Changpeng Zhao is perched in front of a bookshelf at his apartment in Dubai, a place thatalong with Parishe currently calls home. Speaking over video, he is affable and mild-mannered, even self-deprecating. Its a persona that clashes with the Zhao that his rivals know best: a sharp-elbowed executive who built Binance into the biggest and most influential cryptocurrency exchange in the world.

He is used to appearing in different guises. If Americans deal with me, theyll feel Im Asianslightly more Asian than most Americans, but less Asian than all other Asians they know, he tells Fortune. If an Asian person deals with me, they will feel Im very American but less American than other Americans they deal with. So Im kind of in-between.

The harder-edged side of Zhao has put him under harsh scrutiny of late. Zhao and Binance got ahead by outsmarting competitors and playing fast and loose with regulations, as the founder hopscotched to whatever country offered the most favorable rules. Now governments around the worldincluding the United Statesaccuse Binance of patterns of deception and of violating international sanctions and money-laundering rules.

Binance insists it has changed its ways and is now keen about compliance; the soft-spoken, modest version of Zhao is the voice of this reformed version of the company. But Binances about-face raises questions about who Zhao really is and how he built his businessquestions made more acute by big gaps in the public record about both Zhaos background and Binances operations.

A careful study of Zhaos background fills in many of those gaps, revealing how the Binance founder evolved to become a shape-shifter who has for years played hardball to best his business rivals while maintaining the public image of a friendly everyman. In a detailed look at his past, including interviews with those whove known him and extensive reviews of Chinese-language media, Fortune uncovered new insights into the two worlds that shaped Zhaos identity: the Canada of his formative years; and China, where he returned as a sea turtle and rode the wave of Shanghais emergence at the forefront of global business during the first part of this century.

Absorbing the lessons of both places, Zhao mastered many of the cut-throat business tactics that prevailed during the wild early years of Chinas tech scene, while retaining the reassuring, non-threatening affect of an average Canadiana demeanor that deflects attention from his tactical guile.

Until recently, Zhao spoke frequently to crypto and business media, but in the last few months he has curtailed such appearances entirelya decision based on the fraught regulatory environment and on frustration with what Binance regards as media mischaracterizations of the company and Zhao. He broke his recent silence to speak with Fortune, sharing many details of his life that havent been previously reported. The interview provides first-hand insight into how Zhao runs his business. It also reveals how his rise dovetailed with broader trends in the Chinese diaspora, and how a brilliant but aloof father may have influenced the emergence of Binance as the big dog of crypto.

A bookworm moves his family abroad

The Keremeos Court buildings are a series of neat family townhouses that are unremarkable but for their setting. Nestled in a massive rain forest of pungent cedars and ferns, the homes are part of the 2,000-acre campus of the University of British Columbia, which juts into the Pacific Ocean on the far western edge of Vancouver.

It was here that 12-year-old Zhao arrived with his mother and sister in 1989, months after the Tiananmen Square massacre took place in Beijing. They came to join his father, Shengkai, whom Zhao describes as a lifelong bookworm. Shengkai kept studying even after the Cultural Revolution sent him, and other intellectuals like him, to learn the value of hard labor in rural villages. But thanks to Shengkais academic persistence, he had landed in a doctoral program in Canada to study geophysics, bringing his family to join him at UBC several years later.

Changpeng
Changpeng Zhao at the Ladner Clock Tower in Vancouver, circa 1989, in a photograph taken by his father.

Courtesy of Changpeng Zhao

The setting was a far cry from the village of Zhaos early childhood. In Jiangsu province, schools were scarce, and classrooms were sparse and furnished with austere stone deskscommon in rural counties that lacked resourcesthat made the winter months of learning even colder. Like his father, Zhao learned about poverty and privation in Chinabut also about the escape that an academic environment could provide. This came when, at the age of 10, his family left the village and moved to Hefei, a minor city in China but also home to a prominent science and technology university that enjoyed a rare degree of autonomy from the Communist Party.

In this intellectual oasis, Zhao would sit and listen to debates between older students who would sometimes indulge him in strategy games. Those guys they taught me how to play chess, how to play Go. They talked about different things on campus, even to the point where they were talking about politics, Zhao recalls. I think hanging out with people who are like seven to ten years older than you does [make] you think about things slightly differently, compared to kids your age.

When Zhaos family arrived in British Columbia, it meant moving from one of the worlds most ancient civilizations to one of its youngest ones. When Vancouver was founded in the 1870s, few people besides First Nations communities had stepped foot there. The city quickly became a gateway connecting the flow of goods and people from China to Canadaand, for decades, was a stronghold of anti-Chinese racism. Manifestations of that bias included the notorious head tax, which discouraged Chinese men from bringing their wives to Canada even as they built the countrys railroads and much of the city of Vancouver. Even though there were always Chinese [in Vancouver], they lived under the stairs like Harry Potter, says Henry Yu, a historian and scholar of Chinese migration at UBC. They were servantsnot homeowners.

By the 1980s, though, the government had changed its tune completely. Canada, seeking to rev up and diversify its natural-resources-based economy, sought to attract the same migrants from across the Pacific it had once disdained. The plan included offering visas to those who invested C$400,000, and luring academics like Zhaos father. Ottawa intended to signal to ambitious Chinese that if you want to rise in the global economy, Canada was now open for business, says Yu.

Anti-Asian sentiment still lingered in Vancouverjokes about Chinese drivers and the pronunciation of fried rice were common, and Asians could feel very unwelcome in some parts of the communitybut Zhao did not encounter racism often. The high school he attended was composed of students of all ethnicities, most of whom had ties to the university. Still, Zhao was different from his classmates in key respects. He recalls that, even though there were dozens of other Asian students, he was one of only two from mainland China. Most of the others were from more affluent Hong Kong and Taiwan and, unlike Zhao, did not live in the modest homes reserved for graduate students and campus workers.

Zhao remembers a giant wealth disparity between his own family and other students, but also recalls distinctions within the groups of affluent Chinese-speaking arrivals. The Hong Kong kids were more into brands, fashion brands, sports cars, etc., he says. The Taiwanese guys, although all very, very clearly rich had a more of a humble attitude, and I got along with them better. I got a lot of the humble values from the Taiwanese families.

Today, the high valuations Binance and its BNB token enjoy mean that Zhao is worth billions, but he still projects, in public at least, the humble values. Unlike the more obnoxious elements of the crypto crowdthose who buy Lamborghinis they cant drive and tell crypto skeptics to have fun staying poorZhao has never adopted a flashy persona.

In Vancouver, while his mother worked sewing jobs and his father drove a decrepit Datsun, Zhao often got lifts in the BMWs of his friends parents to and from volleyball games, where he was team captain. The only splurge he recalls was his dad spending $7000 Canadian dollarsa staggering sum at the timefor an IBM-compatible 286 computer, which the senior Zhao used for his research but also to teach his son how to program. If you want to squint at Zhaos early life for clues he would become a billionaire, this could be one. The time he spent learning coding from a parent, who others have described as a genius, was likely indispensable in Zhaos later life, when he built the technology that would power Binance. My father, Zhao says, is a mentor on the technical side.

Changpeng
Zhao using his first computer, circa 1990 in Vancouver His father purchased the computer for $7,000 Canadian, a huge sum at the time.

Courtesy of Changpeng Zhao

In high school, where some of his more affluent friends worked for kicks or because their parents wanted them to learn the rigors of a job, Zhao stood out as one of only a few students who worked to make ends meet. That included a summer of overnight shifts at Chevron gas station, and two years at McDonalds. In his later life as a crypto baron, trolls have mocked Zhaos stint at the fast-food chain, calling him fry bitch. But unlike some wealthy people from poor or modest upbringings, Zhao has never sought to distance himself from his working-class past, even retweeting memes of himself in McDonalds garb.

Overall, Zhao portrays his high school years as pleasant and even idyllic. He relished his four years as captain of the volleyball team and participating in Canadian national math competitions. He picked up the nickname Champ from a P.E. teacher. Zhaos high school friend, Ted Lin, says the name likely caught on because many at the school struggled to pronounce Changpeng. Zhao only adopted his current moniker, CZby which he is universally known todayafter entering the crypto world. Zhao says that he earlier tried going by CP, but ditched the name after online pals told him it was shorthand for child porn on the illegal marketplace Silk Road.

Despite his affinity for Vancouverwhere he says he would like to retireand Canada, Zhaos professed affection is belied by some of his actions. He admits he has not stepped foot in the city for years, and he has no active ties there in the form of either family or philanthropy. Nonetheless, Zhao maintains he is Canadian not just by his passport, but by disposition. I think like a Canadian, he says. We are nice people. Not aggressive. Not overly competitive and generally want to help others.

The words are a warm testament to the country where he grew upbut are also hard to square with the achievements that made him CZ, the billionaire crypto king.

A life-changing encounter with a best-seller

As of early April, Zhao sat at number 46 on Bloombergs billionaires list, with a net worth of $29 billion (Zhao describes that figure as not accurate; its hard to estimate with all the fluctuations). And his name was in the news on a daily basis. Last fall, many media accounts focused on his bold crypto trade that sank his rival, Sam Bankman-Fried, at FTX; more recent stories have examined the mounting clashes between Binance and regulators over Zhaos own fast-and-loose business dealings. But while a lot of future rule-breaking tech entrepreneurs show off their audacious, defiant traits in their college yearsthink Mark Zuckerberg as portrayed in The Social Networkthat doesnt seem to have been the case with Zhao.

After finishing high school in 1995, Zhao moved 3,000 miles to attend McGill University, leaving the temperate climate of Vancouver for French-speaking Montreal, a place gripped by winters so cold that large portions of downtown are connected by underground tunnels. By Zhaos own account, he did little to distinguish himself academically or socially at McGill, though he switched majors from biology to computer science because in high school, biology dealt with humans. In university, it was back to animals. I didnt find interest in that. In his free time, he went rollerblading or went out for pho with friends, and hung out late in a campus computer lab, bashing code into rudimentary Apple desktops.

CZ's first residence at McGill University
Zhaos first residence at McGill University in Montreal.

J Roberts

Towards the end of his time of McGill, however, Zhao did publicly flash the brilliance he would later show in his professional career, co-writing a scholarly paper in 1999 about A.I.a topic that only became sexy 20 years laterwith his professor, Jeremy Cooperstock. Sitting in a Montreal coffee shop, Cooperstock says he remembers Zhao well, in part because he was the only undergraduate student in his graduate seminar. He told me, Its not good pay but its good experience, Cooperstock recollects. The professor added that he recalls Zhao as a personable guy who was highly intelligentbut that he was surprised years later to discover his former student had become a billionaire.

During this time, Zhao says, he read something that changed his life. It wasnt an academic treatise, nor a man-versus-the-state screed like Atlas Shrugged, a favorite in the crypto-bro canon. Instead, it was a quintessentially middle class, everyman selection: Rich Dad Poor Dad. Published in 1997, the perennial personal-finance best-seller uses parables to tell the story of two fathersone who works hard his whole life and has little to show for it, and another who gets wealthy as an entrepreneur or investor. The book made Zhao question his own fathers advice. By then, Shengkai Zhao had finished his own Ph.D. and had gone to work in the private sector, where over the next two decades he would earn professional respectbut not much material wealth.

My dad has always taught me to go work hard, you know, to get a decent job, and both my parents had that kind of mentality, Zhao recalls. Theyre not into business. After I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, I started thinking, maybe I want to own a business. It wasnt so much I have to be the CEO. But it was just creating a business that was kind of intriguing.

As Zhaos thoughts turned to getting wealthy, he did make a choice that tracks with Zuckerberg and other wunderkind future billionaires: he dropped out of college. In 2000, he parlayed a summer internship with the Tokyo stock exchange into a full-time gig and decided not to return to McGill. (Many press accounts state, inaccurately, that Zhao is a McGill graduate.)

His math and coding prowess soon landed him a job in another financial capital, New York City, where he developed futures-trading software for Bloomberg Trading. But four years later, even New York couldnt compete with the allure of the hottest center of global business and Zhao moved againto a country he had last seen over a decade before.

A sea turtle learns new rules in Shanghai

Shanghai, on Chinas prosperous southeastern coast, was the head of the locomotive driving Chinas economic engine at the time, says Miu Chung Yan, a social work professor at UBC who studies Chinese migration. In 2005, the year that Zhao moved to Shanghai, the city became the third-busiest container-shipping port in the world, just behind Hong Kong and Singapore; it also posted an 11% GDP, increase for its fourteenth straight year of growth. China was on the upswing and Shanghai was at the center of it all.

Critically, Zhaos early years in Shanghai coincided with Chinas golden era of tech, a time
when the nations homegrown technology companies and free-wheeling entrepreneurs were making their meteoric ascent. Robin Li, Jack Ma, and Pony Mathe founders, respectively, of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencenthad launched their companies at the start of the millennium and were experiencing exponential investment and growth.

I was taught to go where the growth is, not where things are already established, Zhao says.

He was hardly the only young Canadian who had returned to Shanghai. A severe economic downturn in Canada during the 1990s helped spur a reverse migration that surged in the mid-2000s. Returnees like Zhao became known as sea turtlesa Chinese pun denoting individuals who migrated abroad but returned home to China. One study estimates that, by 2017, nearly half a million sea turtles had arrived from Canada and the rest of the world.

The timing for Zhao and others like him couldnt have been better. He and other young professionals held all the advantages of returning to China for work, Yan says. English-speaking, western-educated, and well-versed in Chinese language and culture, sea turtles were well-received in China and received outsized wages compared to their local peers.

But even as he landed in a city eager to receive him, and where he spoke the language, Zhao claims it was difficult to navigate Chinas faster, fiercer, free-wheeling business environment, where vague rules and regulations were the norm. I didnt know the business culture and had to learn everything from scratch, he recalls. After stints in New York, Tokyo, and Vancouver, where rule-based corporations and ideals of egalitarianism prevailed, the critical importance of nurturing guanxia persons connections, particularly with state officials who could act as patronsseemed foreign to Zhao. So did alcohols special role in cultivating these business relationships. Baijiu, a strong Chinese liquor, is often served during business negotiations to signify goodwill and respect.

Id read about it, Id heard about it, he says. But you know, when you actually do business, you sit down at a dinner with government officials, they drink baijiuthe way they talk about guanxi and sometimes other things you have to take care of, those things are very foreign to me, so I was never very comfortable with that.

Still, Zhao quickly prospered in Shanghai. In 2005, he and four other expats founded Fusion Systems, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm that provided high-frequency trading systems and inked deals with the worlds biggest banks, including Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. During this time, he learned the rules quicklythat in China, as he puts it, the rules are deliberately unclear, which gives the government great power in interpreting and selective enforcement of laws. The newly minted entrepreneur flexed his math and coding skills, but his role at the company also taught him how to think like a salesperson, as he leveraged his sea turtle identity to act as a broker between the east and the west. As a junior partner and the only Chinese-looking guy in a Chinese environment, Zhao was always thinking how do I sell the company services? How [are we] going to get the next contract?

Thenas CZ lore goesa late-night poker game in 2013 changed the trajectory of his life. At the game, Chinas top Bitcoin evangelist Bobby Lee and U.S.-educated Chinese venture capitalist Ron Cao introduced Zhao to cryptocurrencies. Zhao went all in. He sold his Shanghai apartment and invested $1 million into Bitcoin. The future billionaire left Fusion Systems and first joined crypto startup Blockchain.infowhich in its early days functioned as a website tracking Bitcoin transactionsas head of technology. One year later, he was hired as the chief technology officer for Chinese exchange and token startup OKCoin.

OKCoin was the battleground where Zhao sharpened his credentials as a swashbuckling public crypto figure, unafraid to engage in open warfare. At first, Zhao engaged the public on platforms like Redditsomething few CTOs were doingusing those forums to politely, but firmly, rebuff criticisms of OKCoin and crypto. But eight months in, in 2015, Zhao clashed with company CEO Star Xu over the direction of OKCoin. Zhao left the company, and he turned to the same platforms to rescind his earlier claims and blast his former employer.

In one 1,600-word Reddit post, Zhao detailed the companys use of bots to boost trading volumes, fake proof-of-reserves, and opaque financials, all under the direction of Xu. Xu, in turn, accused Zhao of fabricating his academic credentials and committing other deceitful acts. The spat eventually died down, but it showed Zhaos willingness to throw sharp elbows in a disputewhile also helping to put the emerging crypto industry on the radar of distrustful regulators in China.

Zhao would court controversy and push boundaries even further with his next venture,Bijie Technology, another SaaS firm that provided software for exchanges and trading platforms. Over the next two years, Bijies technology would become the bedrock for 30 such Chinese exchangesand later, it would go on to power Binance.

Trouble soon loomed, however, as most of the exchanges powered by Zhaos technology dealt in youbikastamps from Chinas imperial times and revolutionary era that became the object of a tulip-style mania. As the youbika frenzy grew, stamp-trading online exchangesand dubious sellersbegan sprouting up seemingly overnight. So-called stamp teachers and wealth consultants lured unwitting investors into joining investment chats on messaging platforms like QQ and WeChat, where theyd advise them to buy shares of stamps and collectibles via digital exchanges on the promise of outsized returns. But many were pump-and-dump schemes. Ordinary investorsespecially elderly Chineselost hundreds of millions of yuan, with some losing the entirety of their pension funds, according to a 2016 investigation by Chinese state-owned paper the Securities Times.

Zhao had no direct connection to the stamp scams, but his technology arguably helped drive their explosion. Whats more, the rampant craze helped put the authorities on high alert: Chinas government quickly established new rules to restrain the unencumbered growth of digital platforms that rewarded rule-breaking and risk-takingand became more suspicious of digital financial innovation in general. In January 2017, the state ordered stamp-and-collectible exchanges to clean up or shut down; by August that year, it halted their operations. The bulk of Bijies clients shuttered.

Zhaos ambitions, meanwhile, were seeking other outlets. In 2017, a massive boom in crypto prices drew millions of new investors into the space. Zhao watched the then-industry leader, San Francisco-based Coinbase, profit from it. He saw an opportunity, and he launched an exchange of his ownBinancefrom Shanghai in July of that year.

In barely a year Binancewhich offered a sleek trading platform, a global customer base, and little in the way of regulatory oversighteclipsed Coinbase to become the biggest trading platform in the world. Soon after, the company would become the first exchange to launch its own blockchaina formidable technical undertakingwhere customers could receive token perks for trading, and it added the ability to trade hundreds of digital assets, including coins whose origins were sketchy. Such tactics would help Binance poach customers from Coinbase and other rivals, as would the companys policies of undercutting competitors with rock-bottom trading fees and of asking few or no questions when it came to vetting customers.

By now, Zhao had clearly internalized the faster and fiercer business norms of Asiaa set of practices that, to some, made competing against North American companies seem like relative childs play. In the book Kings of Crypto, an Asian-American entrepreneur scoffed at media outlets that marveled at the sudden rise of Binance. Whats happening here is arrogance and bias in favor of company that came up in a Western market, said the entrepreneur, who asked not to be identified. Asias not in Coinbases DNA. I see a cultural gap thats not closable for them.

For all its success, however, Binance was on borrowed time in China. The country first restricted banks from handling crypto transactions in 2013. In a bid to stem capital outflow, stamp out financial fraud, and maintain a tighter grip over the countrys financial system, the Chinese authorities in September 2017 banned initial coin offerings (ICOs) and began to shut down crypto exchanges. In response, Zhao oversaw a frantic but stealthy weeks-long effort to move data hosted on more than 200 Alibaba servers to those hosted by Amazon Web Services and others, outside the Great Firewall. The effort was successful and Zhao and other Binance staff decamped to Tokyoending Zhaos 12-year stint as a Chinese entrepreneur.

Zhaos power grows in exile

In some ways, exile from China served Binances long-term interests. Zhao and his company have long been subject to whisper campaigns by U.S.-based rivals who portray Binance as allied with the government in Beijing. Such an alliance would make Zhaos relationships with U.S. regulators even more difficult, at a time of rising Sino-U.S. tensions. The company has been accused over the years of actively obscuring its Chinese origins and past business activities there; it disputes those allegations.

But for a company and a founder that preferred to operate without government oversight, no country was hospitable for long. Binances Japan stint was short-lived. In 2018, crooks used fake Google ads to trick customers into entering their Binance log-in details, and then drained their accounts. Binance was not directly responsible for the losses, but the debacle led Japanese regulators to demand the company register as an exchangea non-starter for Zhao. Instead, Zhao decided to relocate his crypto empire to Malta, whose prime minister at the time, Joseph Muscat, was willing to welcome anything crypto, no questions asked.

The Malta period was also brief, and, rather than shop for a new headquarters, Binance declared it would now operate without one. For a while, Binance was so decentralized that Zhao appeared, for all intents and purposes, to go off the grid. In 2021, a Binance adversary sued the company in the U.S. in a dispute over the delisting of the plaintiffs token. The plaintiff hired a private investigator to find Zhao. In a report about his findings, the P.I. said his team had made exhaustive efforts to track down Zhao but failed, and that he suspected Binance had hired others to obscure his past and whereabouts, making him virtually undetectable. Reached recently by Fortune, the P.I. confirmed that the remarks in the report were accurate. (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.) It wasnt until 2022 that Zhao emerged in Dubai, where there are virtually no restrictions on the trading of crypto.

Binances migratory ways made sense and earned Zhao praise among crypto purists fixated with decentralization. Unsurprisingly, they displeased regulators in most other countries, who have come to regard Binance as a lawless, off-shore casino. And not without reason. In the last three years, it has emerged that Binance has engaged in a series of acts that are ethically dubious or possibly outright criminal. These include loose know-your-customer controls that have allowed figures in Iran to trade on Binances exchange, despite international financial sanctions against that country; as well as an unfulfilled scheme in 2018 to set up a U.S. registered subsidiary whose purpose, according to the Binance executive who proposed it, was to serve as a regulatory sinkhole to distract American regulators from shenanigans underway at the rest of the company.

Binance acknowledges it has engaged in questionable tactics but says it has since disavowed them. The company in February claimed it is on the verge of a sweeping settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and other regulators that will see it address past misdeeds and plot a path forward, though a recent lawsuit against Binance by another U.S. regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has raised questions about the viability of that settlement.

The companys professed desire to turn the page on its past has been complicated, meanwhile, by regulators deep mistrust of crypto in general, following the collapse of the exchange FTX, and the disgrace of its one-time golden boy founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Even though it was his tweets that kicked in the rotten door of FTX in November, Zhao says he was surprised as everyone else to discover the extent of fraud performed by Bankman-Friedwho Zhao knew, having invested in FTX during its early days.

Zhao and Bankman-Fried were the two most dominant figures in crypto during the boom that ran from 2020 through early 2022, and there some notable parallels in their biographies. Most obviously, both are the children of academicsthough Zhaos father was only on the periphery of the university world. Bankman-Fried, by contrast, grew up as the child of two Stanford law professors who owned a fine house on campus and enjoyed life at the top of the academic pecking order.

Today, of course, the two mens situation is very different. Bankman-Fried is still in his parents house as he awaits trial on a spate of fraud charges that could see him go to prison for life. Zhao, meanwhile, is now a father himself after deciding to become a parent with Binances co-founder Yi He, who is now the companys chief customer officer; they have two toddler-age children together.

Its easy to imagine Zhao resenting his rivals privilege and sense of entitlement. Bankman-Fried has taunted him on Twitter multiple timesincluding suggesting on Twitter, in the summer of 2022, that Zhao would be arrested if he stepped on U.S. shores. (Binance says that Zhao has visited Canada several times in recent years, including for his fathers funeral, but maintained a very low profile while doing so). But Zhao claims he feels no personal animosity towards his one-time rival.

He just felt to me like one of those young kids who were smart, who were brilliant, but whos very aggressive, Zhao says. He tells Fortune that he has met Bankman-Fried three to five times, and viewed him primarily as a client, since the latters Alameda hedge fund used Binance as a trading platform.

As of mid-April, Binance appears to have weathered the twin headwinds of a crypto market collapse in the wake of FTXs implosion, and regulators increasingly aggressive attempts to go after the company. Though its finances remain a black box, blockchain data shows Binance has gained market share from rivals in recent months, and its trading volume is upand presumably its revenue as welldue to a rebound in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Meanwhile, Zhao continues to hew to a position that he and his company are decentralized and belong to no country at all. From this perspective, he has transcended the influence of China, Canada, and everywhere else, to become a truly stateless individual.

Nonetheless, Zhao the globe-trotting crypto baron remains very much human; like the rest of us, he can never totally escape where he came from and the forces that shaped him. And in Zhaos case, those forces may have less to do with geography than they do with family.

A fathers legacy

Zhaos English is not perfect and, as his Twitter feed reflects, he has never mastered North American idiomsfor instance, he referred to MLB umpires last year as baseball referees. But his humble and thoughtful affect feel very much Canadian. Over the course of a 30-minute interview, his mannerisms suggest thatdespite his newer identity as a peripatetic billionaire with a pad in Dubaia part of him is still the teenager who slung fries in a Vancouver McDonalds thirty years ago.

Still, it is hard to pin down what drives him. Crypto in many respects remains a frontier industry, and every major participant, including long-established brands like Coinbase, has resorted to slippery tactics to gain an edge or simply to survive. Binance, notwithstanding its recent pledges to walk the straight and narrow, has probably pushed the legal envelope farther than most of its rivals.

Still, asked if he learned to bend the rules while growing up in Vancouver, Zhao rejects the premise of the question. I was always a fairly close, rule-abiding citizen My personality is always conservative, as much as people may not think that way, says Zhao. But he suggests that cryptos culture changed his outlook: Then you find out, okay, this new thing has different rules in different places. So its not so much that we want to bend the rules or even avoid them, we just want to look for places that are more favorable.

The argument is in some ways persuasive, but also feels tailored for Binances self-interest. Zhao has clearly been able to find the places where the rulesor the absence of rulesserve him and Binance best. Thats a stark contrast to his father, who played by a different generations set of rules, and never attained comparable heights.

Jean Legault, a geophysicist at the Ontario firm GeoTech, hired Shengkai Zhao on shining recommendations from industry bigwigs; he managed Shengkai for six years in the 2010s. During that time, Legault remembers the senior Zhao as an exceptional geophysicist and extraordinary technical mind. Shengkai crafted original code that allowed GeoTech to use software to create 3D inversions of geophysical data, an invaluable tool for miners and engineers; the company still uses his user manual today. Legault adds that he has since asked other, extremely knowledgeable, Ph.D. geophysicists to do the same work. They could never replicate it. Shengkai was that exceptional.

Legault believes that Shengkai, who lived for his work, could have reached high pinnacles of the academic or business worldbut that he was perhaps restrained by his humble demeanor. Shengkai never boasted about his knowledge or accomplishments, Legault says. Changpeng agrees: the younger Zhao tells Fortune that his father, who began his career in the Cultural Revolution era and struggled with English, never had exposure to doing business. He couldnt commercialize the problems he was able to solve. So he never really made a lot of money.

Zhao recalls watching his father work from morning to evening investigating complex math equations, in his lab or at his desktop. But despite this brilliance, historical forces and the social dynamics of migration meant that Shengkai Zhao would only toil at the margins of academia, and never enjoy the prestige or fame he could have won if he had been born in a different time or place.

His sons life would also be shaped by historical forcesnew ones that favored a young Chinese emigré to Canada. Zhaos Binance empire, then, may be an attempt to fulfill a destiny his father could never have.

Or it could be the oppositea decision to push away from a father who was brilliant but remote. Shengkai died last year of leukemia; in remembering him, Zhaos voice takes on a regretful tone as he remembers his own teenage years. My dad spent all his days in his lab or his computer, and he never came to a single game volleyball game that I was playing. I was playing as team captain. I was playing multiple games twice a week, my parents never came to watch a single game.

What the richer dad and the poorer dad share, perhaps, is a single-mindedness about work. And even for a billionaire, that quality comes with a cost. Zhao worries that in his own role as a father, he may be emulating what he describes as a neglectful quality in his own parent. I do have that trait, he says.


Newspapers

Spinning loader

Business

Entertainment

POST GALLERY