Binance Founder CZ's Autobiography: Life Experiences and Who Is "Chen Guangying"?
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Binance Founder CZ's Autobiography: Life Experiences and Who Is "Chen Guangying"?
Binance founder CZ shared his life story, emphasizing his Canadian identity and revealing the identity behind the rumored "Ms. Chen Guangying." Finally, he stated that the biggest challenge he currently faces is that all offshore exchanges are considered illegal in China, yet Western media portrays Binance as a Chinese company.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsOn September 1, CZ, founder of Binance, shared a personal account of his life journey, emphasizing his Canadian identity and clarifying the identity of the rumored "Ms. Chen Guangying." He concluded by stating that the biggest challenge he currently faces is that all offshore exchanges are considered illegal in China, while Western media often portray Binance as a Chinese company.
Key points from the full text, compiled by Wu Shuo:
On August 6, 1989, I left China with my mother to settle thousands of miles away in Canada. I was 12 years old at the time. My parents were teachers/professors. We lived on the campus of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, one of the top four universities in China. Normally, it would take four years to obtain a passport, and if lucky, another two to three years to get a Canadian visa. But the Canadian Embassy acted promptly and granted us visas quickly. I remember standing in line outside the embassy for three days. We had to take turns staying in line overnight to maintain our position.
I spent my best teenage years in Vancouver, then went on to study at McGill University in Montreal. Afterward, I worked for several years in Tokyo and New York (at Bloomberg). In 2005, the internet technology industry began booming in China, so I joined five other expatriates—two Americans, two British, one Japanese, and myself, a Canadian—to found an IT startup in Shanghai. The company was classified as a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise (WOFE), since none of us were Chinese citizens. This presented a significant business hurdle. When I reached financial stability and wanted to buy an apartment in Shanghai, I had to pay an extra 25% tax because I was a foreigner. Yes, I sold that apartment in 2014 to purchase Bitcoin. Without that additional tax burden, I could have owned 25% more Bitcoin today.
Between 2005 and 2015, I attempted several different startup ventures before ultimately entering the crypto space. Before discovering my true passion, I was a serial entrepreneur aiming to build a successful startup.
Two years before Binance, I founded a company called Bijie Tech, offering an exchange-as-a-service platform for other exchanges. We acquired 30 clients and the business was thriving. These were mostly platforms for trading collectibles such as art, stamps, and baseball cards. Unfortunately, in March 2017, the Chinese government shut down all such exchanges. All our clients went out of business. It was after this event that the idea for Binance began to take shape—a simple concept: a more streamlined cryptocurrency exchange could offer a smoother user experience without sacrificing useful functionality.
I brought many members from the Bijie team to Binance, and together we launched Binance on July 14, 2017. However, just a month and a half later, before Binance had even established itself, we faced our first major disruption. On September 4, 2017, the Chinese government issued a memorandum stating that cryptocurrency exchanges were not allowed to operate in China. At that point, most of our employees had already left China.
Ironically, I was once again forced to leave China—approximately 30 years after my parents and elder sister fled together.
So who then is Chen Guangying? Last week, a former Washington Post journalist sent a tweet to one of our executives, suddenly asking: "Who is Chen Guangying?"
I first met Chen Guangying (Heina) in 2010 when she worked at my friend's liquor store. Later, she became a service manager at a large commercial bank, managing back-office operations (HR/finance/administration). In 2015, when I founded Bijie Tech, I invited Guangying to work for me. We assigned her to manage back-office tasks because our early team consisted primarily of engineers. Due to restrictive Chinese laws regarding foreigners (like me, a Canadian citizen), it was much easier to appoint a Chinese citizen as the registered legal representative.
Today, she holds a passport from a European country and lives a relatively quiet life with her family. As our organization has grown over the past five years, many original employees and founders have taken on new roles. Guangying currently oversees the administrative and settlement teams within the organization.
The biggest challenge Binance faces today is being labeled an illegal entity in China—as are all other offshore exchanges—while our opponents in the West continue to depict us as a "Chinese company." This is clearly untrue. My personal favorite is when they specifically emphasize that I am a "Chinese-Canadian CEO," or even better, "born in China, educated in Canada." I am a Canadian citizen.
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