mission now is clear: onboard the first billion users into crypto. There is still a long way to go. But if the past eight years prove anything, the best is yet to come.
