REPLAY - CZ, Founder and CEO of Binance: Binance and the Future of Global Crypto Regulation

CZ is the Founder and CEO of Binance, a company with 400 employees, and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. In this conversation, CZ and Anthony Pompliano discuss what he understood that many others didn't when he started the company, how he scaled, and what their future plans are. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoa. Before we get started, I want to go over the four sponsors for this episode who make all this possible. They're fantastic, so go show them some love. The first is the best URL in the industry: crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: driving mass adoption. That's why we're all here, right? To get every human on Earth a digital wallet and to get them using digital currencies. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and a new card payment. Everything you could want is at crypto.com. They've been longtime supporters of Off the Chain and recently announced a new exchange, so go help them out, download their app from the App Store, or visit crypto.com and tell them POM sent you. There's nothing better in the world than a company helping to drive global adoption of this new technology.

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  add tokens that can be mined, or increase the efficiency of the device. Similar to how Tesla does car software updates over the air, Coinmine's sending these passively to thousands of Coinmines around the world on a periodic basis. Pretty damn cool. When Farbood and the team pitched me on the idea of an Xbox or PlayStation-like box that could mine cryptocurrency in your home, I was immediately sold. I invested in the business, have a device personally, and keep telling people to go to coinmine.com/pom so they can save a lot of time if they want to get started mining today. CoinMine has a partnership with our third sponsor for this episode, BlockFi. BlockFi is one of my favorite companies in crypto because they allow users to deposit their assets in a deposit account and immediately start earning interest. Think about it, if you keep your digital assets on an exchange or in cold storage,

• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  you aren't benefiting from any yield on the asset. With BlockFi, they allow you to deposit crypto and then get paid interest on a monthly basis in crypto. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in ETH? You can do it. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in Bitcoin? You can do it. The rates at BlockFi are currently some of the best in the industry. You can earn 6% interest on Bitcoin and you can earn up to 8.6% APY on GUSD deposits. I'm an investor in the company and think BlockFi is building really important and compelling infrastructure. So go check them out at blockfi.com/pomp. Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp. And that brings us to the last advertiser of the episode, eToro. These guys have absolutely crushed it over the years.

• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Their founder, Yoni, was one of the original Bitcoin OGs and has been ahead of almost every trend in crypto. He built eToro to help people buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies, but he added a few twists: social trading, copy trading, and virtual trading accounts. Social trading is a feature where every asset available on the platform has its own separate social feed where people talk about the asset, share trading ideas and analysis, and even include various charts or graphs. Virtual trading accounts is targeted at beginners. If you're just starting out and want to try trading with play money, eToro will give you a virtual account with $100,000 in it to test, learn, and get comfortable. And so, then that brings us to copy trading, which is by far the coolest feature. This allows you, as a user, to select any other user's portfolio to copy.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  If you see someone on the platform you like, you can set your account to mimic their trades. They buy Bitcoin with 5% of their portfolio? Your portfolio buys 5% Bitcoin. They sell 50% of their Ether position? Your portfolio does the same thing automatically. Copy trading is awesome, so go join the 10-plus million other traders on eToro and start trading all the most popular cryptocurrencies today. They're one of the largest companies in the space, and you can get started by going to etoro.com. Again, that is etoro.com, where the entire team is ready to get you started in just a few clicks. And don't forget, go subscribe to the Off the Chain daily newsletter. You can go to offthechain.substack.com. I write a letter of news, analysis, and opinion every morning that goes out to more than 40,000 investors. See you there.

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 4:34Anthony Pompliano?

  CZ is the founder and CEO of Binance, a company with 400 employees and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. In this conversation, we discuss what he understood when he started the company that many others didn't, how he scaled, and what their future plans are. I'm a big fan of the work that he's done, and I think that Binance and CZ are some of the best executors in the crypto industry. I hope you enjoy this conversation nearly as much as I did. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion

• 5:16Anthony Pompliano?

  expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 5:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, I'm super excited. I've got CZ from Binance. We've got a whole bunch of stuff to cover, but first, sir, thank you so much for coming on.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Thank you, Pomp. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 5:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. I think almost everybody in crypto knows you as the CEO of Binance, but you've got a pretty interesting background beforehand. Maybe just talk about some of the stuff you did before you started Binance?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So I was born in China, went to Canada when I was a teenager, did high school and college in Canada, and then I worked in Tokyo, New York, and then Hong Kong, Shanghai, and now everywhere. So that kind of gave you the sort of where I travel was kind of background. I've always been a, I used to be a programmer, so I was computer science, C++ programmer, and then I was always working in the financial field. So in Tokyo, I worked for a subcontractor of a software company that programmed some stuff for the Tokyo Stock Exchange. And then

• 6:35Speaker 01

  in New York, I worked for Bloomberg, mostly on their futures trading products. I was leading a development team that covered everything to do with Bloomberg Tradebook Futures when it first started. So I was the first in the team to start that group. And then, and then I went back to Asia to start my own business. And again, still always, always in trading systems. So I got into crypto in 2013ish and then I think the rest is kind of the history, yeah.

• 7:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And do you feel like a lot of the living in different places, working at different companies, that's helped in terms of the way that you view building Binance today?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  I think absolutely. I think both from the fact that when you travel through different countries, you realize that one currency is limited to one country. This is very different from a large percent of the population where they think that their local currency is the money. Whereas you kind of view that as a different piece of paper. So that kind of shifts the mentality a little bit. It also helps tremendously for Binance to have the international reach and position. So traveling between different countries, I kind of always adopted the mentality with one world. We're not focused on one country, one geographic location. So it does have a lot of impact.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Very, sometimes even less clear than that, sometimes it's more subtle. But it does have an impact.

• 8:07Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And I guess really, you know, a lot of people obviously know about everything that's going on now, but it's not like you just stumbled into crypto a year and a half, two years ago, right? I mean, you've been around for quite a while. Maybe talk a little bit about when you first discovered Bitcoin and the broader crypto industry and some of that early stuff like the conferences, some of those stories.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So the first time I heard about Bitcoin was when I was hosting a poker game in my house in Shanghai, when Bobby Lee and Ron Chao was playing. So Bobby Lee is the CEO of BTC China. Well, he was just about to join BTC China. And that's when the conversation came up. I was like, well, if he's gonna do that and then Ron Chao, Lyspy is gonna pump five million dollars into it. This is sort of mid 2013. I better learn what it is, right? So I Googled Bitcoin and read the white paper. And for me, actually, the white paper was relatively easy to understand. I didn't understand a lot of the mathematics, but I I had my private keys, PGP private keys since nineteen ninety eight. So I I kind of understand how asymmetric encryption works.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And I've always worked in the financial industry, so I kind of know how finances work, kind of at at least at some high level. So it's quite easy for me to understand, and I immediately see the utility of it. And so and then I think it was like December two thousand and thirteen, I went to Vegas for a conference. I met with Metallic, Matt Rosick, Brock Pierce, Charlie Lee, all the same crew. And I said, well, if this is the community back then, back then, they were they were not famous. They were were just all regular guys at a conference. And but I kind of liked the community. So after that conference, I I came back and told my boss I'm gonna leave and I'm gonna do something crypto. And so that's how I started, really. So that's

• 10:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and then what was that first thing you did? Because it wasn't to start Binance.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  No, so Bobby and I had talked about me joining BTC China, like maybe a technology or CTO type of role. But somehow I bumped into Roger Bear, and he was he's the biggest owner or shareholder of blockchain.info. So I ended up joining blockchain.info as the third guy. But there were some blockchain.info, I was the third guy in, together with Nicholas Carey and the original founder Ben Reeves. And then we we grew the team to eighteen people. I learned a lot of stuff from there. So blockchain.info back then was also a company that no offices, no bank accounts. And of the eighteen people that we built, they were spread out around, I don't know, like twelve countries.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  So very similar to Binance today. But then the company took a different direction. They took venture capital and everything else. I left just before that to join OKCoin, which is a Chinese-based exchange, which turned out to be, which basically morphed into OK yesterday. But then, so OKCOIN was on exchanges, which fits my tech background much more. But there were some value system differences, so the way we do things that's different. And I left after about less than a year. And then I was building, I had my own, then I started my own startup, building technology platforms, exchange trading platforms for other exchanges.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  And this is a cloud solution where if you pay a fee and point your domain into an IP address, then you have your exchange system. So we did that for thirty exchanges, and quite a number of them are not in the crypto space, actually.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  And then in two thousand thirteen, based some, a regulator shut down most of our clients. So we lost most, a lot of that business. And we said, well, let's do crypto. That's how we started Binance, and it kind of worked out.

• 11:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, to say it worked out is a understatement, my friend. So maybe talk about, you know, when you started Binance, my understanding is that it was you and a very small group of others, and you were actually building the initial product, is that correct?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yes, so basically, when we started Binance, I had a team of about thirty people. I think thirty-three or thirty-four people back then. We were all crammed into one very small space in Shanghai. And, but we had a product already, we had most of the product already. We had to do some stuff on the deposit withdrawal, security side, etc. But we had ninety, we had like ninety percent of the product. So we did an ICO. From the time we finished the ICO to launching the product took us twelve days. So we finished the ICO on July second, two thousand seventeen, and launched it on July fourteenth, two thousand seventeen. So we had a, we had a, we had a small but very dedicated team, and that helped them, that helped a lot.

• 12:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, that's incredible speed. And it's funny because, you know, as you and I have talked, the early days of Binance, a lot of those same ethos or the approach to building technology, even though you've now scaled to many, many more employees all around the world, a lot of that still applies in terms of the speed that you guys were able to move at and kind of the way that you approached building products.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. So the original team, there's almost no one left. Everyone's still here. And they're all quite wealthy as well, at least on paper. So and so we kept that team, the culture from the early days kind of filtered throughout the organization now. We don't have long-term plans. We have like weekly plans and every week we'll get some, we'll get some stuff done. So we still, we're still on that very fast pace, even though now, given a larger, more decentralized team, there's more overhead on communication. But I still push things very, very hard and things get done very quickly. So we still move forward very, very fast.

• 14:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And what do you think that you knew in those early days, right? And early days is literally what? You think you guys are like 18 months old now, right?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? What do you think you knew then that maybe other exchanges or other entrepreneurs didn't know or maybe didn't put as much importance on that you did?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  I think basically when we started, there was a Bittrex and Polonex who were doing crypto to crypto only. Most of the other guys are still focused on fiat. And everybody viewed fiat as the bigger market. And that's true. The market potential is bigger. But what people missed was the crypto to crypto, you can go international, right? So you can, you can have a small market in each country, but you can do 180 countries. And even Polonex and Bittrex kind of missed this in the early days because they were focused on the US market. They only had an English interface. They only had a web interface. They didn't have a mobile app back then. And so they kind of missed the international aspects. So we want a little bit of, so basically, back then, the crypto to crypto market is relatively new.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  All the guys trading it are advanced crypto users because basically you've got to have Bitcoin to buy some other coin. And that's the user we're using us. So, but, so those guys, those other guys missed the international aspects of it. So I think Binance is probably one of the very few companies, or at least one of the earliest companies that grow sort of simultaneously in 180 different countries. So that's never done before. The most of the mentality before was, let me, let me target the US market. Let me conquer the US market first and then we'll move to China and then we'll move to India and then we'll move to Europe. So that's kind of the mentality where, given the blockchain aspect of it now, there's no borders. You can, you can grow in many countries at once. I think that's, that's early days.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  That's one of the key benefactors for us growing quickly.

• 15:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, this idea that the blockchain allows for a world without borders is fascinating to me. As you were building Binance, what would you say were the biggest challenges? Right, because obviously there was the regulation challenge, but other than that, what, what else were those challenges in the early days that maybe people don't know that you guys faced?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  So, yeah, regulatory spaces are very challenging for when you're growing in 180 different countries because theoretically, there's 100 different, slightly different variations of regulations going on. And also in our, in our industry, to be honest, the regulations, the regulations are still unclear in most of those countries. Probably in all of those countries to some extent. So that's, that's always challenging. So you don't want to, you don't want to step on somebody's toes. So you don't want to violate something, but then the rules are not clear. So what you do and what you cannot do are a little bit fuzzy. So you have to have a very strong moral compass. You have to have a very strong ethical values and, and as the team gets bigger,

• 17:00Speaker 01

  we've got to make sure that the ethical values are inherited in every person. So we've got to hire people very carefully to have that value. So that's probably the biggest challenge we have is basically getting the team right. And once you have, once you have the team with those kind of values, then things become a lot easier. Other difficulties are more tactical. It's like, okay, communication, we have a, as the team is growing, we have a lot of communication issues. We didn't have any system to facilitate it. Everything was done either by chat or like a Google Doc. So, but those challenges are more tactical. They're not very strategic. You, you basically, there, there are multiple ways to overcome them and eventually you do.

• 17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so, so let's dig in a little bit about the, the kind of the organizational structure of finance, because I don't think a lot of people actually realize. You know, you went from thirty people all literally in a room to today, how many employees, how many different countries are they in? Maybe just talk a little bit about that structure that you have that's so unique to, to what you guys are doing.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Sure. So, uh, so today we have, uh, four hundred, uh, exactly four hundred people, actually. And, uh, we've grown about ten times in about, uh, ten acts in terms of headcount in about eighteen months. And that's very challenging to deal with. And also we're spread out around, I think, forty-three different countries, the last time we counted. And, uh, so the way we organize ourselves, and the only way we could organize ourselves is basically have very small teams. And they're, they're very independent, they're very autonomous. So, uh, very often I find out things afterwards, uh, after they're live, they're done, uh, and we're like, okay, that feature is already done and it's already live.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  So it's, it's a very, it's a fairly decentralized organization. Now we have some mechanism to share status across groups or, or across teams. And, uh, now the teams will have to cooperate with each other more often. For example, the, the marketing team kind of, uh, needs to interface with everybody. And now it's kind of slowly grown, uh, the processes are sort of, uh, uh, uh, more fluid now. But there were times where the marketing team, uh, were pushing out stuff that the tech team doesn't know about or vice versa. So we had a lot of those issues, but what, what we did is, um, Because we have people who are very passionate and they all work very hard on themselves. That overcame a lot of the issues and we had. So basically, we just give them a lot of freedom. They decide what they're thinking to do.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Eventually, they figure out how to cooperate with the other teams, how to communicate, what tools we use, etc. So, yeah, I mean, I can get into a lot of details, but there are so many problems as well. For example, we have so many different chat groups, so many different chat tools and just, and that's a constant distraction. How do you deal with that? Is that another issue? Again, there's no perfect solution, so we cannot deal with things.

• 19:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it fascinates me because, you know, there's so much talk in Silicon Valley specifically about distributed teams versus not distributed teams. And not only have you guys made it work at scale with 400 employees, but you've done it in such a short period of time, right? It's the way I think about it is the faster that you grow a distributed team, the more stress you put on everything from the communication to the systems, the management, etc. And you guys, although there's been those challenges, have not only kept it together, but frankly, the company has thrived while you've been scaling that employee base.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  I think it's very, I think we got lucky in a lot of fronts where we have what's called a, there's a term for it, a massive transformative mission or something. So we've got a mission that's meaningful and that's very impactful and people want to contribute to that. And that's something, I think as long as people working on something that's meaningful and impactful, I think that's much stronger than paying them a little bit, like 20% or 50% more. So I think that helped us a lot. And actually, some of the external difficulties we face actually unites us. So when there's an external war going on, we actually, the team unites together and try to fight that war. And that kind of overlooks the small differences or small problems within the team.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  So we actually faced a lot of external challenges. So I think just keeping the team busy on external challenges and getting things done really fast helps a lot. And at the end of the day, I think we're doing a really meaningful thing. And people, everybody on the team knows that. And so I think that helps overcoming a lot of the issues that we were facing. But at the end of the day, we're still having a lot of the issues. We have still having a lot of the growing pains and there's no, it's not a secret.

• 21:39Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  It's working.

• 21:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, one of the things that I've heard you say before is that, you know, finance isn't going to necessarily be the highest paying employer, and actually, a lot of people will take a pay cut to come work with you guys. You know, one, talk a little bit more about that, and then, two, maybe talk about how do you describe that world-changing mission to the employees internally?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Sure. So, yeah, so almost, almost all employees, or we don't really use the word employees, but we use more of team members. We view ourselves as one team, and the concept of our company is kind of virtual anyway. But, so, most people do take a pay cut to join us, and then, the good performers, we send us, we compensate them in other ways, and some, usually when they first join, they would almost, most definitely take a pay cut, and if they do well, we kind of, we can adjust over time. So that definitely happens, and we look for people who are very passionate about this industry, and we, so we look for people who are already understanding this industry

• 22:40Speaker 01

  already. So luckily, finance has a really good brand reputation out there, so it's quite easy for us to attract those guys. And so the two, so basically, it's like two magnets attracting each other, and we, we find those guys quite easily, and they find us quite easily as well. So that kind of worked out. In terms of communicating the value to the organization, I think, basically, that's what you say, and that's what you do. So I think every decision we make internally, when we make those decisions, the decision process is quite transparent to most of the people in our team. So when we make those decisions, our philosophy is, okay, are we protecting our user? Are we doing the right thing? And we ask that question all the time, and we make

• 23:22Speaker 01

  decisions based on that. A lot of times, we take a hit that other people don't know. And when, when you do that consistently, the team knows, the team trusts you. So the team gets a lot more exposure to my personalities or our leadership personalities. So that value, so it's what you do that, that filters out. So, and the team, given, given their visibility to that, trust, like, there's very strong trust within the team. So that's also why most of the team takes B and B as compensation. They know that B and B is good. So, so that's basically how, how I view it kind of works.

• 23:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so, you know, one of the things that I think people would be upset is this idea that you're able to communicate very well internally with those 400 employees and they get to see you kind of day to day, the actions that you take along with the words that you say and kind of the values that you're pursuing and the type of company that you aspire to build. But there's plenty of people who don't get to see that, right? And they're all just put them in the category of like the detractors. And these are the people who they'll complain about everything from the listing fees to the transparency you guys have, to, you know, what you choose to list, the regulatory, you know, kind of avenues you choose, etc.

• 24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What would kind of be your overarching message back to a lot of those detractors? And maybe something that they don't know or kind of, you know, if you were talking with them that you'd want them to understand?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So I think there's, in terms of like the detractors you mentioned, there's a few different groups of those guys. There are guys who just honestly don't understand what we do, or don't know us that well, or they haven't followed our news, they didn't watch what we do. So for most people who's kind of know our history, watched us from day one, or watched us for a period of time, they kind of get it, that they kind of understand. So that's part, and there are limitations on the amount of information we can disclose. For example, our listing process. If we fully disclose that, people will engineer that. And we change that all the time anyway, so we don't follow one standard process. At the end of the day,

• 25:35Speaker 01

  we just want to list good coins, and that's very generic. And how much value do we put on number of users or product or the token economics? It's very hard to say. So, and it changes all the time. And how much listing fees do we charge? Well, it changes in every case actually as well. So as a business, we keep a lot of that. Honest.com is a centralized private business. So we keep, and we keep a lot of those informations internally because we also don't want our competitors to know. We also have other pressures from other directions. So there are certain parts of the business we can't fully disclose. Because if we have no

• 26:20Speaker 01

  we have no competitors, we have no risks. And yes, then we can do that, but it's kind of it's a bit difficult. Yeah, and there's a second category of distractors, which are basically guys who,

• 26:37Speaker 01

  I would say have some deficiencies on their own. They are either jealous, or they feel entitled. So a lot of guys feel that they are entitled to be listed on Binance for free. I'm like, well, no, not necessarily. That's not how the world works. In a decentralized, freedom-driven world, you do what you do, we do what we do. We have all the right to charge a listing fee if you want to. We also have the right not to charge it if we don't want to. So, and even if we don't charge a listing fee for a coin, let's say, we never charge a listing fee for Ethereum or Bitcoin. But we may charge a listing fee for your project. So there's a lot of those kinds of things where people feel entitled, and they feel that the world should work in a certain way.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  But actually, the world doesn't work that way, especially in a freedom-driven world. So some of those guys, we can't really help. They really just need to come to an understanding of how the world really works. And that freedom is freedom. And some, like some guys, even get offended when I block them on Twitter, right? So like, the guy's talking shit, I just don't want to be bothered and block the guy. I don't need to hear what he says. And he says, well, now I'm violating his freedom of speech. I'm like, wait a second, you can still speak. I just have freedom to block you. There are those guys I can't help. So it is what it is.

• 27:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, I'm with you on a lot of the Twitter trolls. You and I probably get a good handful of them. And some of them you can kind of put up with and just say, you know, kind of ignore. But every once in a while, somebody crosses the line. And frankly, it's better for you to block them. So I fully understand that. Yeah.

• 28:18Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So let's talk a little bit about how you see the world, right? Because you're the CEO of, you know, one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the global crypto ecosystem, right? And I think a lot of people see what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. But understanding your mindset... Or your view of the world will help them better think about crypto, right? And so one of the big differentiations is between these utility token and like cryptocurrencies, things that I'll say are not as heavily regulated versus like tokenized securities. Maybe talk through, you know, at a high level, the difference, how you view them.

• 28:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And then if there's certain jurisdictions around the world where you think that tokenized securities will kind of get adopted first, just give them the kind of regulatory compliance that is, you know, easier to do in certain jurisdictions.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So, yeah, so that's actually a very good question and it's very broad. So I'll try to start at a few different places. I think in terms of a utility versus security token, that's sort of a very much main made distinction. Again, as you said, different, different parts of the world regulate them differently. While some parts of the world don't even have very good, or don't even have regulations for some of that stuff. Concepts is very different from every, from different places. But I think fundamentally, a token or a coin should have value based on utility. So that's how you use it. It may, it may be that it represents, represents value in a company share or something that will be closer to a security.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  I think, I actually personally think security tokens probably going to take off faster where the regulations are more, are more relaxed. So in countries where there's very heavy and very strong regulations on securities, I think it's probably going to take off slower because there's just more work involved in moving through those very rigid structures. And I think also cryptocurrency, even tokens, that kind of represents, basically, we talk about tokenizing everything in the world. And when you're tokenizing everything, many of those things will look like a security because they will represent certain shares in certain things. But I think fundamentally cryptocurrencies probably should not be classified as securities,

• 30:39Speaker 01

  to be honest, because cryptocurrency does a lot more than what traditional securities do. Because now you can transfer them on blockchain. So if you use the traditional sort of security tokens model, then now you have to do wireless in the smart contracts of addresses of approved accredited investors, etc. Then it's still better than a piece of paper. The blockchain is still better than a piece of paper. But then you severely limit the growth of that new tool. So I think in countries where they're more relaxed about this kind of thing, okay, so you can tokenize a building or you can tokenize real estate, as you probably have a couple of projects involved in that area.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Then in countries where the regulations are more relaxed, as long as you're not a scam, as long as you have real estate that's being tokenized, then people are free to trade more freely. Then you get a lot more liquidity, you get a lot more market cap. So and then you get a lot more funds and you will be able to grow faster. So I think in that aspect, I think in the early stages of the industry, the regulations should try to prevent bad actors but not limit the industry growth. So I think that's very key.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  And in terms of jurisdictions and sort of my kind of worldview of what we're doing with Binance, right now I think it's very clear that most of the money is still in fiat. So we need to somehow, we need to build bridges so that to let those money flow more freely into the crypto world. So that's why we're adding fiat on-ramps in different places. So that's why we're doing Jersey, Uganda, Singapore, Malta, many other places. And that's also why we enable credit card payments through a third party. And there's more. We are also exploring or at least researching debit card integrations and other things. So there's a lot more to come.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  So we want to build a fiat on-ramp so that we can allow fiat to come into our world of crypto. And then on the flip side, of course, we have the, right now, Binance.com is a centralized crypto to crypto exchange.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  So we are also building or releasing the Binance DEX, the decentralized exchange we have. So we're trying to explore on both, on both, on both sides. And then we have the Launchpad, which I firmly believe is a very, very important part of our ecosystem, which is we want to help entrepreneurs to raise money and also, and to, to be able to better develop our ecosystem and every other ecosystem as well. So I think fundraising is a killer app, blockchain fundraising is a killer app of blockchain. And we, uh, we kind of, we kind of slowed down a little bit in 2018 due to the market correction, due to a large number of projects didn't work out. People are still trying to get used to that and some, some scams and fraudsters involved.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Once people learn how those things work, once people learn how to deal with that, I'm almost 100% sure that blockchain fundraising will be back. It is a, it is a killer app for blockchain and we should help it. And once we do that, we're going to help the entrepreneurs very strongly in our space and to some extent in traditional industries as well. And I think helping entrepreneurs is one of the strongest things to help ecosystems or, or economies grow. So I, I, I come from an entrepreneurial background, so I really want to help other entrepreneurs. And I think entrepreneurs are the guys who are going to make the world change into a better place. So, um, so that's kind of my worldview.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  And we're navigating a very complex world right now with 100 different sets of regulations or different sets of rules that we made up for ourselves.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  We just want to be very cognizant of that and respect every rule as out there. So, and then we want, so I'm, I'm never a revolution kind of guy, so I never, I'm not extreme in terms of, I'm not extremely libertarian like many crypto people are. I'm not against any government, any individual, any company, any organization. I just wanna improve things a little bit at a time. So I'm not trying to remove banks. I'm not trying to revolutionize against them. I just wanna provide a different alternative. And that's potentially has different set of characteristics or advantages. And let people adopt. And some of those things will work, some of things things will not, and the market will choose. So that's kind of my worldview.

• 35:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, what what are the things that, you know, as you and I have talked more, you've spent a little bit of time together in Singapore, that frankly, I was surprised is your approach to a lot of the decisions you make. Not only are one rational and and obviously you're a smart guy who a lot of people believe in. You'd be able to build this fairly large company. But also your approach to regulation is quite sober, right? You you aren't kind of storming the hill, if you will, with pitchforks, right? You you're saying, look, what are the rules there? Let's try to operate within those rules and understand that old kind of,

• 35:57Anthony Pompliano?

  the historic kind of frameworks that have been applied to some of this stuff may not be perfect. But let's do as little as we can to disrupt that, right? Let's not try to step on toes. Let's not try to kind of piss people off or or, you know, get in the way of regulators or do things they don't want you to do. And and I wish that more people kind of saw that side. Because I think it's pretty commendable, one. And two, frankly, it's counterintuitive to what, you know, many from the outside see.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, absolutely. I think many people have a different, I don't know for whatever reason, have a different set of beliefs in how we operate. I personally am not, I'm a very practical kind of guy. So I like to understand how the world really works and figure out what we can do in the world to make things better. And I'm not like kind of idealistic or philosophical that we have, we have to make the world work in this way. So even though I have a set of philosophical beliefs on what's the best, but practically what we can do, we've got to be very programmatic about it. So I'm always thinking in those kinds of ways. Where so far Binance actually have never had any runnings with anybody.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  So contrary to what people believe. So we actually, we actually just trying to find solutions to make things better. That's all we do.

• 37:21Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And you know, two of the parts of the business that you didn't talk about yet, Binance Labs and then the charity work. Maybe give a little overview of what you guys are doing there and why you're spending so much time and resources, you know, building those two functions out.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. I'll talk a little about Binance Charity first. So there is a little bit of a self-serving aspects to the philanthropy work, I think. I think using charity, social impact work to push crypto is the best way, or one of the best ways for people to adopt crypto. And when people receive a donation in crypto, they have to learn it. They have to learn how to use a wallet. They have to learn how to exchange it. And then they have to learn what is Bitcoin? What is Binance Coin? What is Binance? What is this wallet? So I think that's the best way to educate. I think there's more value in educating that person than giving them $10 in crypto. So and that will help.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  And that's when you have that kind of positive experiences, the first interaction with crypto, that basically gets imprinted into your mind or subconsciousness. And crypto is a good thing. So I think if you can do that consistently, a little bit by, a little bit at a time, if you just build that habit and eventually it's gonna, it's gonna add up. 10 years later, the next generation of people who grow up will like crypto. So they will not have the same kind of misconceptions or concerns as we do about crypto as some of the people today. And so, and also, so, and it's a great way to spread, to educate the industry.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  And we also, of course, at the same time, we're doing a really good thing. We're doing social impact work, that's really satisfying. And it's very good that we were able to do that this early stage in the, in the, in the, in the organization's journey. Binance Labs, Binance Labs is an investment arm. So basically, there's many good projects, there's many things out there that's really good. That we are not expressing, or at least I'm not expressing. So for example, wallets, other faster blocks, so there's a lot of stuff out there that I'm not, I'm not experting. And there are other people building those projects. So this way, we want to find them early and we want to fund them.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  We want to give them money so that we want to invest, so that they, they have a healthy platform to grow on. So Binance Labs and Binance Launchpad and even the listing process of Binance are three core pillars that we will help entrepreneurs and new coins, new, to new projects to grow. So we can invest in them, we can help them raise money to Launchpad, and then we can list them to help them, give them liquidity, give them access to more users. So all of this, all of these things we do. And so Binance Labs, we make investments, we also do incubation programs. We just launched a fellowship program where you don't have to really have a project or we don't have to invest in, but we can give you a grant, we can give you like, and there's no strings attached.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  We can give you like, I don't know, a couple thousand dollars or for, for a few months or so. You can, you can go, go ahead and do your project and there's no strings attached. We just want to help you build out the industry. So that's kind of what we do in those areas.

• 40:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then are there other things that you're thinking about now in terms of building out other like divisions of finance? Or do you think you'll just continue to invest in the ones you've got right now? And then maybe in the future you can expand even further?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  I think Binance right now probably has enough sub teams or divisions on the coverage. So I don't think we're going to add a lot more. We, to be honest, I actually think we're doing too much. I actually want to do less. But the organization is decentralized. It's already spread out. So I can't really centralize them right now. But I think we're doing enough in terms of number of initiatives. I think we want to go deeper in each initiative and do them well.

• 41:30Anthony Pompliano?

  The Binance virus is spreading and is out of control.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Thanks. The virus is always spreading.

• 41:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Exactly. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right. Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal. Motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending and card payment. Everything you could want at crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry. Your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and wifi. All you got to do is go to coinmine.com. You buy a coin mine.

• 42:20Anthony Pompliano?

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• 43:02Anthony Pompliano?

  or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds, so you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. So let's talk a little bit more big picture, right? Is there anything that you guys are not doing today that you would like to do in the future, right? Not necessarily like new divisions, but just whether it's operating in certain jurisdictions, if it's adding certain types

• 43:47Anthony Pompliano?

  of assets, like what is kind of the bigger, larger picture for Binance right now from the CEO's seat?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Sure. I think as you said, I think there's a lot of different jurisdictions we don't cover, don't service, or there's no coverage by anybody. We want to cover those jurisdictions so that we can help those people get into crypto or get into the blockchain ecosystem. So there's so many jurisdictions in the world and we're, I'm always asking my team, do you research this country, this place? And give me a list of things where, places where we should be next. And on the product side, so we're, we're, we're obviously, we don't have margin, we don't have futures. So those things will probably come later. Security tokens, there's a few experiments run by different projects. We

• 44:37Speaker 01

  want to see how that market shakes up. We have licenses in a number of jurisdictions for that already. But honestly, we don't know how to use those licenses. Basically, we don't know what we can or cannot do. Given Binance's impact, we actually want other smaller exchanges to try it first. Because with Binance, if we try something bad or something that's kind of, that's on somebody else's toe, the impact will be large and the reaction will be large as well. So we kind of want to avoid that. Um. Other than that, I think we have enough work on our plate and let's just, we don't have to cover everything. Um. What we want to do is, um, we want to be the, uh, infrastructure player for a few things, uh, out of many.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  And we want to do them well. So for exchanges, definitely our core business, uh, decentralized exchanges, if that industry takes off, we want to be there. Uh, fiat exchanges, uh, less important, but, uh, I think right now it's important, uh, it's just for the transition period. Um, so that's kind of our, uh, our view.

• 45:35Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And, and one of those things that you personally, I think, have done a great job of is, uh, the way that you use Twitter, right? You really communicate well, um, whenever there's, you know, maintenance or a security issue or anything like that. Um, maybe talk a little bit about like why you spend time doing that. You know, your, your time is valuable. You've got a bunch of employees. You could be doing a whole bunch of other things. But why spend so much time kind of communicating with, uh, customers that way and, and other people who are interested in, uh, what you're doing?

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. Well, uh, well, just let me say first, on, on how to use Twitter, I'm al- I'm always trying to learn from you. I think you are.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  You, you, your way of communication of like just precise, uh, presentation communication is just awesome. So I'm always trying to learn from you on that. Uh, and how you find out Twitter, uh, is great. So for me personally, um, I, I really like to interact with our community and with our, uh, users and what, what we, what we call binations. So in the early days I was using, uh, I, we were using WeChat and, but it only allows 500 people, up to 500 people in a group. Um, and, uh, and then we switched over to like Slack and Slack has some security issues, uh, with spam bots and stuff like that. So then we switched to, um, I don't know what else. We tried so many different things.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Uh, eventually we, we, uh, we're now using Telegram as well, but Telegram groups go up to like a hundred thousand. Now they go up to 200,000. Uh, whatever you type on screen doesn't stay there for like half a second, especially when I'm in there, people get, people get excited, see this here and the screen just. Starts scrolling like crazy. So I find Twitter is actually the best platform where I can interact with a with a with a with a number of random people, but also a number of uh uh uh set people that I follow. And the interaction is a little bit random, uh, because some I don't see all the all the all the tweets that's pretty at me, but I see a a portion of them and I I just I just respond when I respond. And uh, so I think that's that's kind of working well because um, number one,

• 47:34Speaker 01

  it allows me to learn what our users think, what our community thinks. If there's a big problem, um, or if there are, if there are trending problems, trending complaints, right now, there's big demand for O C O's and right, um, like a new order type. Uh, before there was a lot of demand for X R P base pair. So um, so I I can I cannot get a direct feedback that way. And I also get feedback on how our teams doing, uh, even though without without the mentioned direct teams. Um, and also I think the use, uh, the the community appreciates that. So I try to spend somewhere between ten to twenty percent of my time interacting with the community. And then the other eighty percent or so I spend internally with a team or with other doing other random stuff. So that's kind of how I allocate my time.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  And on Twitter, I don't view myself as a Twitter expert, but what I what I do is very simple. I just be myself. So whenever I do a speech, get on stage or get on Twitter or interact with somebody, I just just say be yourself. So sometimes I do stupid stuff. Uh, I yell at, or I I I like all people or I I even use profanity sometimes, but I look, I just be myself and if that works, that works. If that if that doesn't, I still myself. So there's really no choice.

• 48:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, look, I I think people appreciate your authenticity.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  I I think I think so. I think I'm one of the, I don't, I don't, I don't see many other CEOs, especially for exchanges doing what I what I'm doing, but I'm okay with it. Um, I just try, I just do my thing and looks like it's kind of working. So I haven't got into any big problems.

• 49:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Um, one of the things that I'm personally interested in is, you know, why are you doing all this, right? What what's kind of personally driving you to um, continue to, you know, I always tell you, you're pushing the pace, right? You're you're pushing the pace in terms of features that you're launching, the speed at which you guys are building, the number of assets that you're bringing online, the jurisdictions that you go into. Like, what is your personal motivation to do all of this?

• 49:32Speaker 01

  I think it's just just to have a more fulfilling life, right?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  It's just that I think you want to make the best out of your life. I mean, basically, we're we're or at least currently, we're on this earth for about, I don't know,

• 49:46Speaker 01

  a couple of decades. I don't know, fifty, a hundred years or so. So I think basically, I I so I ask myself, right? So what I want to do? Do I want to relax on the beach and sip martinis all day long? I'll get bored, I like in like in five hours or less. And that's just not, this is not fun. Do I want to drive a sports car? No, it's not fun. So I'm not interested in those kind of stuff. So I think basically today, I can relatively confidently say I can I can take care of myself relatively okay on most fronts. Some places I do need other people's help, etc. So I'm I'm still a social animal. And then, and then I think for for me or for humans in general, the way I figured it out is

• 50:29Speaker 01

  to have the most meaningful life is actually just to do something impactful. I think as a species, we are genetically engineered so that you take care of yourself first, and then you want to take care of help others. I think that's the most rewarding thing to do as a species. So if we don't do that, if we're not genetically engineered that way, then our species probably would not exist. So the most rewarding thing for me to do is find a way to help others. And if my if my abilities are stronger, then I'll do more. If my abilities are weaker, I'll do I'll just do my little bit that I can do. So it's whatever I can do. So I'm like, honestly, I have enough money and doubling it or taking half away of it is not going to change my life very, very much.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  So that doesn't drive me. So I think basically, at the end of the day, what drives me is to be able to make a positive impact. And that's really meaningful. And the best thing I know how to do is basically increase adoption of crypto. I think that's going to be the most positive impact I can bring to our species. So it sounds a little bit arrogant, but that's kind of that's kind of honestly what I think.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  And then, and then in terms of the speed of pushing things out, you basically, you do the, you do, you do your best and then you try to challenge yourself a little bit, right? So I think as humans, we feel most satisfied if we do things that's a little bit challenging, but not over, not overly challenging to ourselves. So we always wanna push ourselves a little bit. And so we keep pushing, so we, we, we always competing with ourselves. So we keep pushing the pace a little bit, keep pushing the pace a little, a little bit, doing the fastest we can while ensuring security and quality. And that's, and things just happen. So I think, um, honestly, given that's kind of my personality, the team inherits quite a lot of it. Uh, we have very, we have very little bullshit, very little politics, very little, sometimes even communication going on in the team. But we just get stuff done. We're very results driven.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Uh, we just get stuff done and we ignore everything else. So that, it kinda works, it, it works quite well.

• 52:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Uh, all right, before we, uh, before we, uh, end this though, I wanna do a, a quick kind of rapid fire of questions. Um, and when asked a question, you just fire away with whatever, uh, whatever comes to mind. What is the, uh, what's the most important book that you've ever read?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, I actually did prepare for this one because I, I listened to your podcast before. Um, so the, so contrary to my, uh, uh, early answer, I would say the most, uh, the most, the book I recommend very highly is actually called The Law, uh, by Frederick, uh, Bastiat. Uh, I think it's written in eighteen fifty, so it's written more than a hundred fifty, a hundred seventy years ago. Uh, but it's still, still there, still around, still being printed. Um, and, uh, so people should read it. And that, that's what The Law should be, uh, describing that book. I believe that book's very strongly, and I think when you read that, you understand how our world works better. There's a couple of other books, if I can squeeze in there, I would recommend. Uh, Economics in One Lesson, um, by Henry something. Um, I apologize, I forgot the author's full name.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Um, uh, that book is kind of a extension of The Law, but it, it talks more about economics where this very fundamental, basic concept of economics that makes total sense expand by that book, but that's a totally misunderstood by, I would say, majority of our population. So people, you gotta understand how the world works. And so Economics in One Lesson is a book I strongly recommend. Yeah, so those two books are very good, yeah.

• 53:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I've never heard of The Law, so I'm gonna have to go read that one.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  It's a very short book. It's very good. I'll tweet you the link later. There's actually a third book, which I would really recommend as well, which is Sapiens by Homo Sapiens, A Short History of Humankind or something. Again, I forgot the author's full name. But again, when you read that book, you understand how humans work, how we evolved, how we made, what emotions we have, how do we think, how different structures of our societies work through history. Basically, you understand how we work, which is very important. So I think to be successful, you've got to understand how the world works and how we work. So I think those books are very, very helpful.

• 54:41Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. All right, I usually end with letting you ask me one question, but before we do that, we've got to talk about aliens. What's the, what is the probability that aliens exist?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  This is a very interesting topic.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  I believe almost 100%, basically 99.99999% that aliens do exist. Which form, what does that look like, is very variable, but they could look similar to us and being able to communicate, interact with us. They could also be aliens who are on totally different dimensions with us that we can't really interact with. I think both exist. And on that topic, we could open our four different kind of worms. I also believe in simulation theory. The fact that basically we're living in a simulation, I also believe in that. But anyway, so we can have.

• 55:33Anthony Pompliano?

  CZ, man, I knew I liked you. I knew you were gonna believe in aliens.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely, yes.

• 55:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. All right, to finish it up, what one question do you have for me?

• 55:45Speaker 01

  So I have a more of a fun question, to be honest. So congratulations on the recent fundraising on your fund. I have a question about that. I heard through the grapevine that you have a police pension fund investing in you as well?

• 56:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, there is a, it is a public police pension in a county in Virginia in the United States.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  That is awesome. Congratulations. That's my question.

• 56:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, look, no, it's interesting because I think a lot of people, you know, there's been this narrative of like the institutions are coming, right? We've been hearing that since like end of 2017, early 2018. And last year in 2018, we did get a kind of a first look at what that might look like in that, you know, Yale, MIT, Notre Dame, Stanford, Harvard, some, a bunch of endowments came in. And some of them very small checks, some a little bit more meaningful checks, but it was pretty much contained to the endowments. Then the other data point that we had was the Singaporean government, right? They actually invested in you guys. Yes.

• 56:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And so that was kind of another institutional type investor, you know, putting money into the crypto ecosystem. But we wanted to raise a fund and really focus on institutions. And so the fund that we announced is anchored by two public pensions and then it also has an endowment, a hospital system, an insurance company, et cetera. And, you know, frankly, it's funny to hear a lot of what you're talking about because they really do believe in a lot of the like, every stock, bond, currency, commodity is going to be digital or tokenized, right? There's going to be this new digital world that has less focus on borders. Just, you know, across the institutional world, you see them buying into a world of like

• 57:43Anthony Pompliano?

  automation and machine to machine transactions. And so going into a venture fund where you can own equity in these businesses in this industry is a little bit less risky for them than say just buy Bitcoin or BNB or whatever. Yeah. And so I think that, you know, this is a nice first step and then hopefully over time, more institutions will follow them and go to the liquid side. The other thing that I will say is the, you know, the police pension, it's funny to me personally because while everyone is yelling and screaming about, you know, criminals use this stuff, bad people use this stuff, right? I think that those that are closest to crime, like law enforcement, whether it's at the

• 58:27Anthony Pompliano?

  federal level, the state level or the local level, they realize that bad people do bad things regardless of the industry. There's people doing bad things on Wall Street. There's people doing bad things in crypto. There's people doing bad things with Bitcoin. And there's people doing bad things with the US dollar. Right? And so it's less about, you know, the dollar being bad or Bitcoin being bad or the industry. And it's much more about, let's go find the bad people and make them stop. And then let's allow innovation to thrive. Right? So I think there's a lot of actual overlap between the way that you see what you guys are doing and kind of building the company and the way that these institutional investors see the world. And so hopefully we'll just have more of them come into the space.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Sure, absolutely. I mean, that's awesome. And it reminds me of the movie or the TV series Billions. I didn't watch much of the series, but the episode I watched was the police fund investing in the funds. So now you're doing that.

• 59:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I have to admit, I've seen it and I did not think that people were going to make that reference. And of course Twitter is undefeated. They literally at 6:00 AM this morning started tweeting photos of the Billions characters. And so I got a good laugh out of that.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Right, right. And also just one more clarification.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  It's not that, I gotta say this so that my investors don't get on me. It's not the Singapore government that investing in us. It's the Vertex, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Thamasic, which is basically a Singapore sovereign fund that invested in Binance. But again, it is a very, it is a very sort of government related type of fund. That's what you're investing in us.

• 1:00:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's related, just the structure is a little different.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I just want to make that clear so that we don't have any, I don't have any guys doing it.

• 1:00:17Anthony Pompliano?

  You got it. All right, listen, man, I appreciate everything you're doing. I think that, you know, there's a lot of people who use your service every day. You obviously are employing a ton of people and you are one of the entrepreneurs that is at the forefront of this industry. And so just, just keep going and let me know however we can help. I'm cheering for you.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, pump. And you've been an inspiration in our industry and for me as well. So yeah, I mean, we talk to each other, we see each other on Twitter all the time. Let's keep the conversation going and good luck with the fund. If you need any help, let me know.

• 1:00:51Anthony Pompliano?

  You got it, sir.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:00:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.