Generally, people's wealth grows linearly, accumulating gradually over the years.
He is different; his wealth can be described as growing at a rocket-like pace because it only took him six months from his most significant entrepreneurial venture to reach a net worth of 2 billion USD, and it only took him four years to become the focus of global attention as the richest Chinese person.
Who is he, and how did he mythically transform himself into the richest Chinese person in the world in such a short time?
01
Who is he
In the 2021 Forbes billionaire rankings, a name that seemed quite unfamiliar to most suddenly emerged among the top five Chinese individuals—Zhao Changpeng.
Image data shows that this person's assets reached 573.3 billion at that time, ranking even ahead of heavyweights like Nongfu Spring's Zhong Shanshan, ByteDance's Zhang Yiming, CATL's Zeng Yuqun, and Tencent's Ma Huateng, becoming the undisputed No.1 in the Chinese wealthy list that year.
Zhao Changpeng suddenly ranked first on the global list of wealthy Chinese, but many people had never heard of his name before, primarily for two reasons.
Firstly, it indicates that his wealth growth rate is indeed very rapid, so fast that people haven't even heard of his name or know what industry he is in, and his assets have skyrocketed like a rocket!
Secondly, this is largely related to the fact that the industry he is engaged in has not been recognized in the country.
Zhao Changpeng also refers to himself as CZ; his name is Zhao Changpeng, and he calls himself CZ because when written in English, Zhao Changpeng becomes Changpeng Zhao, so he combined the first letters of his first and last names to create another name for himself.
In fact, whether you call him Zhao Changpeng or CZ, one undeniable fact is that he is a heavyweight figure in the global cryptocurrency market, known by all.
One of his most notable labels is that he is the founder of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, and he holds the most shares in Binance, with a stake as high as 30%.
02
Zhao Changpeng's youth
In 1977, Zhao Changpeng was born in Lianyungang, Jiangsu, and moved to Canada with his family when he was 12 years old. He attended McGill University, majoring in computer science.
After graduating from university, he smoothly entered the fintech field, starting his working life by developing trading systems at the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Bloomberg.
During this period, due to his strong technical skills and emotional intelligence, he received numerous accolades from colleagues and superiors, even becoming a leader in the relevant development team.
In 2005, after accumulating substantial practical experience, Zhao Changpeng ended his working life and embarked on his entrepreneurial journey. That year, he moved to Shanghai to establish a company called Fuxun Information Technology, which primarily developed high-frequency trading systems for brokerages.
How did a person who worked in the traditional financial market come into contact with digital currency and become the largest shareholder of the world's No.1 exchange?
02
First encountering Bitcoin and becoming a 'leek'
One day in 2013, Zhao Changpeng, who enjoyed and excelled at socializing, played poker with a group of friends.
During the game, a Sequoia Capital investor casually mentioned Bitcoin. At that time in 2013, it was one of the rare significant bull market periods in Bitcoin's history. For this investor, as a profit-maker in the financial market, discussing Bitcoin at the poker table was quite natural.
Little did he expect that the offhand mention of Bitcoin by a Sequoia Capital investor would spark a strong interest in Zhao Changpeng.
After that, Zhao Changpeng began his research on Bitcoin.
After reading the Bitcoin white paper repeatedly, in 2014, Zhao Changpeng made a move that many at the time found incomprehensible: he sold his house in Shanghai and went all in on Bitcoin at around 600 USD per coin! Becoming a 'madman' whose capital rate in Bitcoin was as high as 99%!
After making this crazy move, he, like any other investor at the time, certainly hoped for timely and substantial returns on his investment.
However, the ruthless market did not fulfill his hopes of becoming a heavyweight figure in this market later.
On the contrary, in the following period, the bull market of 2013 came to an end, and the bear market arrived as expected! The price of Bitcoin continued to decline, and at its lowest point, compared to the highest price in that bull market, the Bitcoin investment of Zhao Changpeng saw a rapid evaporation of 70% of his principal.
However, what made him both laugh and cry was that after he sold his house for Bitcoin in 2014, the housing price in Shanghai skyrocketed, doubling compared to 2013!
03
Searching for industry opportunities
After Zhao Changpeng's crazy actions faced the market's ruthless blow, it would be a lie to say he wasn't sad. After all, he is human, and like anyone else, he would have a dislike for losses.
However, he indeed did not blindly sell the Bitcoin he purchased at high prices during the bull market. This is true. After fully understanding the Bitcoin white paper as a programmer, he knew and firmly believed that holding Bitcoin would definitely win him a prosperous future.
At the same time, he began looking for opportunities, seeking a chance to have significant influence in the blockchain field and the digital currency trading market.
To this end, he first participated in the wallet development for the blockchain project Blockchain.info, and later, in March 2014, at a blockchain-related forum, Zhao Changpeng met Xu Mingxing, the founder of the domestic digital currency exchange OKCoin, and soon after, he joined OKCoin as the technical director.
After nine months at OKCoin, Zhao Changpeng had disagreements with Xu Mingxing and ultimately chose to leave.
After leaving OKCoin, he spent considerable effort developing a system for trading collectibles such as stamps, coins, and phone cards—Kuaijie Technology.
As a result, some speculate that he may completely leave this cryptocurrency market industry.
What was unexpected was that two years later, in 2017, Zhao Changpeng once again re-entered the digital currency field and made a decision that would change the industry and his future.
04
Seizing the opportunity to create Binance
As early as when Zhao Changpeng served as the technical director of OKCoin, he had already identified two major pain points existing in the exchanges at that time: poor user experience and weak market liquidity.
The reason he returned to the industry in 2017, I think, apart from having found ways to address the above two major pain points, there are two other factors: first, he must have predicted that the cryptocurrency market was about to usher in another super bull market; second, he saw that the ICO boom at that time was a very favorable opportunity for his entrepreneurship.
Otherwise, why did he choose to return at that critical moment, not earlier or later?
On June 24, 2017, after he returned to the industry, Binance Exchange was announced to be established. At the same time, Binance also publicly announced its intention to issue its own platform token BNB with a total supply of 200 million, including an ICO quota of 100 million.
After the above news was announced by Binance, its platform token BNB was snatched up, and within ten days, the quota of 100 million was completely exhausted. This also allowed Binance to obtain 15 million USD in early project funding in a very short time.
With this funding, Binance's technical team, under the experienced leadership of Zhao Changpeng, quickly launched an incredibly smooth trading system, successfully addressing the common pain point of poor user experience that existed among other exchanges at the time.
To address the issue of insufficient market liquidity that many exchanges faced at that time, Binance's solution was to expand its market operations and target globalization as its market goal. Although this move would not immediately bring significant traffic to Binance, 'once the phoenix tree is planted, why worry about not attracting gold phoenixes?'
05
Binance welcomes immense wealth
As mentioned earlier, when Binance was first established, it raised 15 million USD in startup funds through an ICO of BNB. However, after Binance's trading features were fully opened to users, the ICO fundraising method did not stop immediately in the cryptocurrency circle but rather intensified, reaching a completely crazy level.
At that time, some ill-intentioned individuals took advantage of this opportunity, casually making up a project name, asking someone to write a white paper, and then finding one or two people with some influence in the cryptocurrency circle to promote it, easily raising a considerable amount of funds. This caused significant losses to many uninformed investors.
In this situation, the government began to take steps to rectify the chaotic situation in the cryptocurrency market to protect investors' interests. A crisis that triggered a strong 'earthquake' in the cryptocurrency circle, which would have a profound impact on the future of the cryptocurrency market, was quietly approaching the industry.
On September 4, 2017, our country's central bank, together with seven ministries, jointly released an announcement (regarding the prevention of risks from token issuance and financing). The announcement included: a comprehensive ban on ICOs, classifying ICOs as illegal financial activities; exchanges were shut down, requiring domestic exchanges (Huobi, OKCoin, Bitcoin China) to stop RMB trading, and to complete the withdrawal by the end of October 2017.
After the announcement was released, domestic investors were in a state of panic. To avoid losing all their investments, many began to hurriedly sell their digital currencies. On that day, the price of Bitcoin fell from 4,900 USD to around 2,900 USD, a staggering drop of 40%.
At this time, some attentive investors noticed that Binance's name was not mentioned in the list of exchanges required to shut down. After some investigation, they learned that Binance had originally positioned itself as a global market and had set up its servers abroad from the very beginning.
As a result, these investors who were optimistic about Bitcoin and unwilling to see their investments fail began to shift their positions to Binance.
As more and more domestic investors realized this, Binance, a small exchange that had just been established, quickly gained a considerable number of new users.
Thus, Binance, which had already laid out its overseas market in advance, not only was not greatly affected by the 9.4 turmoil but instead received immense wealth that several exchanges envied.
06
Six months with a hundred billion assets
After the 9.4 turmoil, Binance accelerated its overseas market expansion according to established plans, and its user base continued to grow as the market scope expanded.
At the same time, the three major exchanges in the country began their development in overseas markets. As the three exchanges started to push into foreign markets, the cryptocurrency market gradually emerged from the shadow of 9.4 and began to warm up.
As the market gradually improved day by day, the price of Bitcoin also began to soar, ultimately leading to one of the largest bull markets in Bitcoin history. In this bull market, the price of Bitcoin reached over 25,000.
However, at this time, Binance, which had looked up to the three major exchanges half a year ago, had already grown its user base into a mountain that the three exchanges could not surpass.
By February 2018, Binance's global user count had surpassed 6 million, with daily trading volume reaching as high as 10 billion USD at its peak. In just half a year, Binance transformed from a newly established, little-known exchange into the 'Everest' of this industry!
Binance succeeded! Naturally, Zhao Changpeng, as the founder of Binance, also succeeded.
Also in February 2018, Forbes magazine first published the global digital currency rich list, with Zhao Changpeng valued at 1.1 to 2 billion USD, ranking third on the rich list.
From the time he created Binance to the time his net worth was estimated at 1.1 to 2 billion, in just six months, Zhao Changpeng became a Chinese person with a hundred billion RMB.
07
Becoming the richest Chinese person
In March 2018, the Bitcoin price began to decline after forming a double top pattern, and the cryptocurrency market turned bearish, commencing a new round of cryptocurrency market cycles.
In that bear market, although Binance had already become a top player in the industry, it was still inevitably affected by the broader environment and had once experienced layoffs to reduce expenses.
However, faced with the existing difficulties, Binance did not stop its forward momentum. Before the arrival of the bull market in 2021, Binance began to build its own closed-loop ecosystem.
With the construction of the Binance Smart Chain, the platform token BNB received greater empowerment. Coupled with the sales mechanism of BNB and the emergence of launchpad and staking earning mechanisms around BNB, despite the decrease in trading volume during the long bear market, Binance significantly enhanced user stickiness.
In March 2020, the global outbreak of COVID-19 caused severe turbulence in the global financial markets. Even the US stock market experienced three circuit breakers on the 9th, 12th, and 16th, which left even the stock market guru Warren Buffett shocked.
In this context, the cryptocurrency market, which is much smaller than the US stock market in terms of both capital volume and user scale, certainly cannot remain unaffected.
On March 12, the day of the second circuit breaker in the US stock market, cryptocurrency investors, who had been struggling for several days, finally began to panic sell. On that day, the price of Bitcoin fell from 7,000 USD to 5,000 USD, and on the 13th, it dropped again to 3,800 USD, with a total decline of nearly 50% in just two days.
The recent drop has been a huge loss for sellers, but for those buying at the bottom, it has been a godsend opportunity.
Subsequent market trends proved that the price of Bitcoin at 3,800 USD on March 13 was the golden bottom of that market cycle. After the panic that ensued on March 12 gradually dissipated, Bitcoin once again welcomed a super bull market that would go down in history.
In the bull market of 2021, Bitcoin eventually rose to around 69,000 USD, while Binance's platform token soared from an initial ICO price of 0.15 USD to over 650 USD. Binance's daily trading volume peaked at 760 billion USD, and its market value exceeded 300 billion USD.
As a result, in 2021, Zhao Changpeng, who had created Binance just four years earlier, saw his personal valuation soar again, becoming the undisputed richest Chinese person in the world at that time.
Full text summary:
Some believe Zhao Changpeng's success is due to luck, but after studying his journey to success, I believe it is entirely due to his abilities.
Because in him, I have seen the following extraordinary abilities:
1. Strong technical prowess: This has allowed his exchange to consistently lead in user experience over other exchanges.
2. Accurate forecasting and precise timing skills: This allowed Binance to seize the opportunity of ICOs and establish itself during the bull market window of 2017.
3. Accurate judgment of industry opportunities: The industry he chose has a large growth space and a high profit ceiling.
With these abilities, if he doesn't succeed, who will?
