Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by
Ben McKenzie
and
Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023
Alongside his colleague at FTX Ryan Salame, Sam started publicly shit-talking Binance’s Changpeng Zhao. The two yukked it up over Twitter. “Been an absolute pleasure watching @cz_binance have the extremely difficult but transformative debates on twitter this past week to ensure the crypto industry moves forward in the best possible way,” wrote Salame on October 29. “Excited to see him repping the industry in DC going forward,” responded SBF. “[U]h, he is allowed to go to DC, right?” It was an extremely bold move, even by crypto standards. Was Sam bragging about his government connections, which kept him safe and put Changpeng Zhao and Binance under the microscope?
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—William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade On April 1, 2022, our months-long investigation into the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, was published in the Washington Post. By now we had heard from multiple sources that the number of meaningful players in crypto was actually extremely small. At or near the top of that list was the founder and CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao. Born in China but raised in Canada, CZ, as he preferred to call himself, graduated from college with a degree in computer science. After school, he relocated to Tokyo, working for the Tokyo Stock Exchange and then Bloomberg Tradebook, where he developed futures trading software. In the mid-2000s he moved again to Shanghai to start his own firm developing software for high-frequency trading, Fusion Systems.
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Just as exchanges like Binance have helped “decentralize” finance, the company had essentially decentralized its workforce and had no central headquarters. Nominally headquartered in the Cayman Islands, Binance’s employees are scattered across the world, with growing hubs in Paris and the UAE. Binance’s crypto-nerd-celebrity chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, serves as the company’s face via Twitter while jetting among various global tech and financial capitals. He now appears to be based in Abu Dhabi. Binance is a company dealing with billions of dollars in daily transactions. A Binance representative said of its structure that the company “is a remote-first organization, and as such does not have traditional buildings or campuses like Apple or Google.”
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by
Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023
But the hucksters, zealots, opportunists, and outright scammers who created the boom got unbelievably, unimaginably, impossibly rich. Bankman-Fried told me that as many as five of his colleagues at FTX were billionaires. And that was just a single crypto company. Many unprofitable start-ups with questionably legal business plans were valued in the billions. Changpeng Zhao, who founded another crypto exchange called Binance, made a fortune estimated at $96 billion. The numbers got so large that even the most delusional crypto fantasies started to sound reasonable. It seemed like nothing could stop crypto’s manic rise. Until, of course, the house of cards collapsed.
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I didn’t know where to go next. But a week after I got back to New York, a seemingly innocuous tweet sent by Sam Bankman-Fried set off an unpredictable chain of events that would finally reveal the rot at the center of crypto. The tweet was directed at the richest man in crypto: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. And it was meant to be a joke. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Assets Are Not Fine “Excited to see him repping the industry in DC going forward! uh, he is still allowed to go to DC, right?” Sam Bankman-Fried wrote on Twitter on October 29, 2022. He was responding to an obsequious message posted by one of his deputies praising Changpeng Zhou, better known as CZ, the head of rival exchange Binance.
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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Reuters called Binance: Angus Berwick and Tom Wilson, “How Crypto Giant Binance Became a Hub for Hackers, Fraudsters and Drug Traffickers,” Reuters, June 6, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “we are operating”: SEC v. Binance Holdings Limited, BAM Trading Services Inc., BAM Management US Holdings Inc., and Changpeng Zhao, 1:23-cv-01599 (D.D.C. June 5, 2023), Complaint. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT whether there was any truth: CZ told my Businessweek colleague Max Chafkin that a potential criminal prosecution was not why he avoided the United States. “I think I’m totally allowed in the U.S., no problem,” he said.
Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service
by
Michael Lewis
Published 18 Mar 2025
This work has, among other things, led to the rescue of 23 children from rape and assault, the seizure of a quarter-million child abuse videos, and the arrest of 370 alleged pedophiles. It has resulted in the largest-ever seizure of cryptocurrency headed to Hamas, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. When Changpeng Zhao, chief of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, reported to prison in June, it was because Koopman’s small cybercrime team had uncovered evidence of the firm’s money laundering for terrorists and sanctions-busting for Iran, Syria and Russia. In the past 10 years, this work has returned more than $12 billion to victims of crime and to the U.S.
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In 2018, Koopman had leads revealing that Binance, with 20 to 30 percent of the U.S. market and $65 billion in U.S. transactions a day, was failing to comply with the rules that govern any financial services business that has U.S. customers. It was hard to know where to start the investigation. Even Binance’s location was unclear. It was initially in China, then Hong Kong, then Japan, then Malta. Changpeng Zhao, the Canadian co-founder and CEO, lived in Dubai. “They existed everywhere but nowhere,” Koopman says. “We had to come up with new methods.” The lead agent on the case, Adam Rutkowski, had a computer science background that made him well suited to a pursuit that would involve no physical surveillance, no interviews with company principals.
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto
by
Benjamin Wallace
Published 18 Mar 2025
Calvin Ayre tweeted a picture of himself and Wright, flanked by London barristers, captioned: “Craig and I polishing our muskets.” Bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack retweeted this, adding, “Craig Wright is not Satoshi! When do I get sued?” Wright sued him too. Binance and Kraken, two of the three largest cryptocurrency exchanges, delisted BSV, and Binance leader Changpeng Zhao retweeted, “An attack against one is an attack against all.” There had long been a small tribe of volunteer Wright investigators—one had obtained Wright’s military records from the National Archives of Australia—but now they accelerated their efforts. DebunkingFaketoshi, whose real name was Jim and who worked at a hospital in Sydney, published an investigation of whether fiber-optic cable sufficient to launch Bitcoin had existed in Bagnoo, where Wright claimed Bitcoin was born.
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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Craig Wright is not Satoshi! When do I get sued?”: @petermccormack, Twitter, April 10, 2019, recorded in Judgment, Wright v. McCormack, High Court of Justice (U.K.), Queen’s Bench Division, Media and Communications List, August 1, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Changpeng Zhao retweeted: @cz_binance, Twitter, April 12, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT one had obtained Wright’s military records: Jameson Lopp, “OP ED: How Many Wrongs Make a Wright,” Bitcoin Magazine, April 18, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT DebunkingFaketoshi: @jimmy007forsure, Twitter, June 25, 2019.
Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by
Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020
As Coinbase sat back and waited for the market to turn, it failed to account for rapid changes that were happening in crypto even during the downturn—changes that threatened to make Coinbase obsolete. The company was like a driver tuning up an old Buick even as, in a garage next door, his rival was detailing a Porsche. Brian’s new rival went by the name of CZ (the initials stand for Changpeng Zhao, but everyone uses the shorthand version). CZ wears wireless glasses and close-cropped black hair. In public, his go-to attire is a black hoodie emblazoned with the name of his company in yellow letters: BINANCE. Since he appeared on the scene in 2017, CZ has emerged as the most disruptive figure in the history of crypto after Satoshi and Vitalik.
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
by
Michael Lewis
Published 2 Oct 2023
In Hong Kong, Sam and his small team began to pitch the billionaire founders of existing exchanges on the idea of paying Alameda Research (Gary) to create a crypto exchange, different in important ways from any that existed. Alameda would supply the technology; the existing exchanges would supply the customers, and the trust. The most likely buyer, and the person to whom Sam himself pitched the idea, was CZ. CZ was Changpeng Zhao, CEO of the crypto exchange Binance. Born in Jiangsu province, he was raised, from adolescence, in Canada, and educated there, returning eventually to China, with Canadian citizenship. He’d run through some ordinary jobs on the fringes of high finance—including a stint as a developer at Bloomberg—before landing as the chief technology officer at OKCoin.
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
by
Kate Conger
and
Ryan Mac
Published 17 Sep 2024
Morgan Stanley pitched the deal to Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase, and to the Web3 Foundation, an organization that sought to develop other decentralized digital currencies beyond Bitcoin. But it was Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, that pulled the trigger. The company, led by an enigmatic Chinese-born founder named Changpeng Zhao, was flush. It facilitated more than $75 billion in daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies including Ethereum, Dogecoin, and others. It committed $500 million to Musk’s cause with the intent of weaving blockchain technology into the social network. * * * >>> On the afternoon of May 6, Musk walked through the glass doors of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters for the first time since his deal was announced.
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by
Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024
“He was an MIT graduate guy with crazy hair, who kind of said all the right things. He was totally nonconformist and countercultural and they’re like, oh, that’s who should be running the crypto market.” Qureshi explained to me that the cryptocurrency exchange market had been dominated by companies with Chinese founders—particularly Binance, run by SBF nemesis Changpeng Zhao. Between political risk associated with Chinese investments, a lack of cultural ties, and sometimes outright bias, an American founder was bound to get extra credit. And FTX looked like a relative safe haven in a risky sector that venture firms had fear of missing out on. A VC firm’s partnership agreement might prevent it from investing in tokens or “weird crypto stuff,” Qureshi said.