Changpeng Zhao
Birdslip
Changpeng Zhao was born on the 10th of September, 1977 in Jiangsu province, China. His father was a university professor. Changpeng's parents relocated with him to Vancouver, Canada, when he was 12 years old.
CZ, as he is popularly called, studied computer science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His first job was as a software developer to a stocks-trading contractor on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. His entire career has been around developing and management of enterprise software for stocks and cryptocurrency trading platforms.
He relocated to Shanghai, in China in the year 2005, and founded his own stock trading platform called Fusion Systems.
Although the open source software for cryptocurrencies was released in 2008, trading in Bitcoin really started to grow exponentially around 2012. Seeing the potentially huge possibilities that could come out of cryptocurrencies, CZ sold his apartment in Shanghai in 2014 for $1 Million to buy Bitcoin.
As someone who was highly experienced in building currency and stock exchange software, it would come as no surprise in 2017 when Changpeng decided to build his own cryptocurrencies trading platform, Binance.
Today, Binance is the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange. And Changpeng is the 19th richest person in the world, with a net worth currently at $65 Billion.
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