On February 7, 2018, it was announced that Binance’s CEO will be covering Forbes magazine’s Crypto’s Secret Billionaire Club Edition. Zhao Chanpeng’s famous decentralized exchange now has the record for fastest ICO, initial coin offering, to raise capital of $1 billion. With many publicized crypto regulations and bans taking place globally; Forbes has taken a stance to acknowledge cryptocurrency’s influencers.
Who is Zhao Chanpeng?
Chanpeng was born in Jiangsu, China. In his early childhood, his parents, both educators, were exiled. After being labeled as “pro-bourgeois intellectuals,” the family migrated to Vancouver, Canada. With humble beginnings, he worked at McDonald’s and a gas station to help his parents with monthly expenses as a teenager.
As a young adult, Chanpeng studied computer science at Montreal’s McGill University. Not long after, he traveled to Tokyo and New York to develop software for the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Bloomberg’s Tradebook. While impatiently working for big companies, Chanpeng leveraged his experience and started Fusion Systems, a high-frequency trading systems manufacturer for brokers in Shanghai, China.
After a poker friend introduced him to Bitcoin, he decided to focus on blockchain digital currencies in 2013. It wasn’t long before he rose to leadership and joined Blockchain.info in its infant stages. He worked with Bitcoin enthusiasts Roger Ver and Ben Reeves during his position as head of development. Chanpeng then became chief technology officer at digital asset trading platform OKcoin.
Everything changed for Chanpeng when he manifested his vision of a cryptocurrency exchange. He wanted to create something different, a trading platform without any connections to traditional financial institutions. Taking the advice of Ver, who warned him about the entanglements of financial institutions and the regulations to follow, he took the idea of Binance to ICO. Binance generated $1 billion in investment funds in six months.
Binance Explosion
In those six months, Binance surpassed the success of its predecessor Coinbase. This story has inspired many to reconsider the concept of exponential growth via the Internet of Things. Modest in his victory, Changpeng is quoted saying in his Forbes collaboration Twitter announcement:
“It is a team effort (not just me), 20 years (not six months) in the making.” — via Twitter Zhao Chanpeng
Chanpeng gets the publicity and the win
In crypto, speed is everything. Binance is now the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. Though the company was born in China, the government’s crypto ban forced Chanpeng to make a move elsewhere. Scattered across Asia, some of Binance’s business IPs are located throughout Korea and Japan.
With the insurgency of new businesses using ICOs to build capital, governments have taken an interest in regulating digital currency transactions. Most recently, India’s income tax authority sent out 100,000 tax notices to crypto investors, exerting control over their growing marketplace. Funded by digital coins, ICOs are unlike traditional bank capital.
It is well-known Binance is not the first crypto trading platform. Yet, the firm has formulated a different experience by studying its predecessors’ mistakes. By not operating on the blockchain, Binance can handle 1.4 million transactions per second. This type of scalability allows the platform to cater to the world market.
“On the highest performance day, we used about 3% percent of our matching engine… When you trade on Binance, the response is very quick… that experience, most people like it.” —
Zhao Changpeng, at The Future of Cryptocurrency @ Jibrel Network Conference.
In January 2018, the demand for Binance was so high there was only a two-hour daily window when new users could register for an account.
Chanpeng attributes most of his success with being “country-agnostic.” According to Changpeng, this means catering to all countries. Binance can provide internationally by limiting the word use on the site and allowing the pl to be accessible in different languages by adopting Google Translate (38% of users are from the United States). Inclusion enables more investors worldwide to find value in the platform.
With the integration of a flat inclusive service and a unique experience, most platforms have the potential to crush expectations and grow exponentially on the market. Blockchain ICOs are relatively new territory for companies to gain capital and credibility. Forbes dedicating a magazine to the leaders in the cryptocurrency space adds to the industry’s credibility.
Congratulations Zhao Changpeng, CEO of Binance! The success of this crypto trading platform proves to be foundational evidence for any cryptocurrency-related firm to launch prosperity and unlimited possibilities, whether on or off of the blockchain.
Source: ICO Alert