On a rainy Monday night in Moscow, on October 21st 2019, the famous influencer, game-changer, and billionaire, CEO of Binance cryptocurrency exchange Changpeng Zhao, widely known as CZ, met with 700+ Russian blockchainers during a special Binance Super Meetup Russia. To everyone’s delight, CZ started his speech confirming that Binance is going to launch crypto-fiat trading pairs, and the debut trading option would be tied to the Russian ruble.
*applause*
After patiently posing for selfies with a long line of attendees, CZ went on stage to get bombarded with questions from the audience, and here are his most interesting quotes.
On whether «USDT is fake»:
“Whether USDT is really backed by something, I don’t know. It’s a «black box» for most people. I haven’t seen any auditor reports, or heard anyone reliable saying that they’ve done that. But Bitfinex is a long-running exchange, and they have had many issues in the past and they always resolved it. That’s as much as I know.”
On crypto debit cards:
“We are working with a number of partners in the crypto space, there are a number of solutions that let you spend crypto with a debit card, and we plan to white label it with Binance. But fundamentally it’s just a white label and not our own service. In the future, we hope we can issue a debit card linked to your Binance account, so you can spend directly from that account.”
On whether the altcoins are going to extinct:
“The alt-season of 2017, of thousands of ICOs, is probably not going to come back. That time has passed. Fortunately, the market is much healthier now. Now the investors are much more rational, which is good. And the blockchain fundraising is a killer app, and it will stay. However, I do think that there will be a lot of new projects in blockchain space that won’t be successful.”
On whether Binance would provide information about Russian users activities to Russian regulators, if they ask to:
“That’s a tough one. I don’t know what the correct answer is. In general, we have not provided any information to a regulator. But we do comply with law enforcement on specific cases.”
On whether he ever recommended selling or buying crypto:
“I almost never say to sell or buy crypto. I personally believe in two coins, BNB and BTC, that’s it. But don’t follow me, I’m often wrong.”
On whether indexes of crypto would be issued on Binance:
“Indexes, or ETFs, or baskets – many exchanges apply that, and none of them are very popular. And many of the exchanges that tried it, stopped doing it. That probably means that demand is not that strong. It’s a pretty easy thing for us to do, but I don’t think there is demand. Demand for ETF can be stronger when Bitcoin dominance is smaller than 50%.”
On the BitWIse report and crypto exchanges faking trading volumes:
“I do trust the Bitwise report quite a bit. But overall, the fake trading volume issue is very hard to measure. Especially from a third-party point of view. But I think most of the techniques used in the Bitwise report make sense. It’s technically possible that one of the traders on those exchanges caused those patterns to be abnormal.”
On whether dApps are any good:
“For dApps, we have a couple of issues right now. Number one: the popular platform Ethereum has capacity bottom necks. To be honest, overall, most of these smart contracts are relatively simple. It’s still very early stage for dApps. I actually think that centralised games will integrate cryptocurrency, and there is a higher chance of success of adoption in the short term.”
Photo: NexChange