Crypto Leads Changpeng Zhao To The World's Rich List With $ 19 Billion In Wealth

JAKARTA - No one ever predicts that Ethereum can make someone a new rich person when a cryptocurrency or cryptocurrency like Bitcoin can make someone a new rich person.

Crypto assets used to be considered one-sided, but as the price of crypto assets soared, many investors and tenders abandoned shares. They hunt money quickly through cryptocurrency.

Changpeng Zhao is one of nine new rich people on the Forbes list. The cleverness of seeing opportunities in crypto assets makes the coffers increase. He has a total wealth of $ 1.9 billion.

Today, Changpeng is ranked 1,664th as the richest person globally and 216th richest person in China.

This man from China is the founder of one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world named Binance. He started the crypto business from the fun alone. It is now estimated he owns 30 percent of the company.

CZ is a familiar call, first founded Binance Exchange, a crypto exchange in 2017. Seven months after its founding, Binance became the world's largest crypto exchange. Binance was able to serve 1.4 million transactions per second and managed to attract 6 million users per second.

"No decentralized exchange today can handle our volume (Binance). Nothing is as safe as us", CZ told CNN when interviewed by Forbes, in February 2018.

Buy Bitcoin Apartment

In the late 1980s, CZ and his family emigrated to Vancouver, Canada. CZ grew up as a teenager in general even though his father was a professor of geophysics. CZ used to work at McDonald's and part-time at a gas station.

Despite working part-time, CZ continued to attend high school. He studied computer science at Montreal's McGill University before moving to Tokyo to work on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and moved again to New York while working at Bloomberg's Tradebook to develop futures trading software.

CZ's career went smoothly, he was already a computer coding whiz at the age of 27. Not only that, but he also received promotion three times in the space of two years to manage teams in New Jersey, London, and Tokyo.

CZ then decided to quit his job and moved to Shanghai to start Fusion Systems, a well-known company that built the fastest high-frequency trading system for brokers. From there, he began to learn about Bitcoin crypto. CZ had to willingly sell its apartment in Shanghai in 2014 to learn and transact crypto assets.

Later, he chose to join blockchain.info as the third member of the cryptocurrency wallet team. CZ is believed to have been head of development working alongside top people, such as Roger Ver and Ben Reeves for eight months.

CZ also briefly tried as chief technology officer of OKCoin for less than a year. After that, CZ began to consider creating its own digital asset exchange. From there, Binance was born and expanded out of China.

As fast as lightning, CZ relocated the business to Japan and was immediately seen in Binance trading volume which is no longer dominated by China. Currently, 38 percent of Binance users are in the United States. Then, the second-largest market in Japan.

CZ begins to enlarge the Binance team. It employs developers and customer service staff. In just three to six months, he doubled the number of teams to 300.

In fact, it has received more than 5,000 applications for crypto coin registration. However, he stressed it only accepts credible transactions.

Binance Allegedly Laundered Taxes

In the midst of successfully managing Binance, CZ encountered a gravel road. Binance Holdings Ltd is facing a legal case that is being investigated by the United States Department of Justice (US) and the Internal Revenue Service. The investigation relates to money laundering activities and tax violations.

A forensics firm, Chainalysis Inc, found that last year, transactions made on Binance were more related to criminal activity than cryptocurrency exchanges.

"We take our legal obligations very seriously and engage with regulators and law enforcement collaboratively", CZ said, quoted by CNBC, Sunday, May 23.

CZ also said its company would not comment on statements from various parties.

"We have worked hard to build a robust compliance program that combines the principles and anti-money laundering tools used by financial institutions to detect and deal with suspicious activity", he said.