History has a habit of flattening people into symbols.
Villains are easier to understand than systems.
Heroes are easier to sell than nuance.
Changpeng Zhao exists in the uncomfortable space between the two.
To some, he is the main character who built the most powerful financial infrastructure of crypto from nothing
And gave hundreds of millions of people access to markets they were never meant to touch.
To others, he is the embodiment of crypto’s original sin: speed over compliance, growth over reputation, ambition before permission.
The truth is weird and far more interesting.
But first we need to walk through CZ path to become the most hated founder today
Origins: Distrust of Systems
He was born in 1977 in Jiangsu, China, into the long shadow of the Cultural Revolution.
His father was an academic, the kind of person the system distrusted.
Intellectuals were liabilities in that era.
Dangerous even.
His family paid for it with exile, poverty, and displacement.
When they emigrated to Canada in 1989, Vancouver did not greet them with abundance.
CZ worked wherever he could, gas stations, McDonalds, odd jobs while learning what it meant to live in a world where nothing is guaranteed
CZ’s relationship with authority was never reverent.
Learning the Game
In the early 2000s, he found himself building trading systems at Bloomberg in New York
Then high-frequency trading software in Shanghai
By the time he discovered Bitcoin in 2013, the idea landed on fertile ground.
He liquidated his apartment and went all in with crypto
I guess when you don’t trust systems, you trust asymmetric bets.
Before Binance
But how he started?
Wallet infrastructure at Blockchain info.
A short, tense stint as CTO at OKCoin.
But he wanted more, so he founded his own company
Binance: An Ethos Is Born
Binance launched in 2017 with a simple idea that would later look subversive:
fees should be low
listings should be abundant
and users should come first
When China banned crypto exchanges weeks after Binance launched, CZ moved.
When projects collapsed and users were hurt, he reached into Binance’s own treasury and reimbursed them.
Binance was born to be an ethos.
Protect users.
Within six months, Binance became the largest exchange in the world.
CZ played a game that regulators were not structurally prepared for, and for a while, he won.
The Peak: 2021
This is where the hero narrative peaks
2021 and EVERYONE loved CZ
Hundreds of millions of users.
Trillions in volume.
An ecosystem that rivaled Ethereum.
And a founder who communicated directly, plainly, almost casually, on Twitter.
But oh my dear friends power attracts gravity.
And you know what Uncle Ben said about power, right?
The State Pushes Back
As Binance grew, so did scrutiny.
Countries banned it.
Agencies investigated it.
The SEC accused it.
In 2023, CZ pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws.
Binance agreed to a $4.3 billion settlement, the largest in crypto history.
CZ stepped down as CEO.
In 2024, he went to federal prison.
Justice served, but he now was a martyr
The real crime was not fraud in the classic sense, it was defiance, negligence, and an underestimation of how far the state will go to assert relevance when a parallel system grows too large to ignore.
Four months in Lompoc
Release and Pardon
When he was released, something interesting happened.
He accepted responsibility publicly and quietly exited operational power.
Then, in 2025, Donald Trump issued him a full presidential pardon
The Failed Comeback
But in the meantime, what could have been a dream comeback, a return to 2021,
a freed hero meant to lead the next cycle, the bull run,
revealed itself as the classic line:
you either die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain.
You’ve surely seen this chart.
In recent months, Binance Alpha became a black hole for projects.
Founders mortgaging their future and their token’s value in exchange for exposure to Binance’s teat.
Failures, every single one of them.
From Builder to Antagonist
While CZ stepped away from his role as Binance’s leader, he also left all of his passion there.
And when his favorite child found itself threatened by Hyperliquid, instead of pushing and fostering healthy competition,
he went all in against them.
That’s almost how Aster was born, a project where CZ had a starring role,
the only project besides BNB that had CZ attached to it,
that’s how KOLs sold it on the timeline.
And it was true.
For four weeks.
A supply tightly controlled by the team and a half-hearted push from CZ were not enough.
Liquidating His Own Market
It didn’t end there.
By every possible means, CZ tried to revive a crypto market that he himself was liquidating through his own gem, Binance.
Bullish messages, but narratives and rumors underneath.
Attempts at memecoins on BNB stained by manipulation.
And CZ’s figure turned into that of a villain in the eyes of his own community.
Beyond Hero and Villain
This is where the question of hero or villain breaks down.
Villains cling to power.
Heroes don’t usually survive systems intact.
CZ did neither.
He built something undeniably transformative.
But he also absorbed the consequences.
My most and personal takeaway is this:
Changpeng Zhao is a case study in what happens when technology moves faster than legitimacy
And one individual is willing to bear the cost of proving it can exist at scale.
Not a saint.
Not a villain.
