Binance founder CZ on his memoir, crypto's future, and why he's come to peace with never knowing who Satoshi is

Changpeng Zhao on crypto's second act, privacy, and life after prison

Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, wrote most of his memoir Freedom of Money while serving his prison sentence. The book, now published, is partly a rebuttal to what he sees as persistent media mischaracterisation of crypto — specifically the assumption that illicit activity dominates the space. His counterargument: as a share of total transactions, illicit use in crypto is meaningfully lower than in traditional finance. That claim is his, and he offers no third-party data to support it, but it frames his broader frustration with how regulators and press have approached the industry.

US regulation

On the current regulatory environment, Zhao is cautiously optimistic. He points to the GENIUS Act, passed last July, as meaningful progress, though he acknowledges ongoing debates around stablecoin interest rates. His position is pragmatic: any regulatory clarity beats none, and the first iteration will not get everything right. He expects refinement over time through collaboration between industry and regulators.

The privacy paradox

One of his more pointed observations concerns the transparency of crypto, not its opacity. Zhao argues the blockchain is already a highly effective surveillance tool — pair a public ledger with KYC data from centralised exchanges, he says, and law enforcement can trace the majority of transactions with considerable accuracy. The problem, in his view, is that many regulators and law enforcement agencies still lack the expertise to use that capability. His examples of the privacy gaps that remain are concrete: if a company pays salaries in crypto, anyone who knows a single payment address can reconstruct the entire payroll. Hotel stays paid in crypto can reveal someone's location in near real time.

“I've come to peace with it. If there was one person I really want to meet in the world, that would probably be him. But I think there are negative consequences if we find out who he is... What makes Bitcoin unique is that we don't know who the founder is — he's no longer participating — so that makes it more decentralized. I think that's a good thing... AI is going to use crypto for payments. They cannot KYC through a bank. They cannot do a selfie. They don't have a passport.”

AI and crypto

Zhao sees AI and blockchain as naturally complementary. His core argument is that AI agents cannot KYC through a bank — no passport, no selfie — and that crypto's globally uniform rails solve the cross-border payment fragmentation that would otherwise block AI-to-AI or AI-to-human transactions at scale. He also expects AI to accelerate smart contract development and make self-custody tools meaningfully safer. He acknowledges the two industries have not yet materially leveraged each other, but expects that to change.

Security and quantum

On quantum computing, Zhao is sanguine. Quantum-resistant encryption algorithms already exist, and upgrading protocol-level encryption is, in his view, a manageable engineering problem. He makes a similar argument about AI-driven cybersecurity risks: the same tools that could help attackers find vulnerabilities are available to developers to patch them first. On balance, he thinks AI improves security across the ecosystem rather than degrading it.

Satoshi and decentralisation

Zhao has made peace with not knowing who Satoshi Nakamoto is — and thinks that is probably the right outcome. His reasoning is structural: Bitcoin's credibility as a decentralised network is partly a function of having no identifiable founder actively participating. He contrasts this with Ethereum, where Vitalik Buterin's ongoing presence creates what he calls "founder centralisation." The anonymity is the feature.

He is sceptical that the Satoshi playbook can be replicated. Most projects fail even with founders actively promoting them, he notes, and anonymous projects carry an association with rug pulls that erodes community trust before momentum can build. The operational security required to stay anonymous in 2025 is, in his assessment, essentially impossible.

Global adoption gap

Zhao is direct about the cost American crypto users are paying compared to the rest of the world. Because US policy was hostile to crypto for several years before the Trump administration, the largest exchanges, blockchains, and stablecoin issuers all built outside the US. American consumers are now accessing crypto through a thinner, more expensive market. Talent and some liquidity are returning, but larger offshore players have not yet reoriented toward the US market.

Prediction markets and second winds

Zhao's investment vehicle, EZ Labs, has positions across multiple prediction markets. He frames prediction markets as a genuine mechanism for truth discovery — using price to surface information rather than the reverse — and thinks the current wave is substantively different from failed earlier attempts, even if the underlying idea is the same. He draws a parallel to earlier cycles in NFTs and DAOs: the next iteration of those categories will likely carry some of the same branding but with enough structural differences to matter. He does not commit to a timeline.

What he is doing now

Post-release, Zhao is running Giggle Academy, a free education platform that has reached 240,000 students in roughly 18 months. He also advises governments on crypto policy and supports EZ Labs in an investor-adjacent capacity. The memoir's audiobook will be narrated by a friend, Michael Santos — Amazon does not currently permit AI-generated voices — though Zhao says he is experimenting with an AI clone of his own voice for other platforms. He finds the clone reads more smoothly than he does, with the exception of Chinese names and dollar amounts, where the model still makes obvious errors.