Changpeng Zhao said on Aug. 23 during a Binance Clubhouse Bali 2026 Community Q&A that he does not advise young people to sell their homes and go all-in on crypto assets, particularly when a property represents the majority of an individual's wealth.
Zhao contrasted this advice with his own move in 2013, when he sold his Shanghai apartment to invest all his wealth into Bitcoin. He explained he had strong confidence in Bitcoin's long-term growth trajectory and noted his lifestyle would not have been affected even if Bitcoin had gone to zero following his initial investment. Not everyone has the financial capacity to absorb such a loss, he acknowledged.
For most people, Zhao recommends a measured approach: invest one to 10 percent of monthly income into leading crypto assets. This strategy focuses on consistent, smaller allocations rather than single, large-scale commitments.
Zhao first encountered Bitcoin in 2013 during a poker game with Bobby Lee, founder of BTCC. Lee advised Zhao to allocate 10 percent of his money to Bitcoin, but Zhao chose to go all-in instead.
Zhao resigned as Binance CEO in November 2023 following U.S. Department of Justice allegations concerning violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. He pleaded guilty to the charges and received a four-month prison sentence in April 2024, completing his sentence by September of that year. President Donald Trump granted Zhao a presidential pardon in October 2025.
Before founding Binance, Zhao worked as CTO at OKCoin and as head of development at Blockchain.info. He spent four years at Bloomberg Tradebook developing futures trading software and founded Fusion Systems in Shanghai in 2005, a company known for high-frequency trading platforms for stockbrokers.
Zhao was born in 1977 in Ganyu, Jiangsu province, China, where his parents worked as schoolteachers. His father, a university instructor, was exiled to rural areas after being labeled a "pro-bourgeois intellect." In late 1989, at age 12, Zhao emigrated with his family to Vancouver, British Columbia, after acquiring a Canadian visa following the Tiananmen Square protests. He worked service jobs as a teenager to support his family and later majored in computer science at McGill University in Montreal.
