Changpeng “CZ” Zhao says his path to crypto wealth started far from trading floors or VC circuits in a Shanghai poker game where a friend told him to take Bitcoin seriously, and a second friend urged him to bet a meaningful slice of his net worth on it.
Binance Founder On His Bitcoin Origin StoryBobby, Zhao recalled, didn’t frame it as a hobbyist curiosity. He framed it like a portfolio decision. Zhao said Lee told him to put 10% of his net worth into Bitcoin: “There’s a small chance you will go to zero then you lose 10%. There’s a much higher chance you will go 10x and you’ll double your net worth.” Zhao said that was the moment he started digging into the white paper “more carefully.”
By the time Zhao felt he “fully understand[s] it,” he also felt he’d missed it. Bitcoin had run from roughly $70 in mid-2013 to around $1,000 by the end of 2013, he said. “I was like, I’m too late,” Zhao recalled. “Because everyone you talk to… has bought before you.”
Still, he decided he wasn’t going to sit the next major technology wave out. “For me it was very clear I got to do something in this industry,” Zhao said, describing Bitcoin as the second foundational technology of his working life after the internet. “I was 35, 36 — I wasn’t going to miss it. The next thing that’s going to come along is going to be 10, 15 years later… and that’s AI.”
That conviction translated into an unusually blunt trade: The Binance founder said he sold his Shanghai apartment to buy Bitcoin. “I said look I’m going to sell my apartment in Shanghai and then buy Bitcoin,” he told Chamath Palihapitiya. The sale, he said, came in tranches and he bought each time cash hit, even as the market slid. “I sold the apartment… for roughly $900,000… The first trench at $800 and then Bitcoin is dropping $600, $400. Kind of averaged to about $600.”
Zhao’s account of “getting rich” isn’t a single lightning strike so much as a sequence: buying Bitcoin after liquidating property, then taking operating roles at early crypto companies (including Blockchain.info and OKCoin), and later building exchange infrastructure that became the foundation for Binance and its token-driven growth story.
Today, the exact size of the Binance founder’s fortune depends on who’s counting and how they value private stakes and token holdings. Forbes’ real-time tracker listed Zhao at $78.8 billion as of Feb. 10, 2026, placing him among the world’s richest individuals. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, which uses its own daily methodology, showed a materially lower figure for Zhao about $52.2 billion on its global rich list around the same time.
At press time, Binance Coin (BNB) traded at $592.44.
