Changpeng Zhao, popularly known as CZ, is the CEO of Binance. Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange.
In a few months, Binance grew from an idea to becoming a portal for launching new blockchain projects, creating its own blockchain.
Changpeng Zhao was born in Jiangsu Province, China. In the late 1980s he moved with his family to Vancouver, Canada.
His father was a professor in China before he was banished from his country. During his teens, Zhao helped his family by working at McDonalds.
Zhao studied at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he graduated in computer science.
After his studies, Zhao started working for the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Here he developed software to match commercial orders.
He then moved to New York in 2001 to work on futures trading software at the Bloomberg Tradebook, and was soon promoted to Development Manager.
During his time here, he led a team responsible for the entire Bloomberg futures trading platform.
After spending four years with Bloomberg in 2005, Changpeng Zhao moved to Shanghai to become co-founder of Fusion Systems.
Fusion Systems is a company that focuses on creating high-frequency trading systems.
The study of Bitcoin
He learned about Bitcoin in 2013 through a friend and moved to London. Here he started working as a third member of the Bitcoin portfolio team and soon became Head of Technology.
While working there, he worked with Ben Reeves, Roger Ver, Anthony Antonopoulos and Nicolas Cary to grow the Blockchain.info service.
After about a year, Changpeng Zhao left London in June 2014 to become the OKCoin CTO for encryption in Beijing.
During his time at OKCoin, CZ worked with He Yi, who was in charge of branding and marketing.
Eight months later, in February 2015, he announced that he would leave OKCoin. In September 2015, he returned to Shanghai to become the founder and CEO of BijieTech.
The birth of Binance
Finally, CZ left BijieTech in July 2017 to become the full-time founder and CEO of a new "Binance" cryptographic exchange. Binance is the abbreviation for "Binary Finance". Binance was founded on 1 July 2017 and has become one of the largest cryptic fairs in the world in just under six months.