This year could be a recovery year for crypto. Binance is always prepared, and the platform is ready to handle a huge increase in trading volume should it come.
Rather than worrying about FUD and what people say about us, we focus our energy and teams on compliance, advocacy, and building products.
For International Women's Day (March 8), Binance is waiving all trading fees up to $600 for all new users who sign up in March using the code IWD2023.
What follows is a summary of CZ’s answers to some of the questions he received during a Twitter AMA on March 8, 2023. Please note that this transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
On Machine Learning
What’s your opinion on AI applications in 2023 with regard to cryptocurrency? How does Binance approach AI?
CZ: AI has many wide implications. Binance has been using AI in our products in a few areas. Our team recently integrated ChatGPT into Binance Academy — our free educational platform. If you ask for something on Academy, the AI will try to give you a response. That's the most recent development. Before that, we've been using AI to field our customer support desk.
The other area we use AI is market surveillance and risk monitoring. It's a different type of AI that looks for market manipulations, hacker attempts, risk-based approaches, and so on. More recently, we've been applying AI alongside compliance tools, such as the KYC process. With AI, all of those processes can be significantly improved in terms of efficiency and accuracy. There are probably 10 other areas our teams use AI, but I don't know all of them.
On Personal Goals, and Goals at Binance
What are your personal goals for this year, and what are your goals at Binance?
CZ: Contrary to what people believe, I'm not actually a very big ‘goal’ person. From my perspective, and from Binance's perspective, I've always encouraged our team just to do their best. One of the goals last year was that we were going to triple our user base. That didn’t happen because last year was a bear market. But I think our team did pretty well in terms of holding the ship stable, making sure the platform always worked, and making sure that we weren’t affected by any of the turmoil happening in the industry.
If you look at crypto history, there’s a very distinct four-year cycle. Usually, there's an all-time high every four years, which is much higher than the previous one. This is not to say that history can predict the future; it doesn't give us predictive powers, but there’s a possibility that this year should be a recovery year, and we are preparing mostly for that.
We always prepare our platform so that if there’s another 10 or 100X in volume, we should be able to handle it. And if all crypto prices drop by another 90%, or even to zero, we have enough cash to last. We’re covered on both sides. I do have a personal goal. I want to get a six-pack, but that's been my personal goal for the last 30 years. I never got one.
On User Feedback
Could you talk a little bit about the channels that Binance has for users to submit feedback and how you typically deal with that?
CZ: Actually, the easiest way to give feedback is through customer support.
If you have product feedback, please open a ticket or chat, then leave your comments. If they're being worked on, our customer support teams can change the status, and once the feature is released, they can close it. We also have a feature to notify all the users who requested or were affected by that feature.
We recently made the system public, so now there is a Feature Request & Feedback Board on the Binance website. Feedback with more votes gets more attention from our product teams. So it's a public, very simple webpage for feature requests and product enhancements.
Then there are other means. You can tweet at me on social media. If our teams see it, we’ll pick it up. This also goes for all of our other social media channels. We especially welcome specific product feedback. Not just attacking us, but saying something that’s specific and helpful.
On The Global Landscape For Crypto Adoption
Which geographical region would you say is showing the most promise for widespread adoption of blockchain and crypto — taking into account retail, business engagement and regulation?
CZ: On the regulatory landscape, in my perception, China has always been really negative. They banned crypto payments in 2013, cryptocurrency exchanges and ICOs in 2017, mining and crypto exchanges again in 2021. They are experimenting with a central bank digital currency, but it's not an open blockchain. It's not something that we can integrate with yet.
At Binance, we had to offboard users in Singapore, many of whom went to FTX, which was not blocked for them, and they got hurt. Because of that, I think Singapore is quite conservative on crypto now, even though they were quite open to it two to three years ago. And then you have countries like the US. Given recent regulatory uncertainty there, it doesn't feel like a very friendly environment for crypto.
There are very favorable places like France, Dubai, Bahrain, and Abu Dhabi. There are also areas that haven't changed that much, like Africa. Latin America is also waking up quite a bit. But this is always the case; different places evolve at different rates. Hong Kong has recently turned positive too, now allowing retail traders to trade crypto, issuing regulatory guidelines, and opening up the registration processes. Japan changed from having a crypto exchange registration framework that was quite restrictive in 2017, and as a result, missing the NFT and DeFi booms, to revising regulations and loosening it up.
I could go on for a while. There are many other countries. Different places move differently. There are positive and negative developments at a very generic level. There are also many minute details that I may or may not even know about.
On Legal Action Against FUD
Some news portals recently published fake news or FUD about Binance. Is there any legal team from Binance that can take action against them?
CZ: Generally, the short answer is, basically, no. It’s a time-consuming and expensive process. It's much better for us to focus our energy, our legal teams, on compliance and regulatory advocacy, and focus myself and our product teams on building products. What we’ve learned is that this strategy actually works really well. There's so much FUD that has happened, that was an attack on Binance, but we have always stood the test of time. We have always proved them wrong, and we've grown because of that.
On Product Releases
Binance has been sharing a lot recently about product releases. Is there anything that you want to highlight that's been built or released within the Binance ecosystem over the last few months?
CZ: There's a whole lot of stuff. I can run people quickly through some of the things we've done recently. We did Binance Sensei, which is a ChatGPT integration into Binance Academy, and then there’s Bicasso — AI-generated NFTs in our NFT marketplace. We have a Binance tax tool, and launched zk-SNARKs proof-of-reserves; this was actually suggested by Vitalik [Buterin].
There's been a lot of little tweaks on the trading product, even though people think that the trading page doesn't change, such as a trading heat map, an option to place TWAP [Time-Weighted Average Price] orders directly on the Futures page, and a break-even display, too. We also released self-trade prevention for spot trading. There's a whole lot more that goes on the product side. I actually can’t list them all.
For the Turkey earthquake donation, we airdropped $100 to people in the affected zones and donated about $11 million to users in Turkey — directly on the Binance platform. Lastly, for International Women's Day, Binance is waiving all trading fees up to $600 for new users [using the code IWD2023]. So that's another thing we're doing.
On Women in Crypto
March 8 marks International Women's Day. There are a lot of incredible female leaders and employees at Binance, and you've worked with extremely talented women across the ecosystem as well. Any thoughts and reflections around the commitments that Binance has to increase the reach of the ecosystem, and invite more people to come in from outside?
CZ: Absolutely. I really think that women contribute more to our civilization and to our species than men. Men are often just stronger physically and take all the credit for things other people do. It's important for crypto to get more women in the space. Binance has done a pretty good job so far in terms of our employee ratio. We're at 40-something percent, and my direct reports are 50% women. We almost never specifically hire women, we just hire the best people, and 50% of them happen to be women. I think we need to do more on that front. We’re empowering more women to get into crypto and to educate other women about crypto. It’s important for mass adoption to have equal participation. So I think just allowing that access, and allowing that reach, and having that inclusion, is super important.
You can listen to a recording of the AMA in full here .
