Changpeng “CZ” Zhao says his path to crypto wealth began far from trading on the floor or in VC circuits at a Shanghai poker game where a friend told him to take Bitcoin seriously, and a second friend urged him to bet a reasonable chunk of his net worth on it.
Binance Founder On His Bitcoin Origin Story
According to Zhao in an interview with the All-In podcast, he first encountered Bitcoin in mid-2013, when he was a junior partner at a software and services company based in Shanghai. “One of my friends tells me, ‘Look, you should look at this thing called Bitcoin,'” Zhao said. “It took me about six months to fully understand…
That friend, the founder of Binance said, was Ron Tao, then a venture capitalist in China, who brought up this topic during an ongoing poker game, between entrepreneurs and investors. The pitch quickly gained weight when Zhao met Bobby Lee, who was preparing to leave Walmart and join BTC China (BTCC) as CEO.
Bobby, Zhao remembers, did not consider it a hobby hobby. He framed it as a portfolio decision. Zhao said Lee told him to put 10% of his value in Bitcoin: “It’s very unlikely that you will go to zero and lose 10%. Zhao said that was when he started digging into the white paper “carefully.”
When Zhao felt that he “fully understood[s] He felt missed. Bitcoin went from $70 in mid-2013 to nearly $1,000 by the end of 2013, he said.
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However, he decided that he would not stay in the next stage of advanced technology. “It was very clear to me that I had to do something in this field,” Zhao said, describing Bitcoin as the second technology that forms the basis of his working life after the Internet. “I was 35, 36 – I couldn’t miss it. The next thing that’s going to happen is 10, 15 years later … and that’s AI.”
That conviction translated into an unusual transaction: The founder of Binance said he sold his Shanghai apartment to buy Bitcoin. “I said look, I’m going to sell my house in Shanghai and buy Bitcoin,” he told Chamath Palihapitiya. He said that the sale of these goods came separately and he always bought when there was a lot of money, even if the market was smooth. “I sold a house… for about $900,000… The first ditch is $800 and Bitcoin is down $600, $400. It’s about $600.”
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He also described the social evidence that was important to him at the time: the first builders and miners he met while trying to pressure-test his own understanding, and the small Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas in December 2013 that was very different from the story of “drug lords” that dominated the headlines after the arrest of Silk Road. “When you go to the conference, it’s like a bunch of kids, a bunch of geniuses… and they’re really nice people,” Zhao said, looking at the audience like Vitalik Buterin and Charlie Lee.
Zhao’s account of “getting rich” is not one lightning strike as much as a sequence: buying Bitcoin after liquidating assets, then taking operational roles in early crypto companies (including Blockchain.info and OKCoin), and later building the exchange infrastructure that became the foundation of Binance and its token-driven growth story.
Today, the exact size of the Binance founder’s fortune depends on who is open and how they value the private stakes and token holdings. Forbes’ real-time tracker put Zhao at $78.8 billion as of Feb. 10, 2026, which puts him among the richest people in the world. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, which uses its daily methodology, showed Zhao’s lowest figure of $52.2 billion on its global rich list during the same period.
At press time, Binance Coin (BNB) traded at $592.44.
The featured image was created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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