Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao is one of the most famous CEOs in crypto history. But he doesn't want to run the global exchange he largely owns. He doesn't want to run its U.S. arm he mostly owns. He doesn't want to be a CEO at all, or serve on boards.
But when he talks about Binance, it's clear he sees himself at the center of its efforts, and he said its U.S. plan is to break the hold that a few leading exchanges have and to offer a lower-cost service.
As the dominant shareholder of Binance's global exchange and also of Binance.US, the 49-year-old has clear influence over the direction of both, though he denies he's pushing any day-to-day buttons. CZ sat for a lengthy interview with CoinDesk in Washington, D.C. earlier this month and revealed he was on a mission to reintroduce himself to the U.S. following his stepping down from the exchange he launched at prosecutors' request, a four-month prison stint and a presidential pardon over the past few years.
"I've perceived there's a lot of misunderstandings about Binance, about myself," he said. "I'm here to just talk to more people who may want to understand us more, just so that when they see me, they hear from me too, they get a sense of who I am."
The version of CZ who made the rounds earlier this month said he prefers to help founders from the background, rather than be at the center of a headline, he said.
And while he said he isn't involved in the immediate operations of Binance.US, he still suggested that he's trying to boost the company's profile in the country.
"We want to do more in the U.S., and personally, I really want to help make the U.S. the capital of crypto," he told CoinDesk. "I want to bring more crypto services into America."
CZ's argument for letting Binance.US tap the global exchange's liquidity is simple: the global exchange has much more liquidity than any U.S. platform can have on its own.
"U.S. consumers, as I said before, don't have access to the best liquidity," he told CoinDesk. "That means they pay a much higher price to buy and sell crypto. ... Crypto is the only place where U.S. consumers, the largest capital markets in the world, do not have the best prices … we're trying to figure out how to fix it."
This means that U.S. markets have higher slippage — the difference between the expected price of something and the actual price when conducting a transaction — and higher fees than their overseas counterparts may have, he contended.
If the U.S. wants to be the crypto capital of the world, it needs to have better liquidity, a goal for Binance.US, he said.
U.S. exchanges could just try to grow their liquidity without tapping offshore markets, but the fact that other countries are also welcoming crypto and 80% of global gross domestic product (GDP) is outside the U.S. means there's no guarantee that this approach will work, he said.
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