Descriptions:
Changpeng Zhao — universally known as CZ — sits down with the All-In Podcast for his most extensive public interview following four months in U.S. federal prison and Binance’s $4.3 billion settlement with the Department of Justice. The conversation starts from the beginning: CZ’s upbringing on a Chinese university campus during the lead-up to Tiananmen Square, his family’s multi-year immigration process to Vancouver, Canada, and his early career trajectory from McDonald’s to Bloomberg to traditional finance before discovering Bitcoin.
CZ walks through the founding of Binance in 2017 in granular detail — the BNB token launch that raised $15 million by selling 60% of supply, the original tokenomics including a 50% fee discount for BNB holders, and the company’s sharp pivot when China’s government issued a sweeping September 2017 memo banning crypto exchanges, ICOs, and mining simultaneously. Rather than wind down, CZ relocated the entire 30-person team to Tokyo within weeks, then navigated a series of additional jurisdictional moves as Binance scaled into the world’s largest exchange by volume.
The interview covers CZ’s candid perspective on the DOJ investigation, what the prison experience was like in practice, how the $4.3 billion fine was structured, and his current thinking on where Binance and the broader crypto regulatory environment are headed. For anyone tracking the intersection of exchange infrastructure, global crypto regulation, and the legal exposure that comes with building at the frontier of financial infrastructure, this is a detailed primary-source account from one of the most consequential figures in the industry’s first decade.
📺 Source: All-In Podcast · Published February 10, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
