We read CZ’s ‘memoir’ to protect anyone else from having to

When Changpeng Zhao, one of the world’s richest men, decided to write and publish a book, he chose not to hire professional editors, find a publishing house, or do anything that people typically do when writing and publishing a book.

Instead, the founder of Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, has self-published Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance. 

We read it, so you and others don’t have to.

If time is tight, just know that it is awful. Completely vapid, contradictory, egotistical and at some points just plain wrong. To call it a memoir would be a disservice to great writers of the genre (Julia Fox, Jeannette McCurdy) and even calling it a book feels like an insult to great books (The Guinness Book of Records, The Gruffalo).

If you’re looking for juicy insights into CZ’s feuds with Star Xu of OKX and FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, or how he got a presidential pardon, you’re going to be disappointed. Nothing contentious is delved into. The 364 page, roughly chronological read is at times a notes-app-esque, sometimes bullet-pointed telling of stories, lists of countries CZ travelled to, ministers he met, and how his company has changed the world — with a heavy-handed emphasis on staying humble. You have been warned. 

Freedom of Money begins with a foreword by Yi He, CZ’s longtime romantic partner and recently appointed co-CEO of Binance. That nepotism goes some way to explain why she compares him to one of Shakespeare’s greatest characters, writing:

Every reader finds their own Hamlet; ten million people see ten million different versions of CZ.

She continues:

He has always believed that doing the right thing is the only rule that matters. The tides of the world swirl around him, and he lets them pass.

Presumably “tides of the world” also refers to the regulations governing the crypto industry, rules which under his leadership Binance has ignored, flouted and occasionally been punished for. 

The anecdotes begin when CZ was young. He describes growing up in Zhong Hu, a village in rural China without running water or gas. Stories of family life are peppered with insights like this, when the oil lamps at home were replaced by lightbulbs:

My sister told me that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. I was like, “How the hell did he come up with that?”

Zhao’s family later moved to Hefei, a city in eastern China, and then to Vancouver, where CZ’s father studied a PhD at the University of British Columbia. There, CZ slept in a windowless storage room in their two bedroom house.

Maybe that’s why I don’t suffer from claustrophobia. To this day, I’m content in small spaces by myself.

It’s ironic foreshadowing of CZ’s spell in prison — he later describes ardently not wanting to be put in solitary confinement. Clearly small spaces have their limits. 

How and why CZ got interested in crypto is told bluntly. At a poker game in July 2013, Ron Cao (co-founder of venture capital firm Lightspeed China Partners) and entrepreneur Bobby Lee told CZ about bitcoin. He downloaded a bitcoin wallet and read about the cryptocurrency.

CZ eschews any frivolous scene-setting as he describes this transformative moment, simply stating: 

After the first bitcoin transaction, I was amazed. It was the same feeling as when I first used a water pump, when I first saw a lightbulb, and when I first sent and received an email. I knew right there and then: The blockchain is the new technology for money.

Other illuminating lines highlight the need for an editor more than why CZ came to believe in crypto so strongly:

James Thomas (name could be wrong) explained XRP to me

CZ moved between various jobs, passed up being the head of Mt. Gox China, and then worked at OKCoin, the crypto exchange now known as OKX that sponsors an alleged rule-breaking English football team that’s desperately trying to ruin the author’s life win the Premier League.

CZ and OKCoin founder Star Xu have repeatedly clashed in the past over allegations that CZ faked contracts during his time there. Perhaps for fear of writing something legally contentious, little of that is explained here. 

Not long after I started my role at OKCoin, certain aspects started to bother me. I won’t go into the details here. Plenty has been written before. Let’s just say there were cultural and value differences.

(For his part, Xu called CZ “a habitual liar” after the book was published, saying “he continues to make false statements to the world.”)

In 2015, CZ launched a business in Japan that built exchange systems for other venues, before becoming an exchange itself. Binance was born and from then on, its growth is attributed purely to prioritising users. Again and again, CZ lists stories of how the exchange helped its users, sometimes at the detriment of making money. 

US officials have a different view — stating that a lack of controls to prevent money laundering contributed to high profits and trading volumes. Which, we suppose, is one way of prioritising users. (“I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility,” CZ said at the time when the US hit Binance with a record $4.3bn fine.)

Stories of generosity towards customers are interspersed with CZ’s generosity towards giving jobs to men on the street, sometimes literally. 

One evening, a guy named Mario showed up at our office at 7 PM, expressing his desire to work for us. He mentioned he spoke Spanish and could assist with our Spanish-speaking users. We hired him.

No due diligence? No problem. 

As Binance grew, so too did regulators’ interests. CZ’s solution? Move countries to avoid scrutiny. Japan’s financial regulator asked about Binance’s operating location and registration status. CZ writes: 

Deep down, I had a feeling we might need to move again soon.

He writes repeatedly about targeting “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to deals. That approach seems to have extended to regulators, with CZ excitedly listing meeting scores of officials at countries with little crypto experience. 

After a 2018 lunch in the UK meanwhile, he simply states: 

But I knew the UK wouldn’t be an early adopter of blockchain.

There’s no mention of Binance’s repeated clashes and eventual ban from the UK by the FCA for operating without appropriate licensing, among other concerns. 

Later, CZ blames increased regulatory scrutiny on his now-jailed foe, Sam Bankman-Fried:

I didn’t mind his constant self-promotion, but it often invited regulatory scrutiny to industry players, though it never seemed to land on him.

CZ eventually landed in the UAE, which he applauds for its tech-savvy approach to crypto, in 2021. Omar Sultan Al Olama, a senior minister there, offered to get CZ a golden visa after one meeting, which he received “less than 12 hours later”. Al Olama didn’t reply to a request for comment on whether and why he offered CZ the golden visa. 

Throughout the book, CZ presents anecdotes that convey his management judgment and simultaneous nonchalance, the latter an apparent attempt to absolve himself from any subsequent problems that arose.

Of Binance’s $500mn investment into Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, he writes:

It was a finger in the air number, without much financial analysis or calculations.

Binance’s investment arm, YZi Labs, invested $3mn into Terra, operator of the LUNA stablecoin whose collapse precipitated the failure of FTX and the onset of the global crypto winter. Cue more hands-off management: 

I never interacted directly with Do Kwon, the founder of Terra, not even joining a conference call. I largely forgot about the investment.

Instead of caring about how money is being spent, CZ presents himself as caring much more about his growing fans, the “600+ selfies in less than 30 minutes” that he took at a Vietnam conference, or which of his tweets went viral and were retweeted by who.

That heavy air of nonchalance pervades much of CZ’s attitude to the rest of the cryptosphere. Even when FTX collapses, a seismic, market-moving event in his industry, he writes:

I didn’t follow the news but saw tidbits on Twitter.

He makes no mention of tweeting that Binance would dump its roughly $600mn holding of FTX’s token FTT, a move which helped spark the exchange’s rapid downward spiral. CZ also at one point agreed to buy FTX “to protect the users and the industry” but his reasons for quickly backing out aren’t explained. He simply writes:

We decided not to proceed with the deal.

CZ also gets facts plain wrong, writing earlier that:

one of [Binance’s] clients that went to FTX was Three Arrows, which later went bankrupt following FTX.

But Three Arrows went bankrupt first, by July 2022, while FTX collapsed in November that year.

CZ also claims in 2019 to have “quickly said, ‘no’” to Binance doing proprietary trading on its own exchange. But two trading entities controlled by CZ lay at the heart of the SEC lawsuit against Binance in 2023, which said they conducted “manipulative trading” on its US arm. Binance US called the lawsuit “baseless” at the time.

Never mind that. CZ instead highlights more acts of goodwill, like how he helped ChatGPT become accessible in Bahrain in 2023 after asking Sam Altman why it was blocked. OpenAI declined to comment.

Other matters such as the launch of BUSD, Binance’s US dollar stablecoin, are again given a dismissive treatment, a transparent attempt by CZ to absolve himself of any responsibility when the New York financial regulator later shut the coin down. About the launch, he writes inspiringly:

I agreed but didn’t examine the commercial terms closely.

No mention of adopting anti money laundering laws or stringent customer checks is included. Regulators are constantly blamed for slowing things down. 

Finally, CZ describes his negotiations with the Department of Justice and attempts to avoid prison. He puts the blame for much of his eventual four month prison sentence on bad advice from an army of lawyers and consultants, and naturally denies the US claims against him. 

In the book’s prologue, he writes:

I voluntarily flew to the U.S. and pleaded guilty to a single violation of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) . . . Granted, ‘effective’ is subjective; there is no universal metric for compliance.

Sure, but there are laws.

Later, as prison loomed, CZ turned to new friends for advice, highlighting the high calibre of his social circle…

Through friends, I was introduced to a few people who had actually served time in prison

. . . and describes prison life like you would when filling in a survey after receiving a parcel:

The entire process was designed to deliver the lowest possible customer satisfaction

After four months in a low-security Californian prison, he transitioned to a halfway house, then confinement at his sister’s home, then an ICE detention centre for overstaying his visa.