Is it possible to go from a political refugee from China and an employee in McDonalds to the head of the largest cryptocurrency exchange? It turns out that nothing is impossible if you do not stop there and constantly set new goals for yourself. This is exactly what the head of the cryptobirgy Binance Changpen Zhao does and now we will tell its story.
early years
Changpen Zhao was born in a family of teachers in 1977 year in the Chinese province of Jiangsu. His parents did not support the policies of the Chinese Communist Party, and his father took part in protests against the authorities, known as the "Tiananmen Square Massacre", when troops dispersed the demonstrators with firearms and tanks.
Fearing persecution by the authorities, Changpen's parents move to Canada in the city of Vancouver. There, the future billionaire went to school and at the same time worked part time at McDonalds to help his parents with money. After school, he entered the University of Montreal in the Faculty of Computer Science. During his studies, Changpen Zhao mastered trading on the stock exchange, which determined his future path in life. After completing the training, he first worked on the New York Stock Exchange, where he developed a system of trading orders. Then he gets a job in the Bloomberg financial department for the position of software developer for trading platforms.
Career
After joining Bloomberg, Changpen's career quickly went up. In just four years, he received four promotions and in 2005, he was already in charge of coordinating three development teams based in London, Tokyo and New Jersey.
It would seem that life was a success and you can rest on your laurels, but Zhao wanted more and that is why he quits Bloomberg and opens his own company, Fusion Systems. In this company, he worked 8 years, doing the same as before, namely the development of various services for exchanges. But in 2013, Changphen Zhao discovers cryptocurrency for himself and, as a true follower of the Satoshi Nakamoto case, he began with white paper Bitcoin.
Learning about a completely new world of cryptocurrency, Changpen Zhao began to study it and, if possible, attended all thematic conferences and other events. So he met the head of BTCC cryptobirds Bobby Lee and Roger Wer, who at that time was also called Bitcoin Jesus. Taking advantage of new acquaintances, Zhao gets a job at Blockchain.info, which at that time was still a little-known startup. It is believed that it was Changphen Zhao’s personal contribution that helped Blockchain.info grow quickly in one of the key players in the blockchain industry.
In 2014, Zhao joins OKCoin, the largest Chinese stock exchange of that time, in which he worked for about a year and made many useful contacts. But he could not stay long on this exchange because of problems in the team, which could be related to the fact that the management rejected his ideas for expanding the business.
After leaving OKCoin Changphen, Zhao did not abandon cryptocurrency, but began preparing to launch his own cryptobirth. What is interesting, according to Zhao in 2014, he sold his house and bought Bitcoin at 600 $, and then the first cryptocurrency collapsed to 200 $. But he did not abandon the cryptomere, did not succumb to panic sales and did not abandon his plans.
Creating Binance
In 2017, during the boom of ICO projects, Changpen Zhao founds the cryptobirge Binance, on whose account 10 was originally a thousand. $ invested from his own funds. And the main part of the team of the site was made up of employees who Changpen lured to his work from OKCoin.
Binance was the first exchange that launched as a result of ICO, collecting $ 15 million. The secret of success was to release their own cryptocurrency BNB Coin, which provided its owners with excellent bonuses for trading on the site.
In less than a year, Binance has become the leading exchange in the world in terms of daily trading, and its BNB Coin token is in the top 20 cryptocurrency by capitalization. But even this result does not satisfy Changpen Zhao and now Binance is working on creating its own decentralized exchange, opened a trading platform in Ugadna with support for fiat currencies and plans to launch similar services on each continent. But the main plan for the development of Binance is to transform the exchange into a decentralized community of traders who will work on a special blockchain, where BNB Coin will be used as the main cryptocurrency.
Life principles
In conclusion, we would like to talk about the life principles of Changphen Zhao and for what he is respected in the crypto community. First, always, when important events occur at Binance, such as a malfunction, the addition of new assets or the opening of subsidiaries. Changpen is the first to report this through his twitter, he is always in touch and shows respect for the clients of the exchange in any situation.
Secondly, Zhao does not hesitate to openly stand up for cryptocurrency. So he criticized Warren Buffett himself, explaining all his attacks on Bitcoin by saying that Buffett simply does not understand cryptocurrencies. And when Vitaly Buterin wished all centralized exchanges to burn in hell, he interceded for his platform and politely put the creator of Ethereum in place. Explaining that centralized exchanges are the main gateway for raising capital in the cryptoindustry without them, things would have gone much worse.
Here he is, billionaire Changpen Zhao, who continues to write the story of his life, and we will definitely release a continuation of this article.