Binance — What I Think
Binance won by refusing to have an address.
While everyone else was negotiating with one regulator in one jurisdiction, Binance treated the planet as a single liquidity pool and borders as latency. Brutal insight, correct insight: in a permissionless global market, the firm with no home wallet beats the firm filing paperwork in one country. For years they were everywhere and nowhere. That wasn’t sloppiness. That was the plan.
What Coinbase missed: speed of listing IS the product. Coinbase curated. Binance shipped. New token, new pair, new perp, new chain — Binance was first, deepest, cheapest, and in a market where liquidity begets liquidity that’s a flywheel you basically can’t attack head-on. They built BNB Chain, Launchpad, the whole vertical stack, so they weren’t an exchange, they were the gravity well the entire alt market orbited. At peak, a majority of global spot volume. That’s not a company. That’s weather.
The bill came due, and I’ll state it flat without piling on. In 2023 Binance settled with US authorities over AML and sanctions-compliance failures, CZ stepped down as CEO, and the company paid a very large penalty. That’s the cost of “no address.” The thing that made them unbeatable — being faster than the rulebook — was the exact thing that eventually had to be reconciled. You can outrun jurisdiction for a long time. Not forever. The genius and the liability were always the same fact, just seen from two sides.
Where they were right anyway: finance is global-by-default, and somebody had to prove the demand was real before the compliant version could exist. Binance ran that experiment at a scale nobody else dared. Coinbase gets to be the regulated heir partly because Binance already showed the whole world wanted in. Pioneers take the arrows. Binance took the whole quiver.
Favorite & worst CEO
Two eras, so favourite and least-favourite as opinion about vision, not character.
Favourite vision: Changpeng Zhao, CZ. Whatever you make of the ending, the founding read — crypto liquidity is global, the winner serves it fastest with no home-jurisdiction tax — was the single most correct call on the 2017–2021 market. Deepest book on Earth, under four years, from a standing start. As pure product-and-market intuition it’s generational.
Least connected to: the current Richard Teng era. Not a knock on Teng, who’s exactly the right operator for the moment. His mandate is to convert a borderless pirate ship into a licensed, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction institution. Necessary, mature, correct. But it’s a stewardship thesis, and the thing that made Binance Binance was the opposite of stewardship. I respect the cleanup. I just felt more thesis in the chaos.
Part of “What I Think About the Top 50 Fintech Companies of All Time.” I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.