Changpeng “CZ” Zhao says his path to crypto wealth started far from trading floors or VC circuits in a Shanghai poker game where a friend told him to take Bitcoin seriously, and a second friend urged him to bet a meaningful slice of his net worth on it.
Binance Founder On His Bitcoin Origin Story
By Zhao’s account in an interview with the All-In podcast, he first encountered Bitcoin in mid-2013, while he was still a junior partner at a Shanghai-based software and services firm. “One of my friends tells me, ‘Look, you got to look at this thing called Bitcoin,’” Zhao said. “It took me about roughly six months to fully understand it… back then there was the Bitcoin talk forum and then that’s pretty much it.”
That friend, the Binance founder said, was Ron Tao, then a venture capitalist in China, who brought the topic up during a recurring, small-stakes poker game between entrepreneurs and investors. The pitch gained weight quickly when Zhao met Bobby Lee, who was preparing to leave Walmart and join BTC China (BTCC) as CEO.
Bobby, Zhao recalled, didn’t frame it as a hobbyist curiosity. He framed it like a portfolio decision. Zhao said Lee told him to put 10% of his net worth into Bitcoin: “There’s a small chance you will go to zero then you lose 10%. There’s a much higher chance you will go 10x and you’ll double your net worth.” Zhao said that was the moment he started digging into the white paper “more carefully.”
By the time Zhao felt he “fully understand[s] it,” he also felt he’d missed it. Bitcoin had run from roughly $70 in mid-2013 to around $1,000 by the end of 2013, he said. “I was like, I’m too late,” Zhao recalled. “Because everyone you talk to… has bought before you.”
JUST IN: ASIA’S RICHEST MAN TALKS ABOUT HOW HE MADE OVER $80,000,000,000 ON #BITCOIN AND CRYPTO
“YOU WILL ALWAYS FEEL LATE TO BTC.” 🚀 pic.twitter.com/GqilPyC6xI
— The Bitcoin Historian (@pete_rizzo_) February 10, 2026
Still, he decided he wasn’t going to sit the next major technology wave out. “For me it was very clear I got to do something in this industry,” Zhao said, describing Bitcoin as the second foundational technology of his working life after the internet. “I was 35, 36 — I wasn’t going to miss it. The next thing that’s going to come along is going to be 10, 15 years later… and that’s AI.”
That conviction translated into an unusually blunt trade: The Binance founder said he sold his Shanghai apartment to buy Bitcoin. “I said look I’m going to sell my apartment in Shanghai and then buy Bitcoin,” he told Chamath Palihapitiya. The sale, he said, came in tranches and he bought each time cash hit, even as the market slid. “I sold the apartment… for roughly $900,000… The first trench at $800 and then Bitcoin is dropping $600, $400. Kind of averaged to about $600.”
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He also described the social proof that mattered to him in that era: the early builders and miners he met while trying to pressure-test his own understanding, and a small Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas in December 2013 that contrasted sharply with the “drug lords” narrative dominating headlines after the Silk Road arrest. “When you go to the conference it was like a bunch of kids, a bunch of geeks… and they’re very nice people,” Zhao said, name-checking attendees like Vitalik Buterin and Charlie Lee.
Zhao’s account of “getting rich” isn’t a single lightning strike so much as a sequence: buying Bitcoin after liquidating property, then taking operating roles at early crypto companies (including Blockchain.info and OKCoin), and later building exchange infrastructure that became the foundation for Binance and its token-driven growth story.
Today, the exact size of the Binance founder’s fortune depends on who’s counting and how they value private stakes and token holdings. Forbes’ real-time tracker listed Zhao at $78.8 billion as of Feb. 10, 2026, placing him among the world’s richest individuals. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, which uses its own daily methodology, showed a materially lower figure for Zhao about $52.2 billion on its global rich list around the same time.
At press time, Binance Coin (BNB) traded at $592.44.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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