 Can you tell us your story? So who is Suzie? Where do you come from? So I was born in China, and then I moved to Canada when I was 12, and then I spent six years in Vancouver, four years in Montreal. After university, I went to Tokyo to work. I worked in Tokyo for four years, and then went to New York for four years to work for Bloomberg. And then in 2005, I returned to Shanghai to do a startup together with five other founders. So there's six partners in the startup. That company is still there. So in 2013, I decided to leave that company after eight years, and I decided to jump full into crypto. Back then, it was called the Bitcoin industry. So in mid-2017, I decided to do Binance, and we got very lucky. It grew very quickly. So for me, it's like a 20-year journey. So how did you go into the trading in the first place? So myself, I was never really involved in trading even today. So I'm actually a very bad trader. I don't know how to trade, but I know how to do trading systems. So I think of myself more like the blacksmith that's making the sword for people with Kung Fu masters to use. So I was always making those trading tools. So systems, I come from a programming background. So I've been doing that for 20 years, but never really trading myself. So every time I tried to trade myself, it never worked. You mean you lose all the money, or you just can't transfer it? No, I usually lose money. But how did you first learn about the Bitcoin industry? Yeah, so I first learned about Bitcoin from Bob Billy and Ron Cao. Bob Billy was the CEO of BTC China before they disbanded that exchange. And Ron Cao was his institutional investor. At the time, Ron Cao was with Lightspeed Ventures. Right now he runs Sky9 Capital. Both of them are very good friends of mine. I've known them for like three or four years before 2013. So I've known them like from 2008, 2009-ish. So when they asked me to look into it, and Ron's investing in Bobby, BTC China, and the whole thing looks really good, and I looked into it. But the thing that turned for me was the Vegas conference in December 2013. So I went to Vegas to learn about Bitcoin and met a bunch of people. Vitalik there was there, Charlie Lee was there, Matt Rosik was there, Brock Pierce was there, and the same crew. It was really a group of nice people. They're not money-driven, they're very nice. So after that conference, I said, if this is the group of people in this community, and I know the technology works, the encryption, asymmetric encryption, private key, et cetera, so I understood those quite easily. But it was the community that said, that made me decide, okay, if this is the community that's around, I'm very happy to join this industry. And I know that it will be the future. So I know basically it's like discovering the internet in 1989. So this is the community that got you into the space in the first place. Yes. Is it still the same community? It's still pretty much the same community. It's much bigger now. So those same group of guys are now KOLs or knowledge leaders in our space that people look up to. The industry's definitely grown a lot. Back then, I think that conference was maybe like 100 people. So the conference today is like 3,500 on this little island. So the industry's gone much, much bigger now. There are a lot of opinions that the crypto and blockchain community has become more toxic or more greedy, do you agree with that? Because the community is much larger. So there are some bad players. There are some money-driven people who are more pure profit-driven. And some of them even go to the worst extent of being scams or lying, stuff like that. So there are those players. But I think by and large, the community is healthy. I think there are definitely more good players than there are bad players. And also, if we should not have any delusions that even in any industry, even in a very mature banking industry, there are bad players. Very recently, a bank was fined for lending like $235 billion. That's bigger than the entire crypto market cap. So you could say that they're worse players in the traditional industries by far. What is the difference between building a trading system for traditional financial markets and building a system for a crypto exchange market? I think the biggest difference is the wallet or the funds management. So historically, you will interface with a bank API. So you will do reconciliation with a bank. And you have to go with the bank's API and bank schedule. Today, we interface almost exclusively with the blockchains. When you're dealing with banks, you depend a lot on the business negotiations or the business side of it. Whereas in blockchain, now there's no business to discuss. The blockchain cannot reject us. But we do have a lot of new blockchains now, especially with people switching to main nets. So some of them are less stable. Some of them are technically technical issues. So there's two different sets of issues. And with traditional exchanges, the money is at the bank. So as a technology system, there's not a whole lot. The security requirements are actually lower. Basically, you can fake somebody's order. But the impact is quite minimal. And if you try to wire money out of the bank, the bank can reverse the transaction. Come to blockchain crypto, you've got to be really, really secure. So the security requirement is much, much tougher. You've mentioned that your team is quite distributed. Yes. So different cities, different time zones. How do you cope with that? So it is a challenge. But now I think we've found like a medium. Or distributed teams are definitely less efficient than a centralized team in one place. And this is the same for blockchain networks or teams. It's all the same. So we now use chats a lot. We have tons and tons of chat groups. We use almost every chatting tool out there. We use every video conferencing tool out there. So we have a way that it works now. Do you think it's the future for businesses? So I think there's definitely going to be more and more decentralization, even in the team structure of businesses. But a centralized team is always, especially when you're small, it's much easier to organize and much more efficient. So there are trade-offs. So I'm not exactly sure you'll be fully decentralized. It's the way to go. So what are your plans for the future in terms of the finances and exchanges as a company? Sure, sure. So basically, we just want to provide a few infrastructure services in the blockchain space. Right now, our core businesses is like exchange. So right now, we run a crypto-to-crypto centralized exchange. And we're working on a number of fiat-to-crypto exchanges so that we can open the fiat gateway into crypto. On the flip side, we are working on our decentralized exchange. Those two are not in conflict. So we're giving users options. We're giving our community options. With a decentralized exchange, we're taking a very different approach. Now we don't manage customer assets. So you hold your own private key. We don't know about it. We don't want to know about it. And then it's a decentralized, you can run or know yourself. So we don't fully control the network, which is the crypto sort of way. So we're doing both. So that's our core business, which we know well, or at least I personally know well. Other than that, so Binance Labs, their mission is to invest in projects we don't know too well. So for example, wallets, for example, payment systems, gaming, anything else. So I believe that we want to manage businesses that we know well closely. But the business that we don't know well, we should let experts do their own work. So Labs will typically take a minority stake in projects. So they will invest, will become a minority shareholder or not even a shareholder owner. And we just try to do whatever we can to help the project succeed. But we're not the drivers, the project team are the drivers. So we want to help and we want to invest in infrastructure projects. So projects that will help build basically roads, buildings in this industry. So anything that's infrastructure related. So I think we're still in the early stages of this industry. So that's kind of what we want to do. We also have a few other initiatives like Info is a portal for different informations about coins. We have a charity, which is a very important social impact program for us. So the Binance Charity Foundation is partnered with the President's MOTA charity initiative and a bunch of other initiatives. You are famous for being a very open and honest person. Like in a good way, a rock star of the industry. Do you know how did you get to that point? Actually, it just happened so quickly that actually, to be honest, I didn't really know. I don't even if I recall, I think it was only in the last two conferences that started getting mobbed by like people trying to take selfies. I don't know if people want to take selfies with me. Sure, sure, sure, but I'm always happy to take to take selfies. I think all of those guys are our strong supporters. And so I think we've got to thank people who support us. And I think this whole thing just happened so quickly that we actually don't know how exactly it happened at every step. We didn't we certainly did not plan it. If you asked me like a year ago when we first started, I would say I would give you like maybe three, three years, five years will become number one, but it happened in six months. So we got very lucky in a lot of places, but we worked really hard. We we had the right values. We had the right I think we had the right ethics that the community appreciated in an industry where there's less regulation. You actually it's actually more important for you to do the right thing. So sometimes a regulation is very tricky because of 200 different countries. Each one is slightly different, but the right thing. People would apply the common sense and it's quite easy to figure out. So we always protect the user's interest. We never participate in trading. We never we we try our best not to list bad coins. We go through a very rigorous process to list. We think only good coins, but again, it's subjective to some to some extent. But we do all of those things trying to we work really hard to try to do those things. And I think our supporters and users users are very smart now. They figured out and that's why they so that's why they like us. And I think there was a need. There was a very strong need for exchange that wanted to operate everything properly. So I think the value system is a is a key ingredient that drove us to to the success very quickly. But there's a lot of external factors that we got lucky on. How to build a brand in the crypto industry, whether for a company or for a person. So I think basically is exactly what you just said, which is you want to be you want to be transparent to the to the maximum extent possible. You want to be available. So you want to be available to your community to the maximum extent possible. You don't want to hide. You don't want to like say, hey, I'm above you guys and now you can't reach me even even after you're successful. So and most importantly, you want to establish strong trust. And this is not something you just say, right? So people are smart. I mean, you can say trust us, but people don't. But what you got people trust you through stuff you do. So you really want to put the user's interest ahead of yours. So I think it's quite easy to make short term gains in this industry, especially like last year with the ICOs going crazy. But then there will be more. There will be opportunities like that in the future as well. But I think if you want, if you're honestly shooting for the long term growth and building value and being doing everything properly, people will unless people will know. I think there's no there's no shortcuts to it. So I don't think there's any shortcuts to trust. You just got to earn it. You just got to build it. So I think every decision you make, you got to think about it. So we never take shortcuts on that. We never we never do anything dodgy. We always said, OK, when we have, we have certain values that when we make decisions, we ask ourselves, even as a group, say, OK, this decision, does it fit with our values of protecting users or doing the right thing? And is it ethical? Is it a fair thing to do? Sometimes it's kind of hard to tell if it's the most. So sometimes you have to argue from different angles to consider it. But we always choose the most ethical, most fair, most right thing to do. And over the long run, I think especially because there are a lot of scammers or there's some scammers in this industry, that's actually good for anybody who wants to do a proper business, because then you can differentiate yourself quite quickly, quite easily. So it's actually it's actually not that hard in this industry. Cointelegraph, like, subscribe and hodl.