On Thursday (8 November 2018), Ran Neu-Ner, the host of CNBC's Crypto Trader show, released the video of an interview with Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”), the CEO of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange (by adjusted trading volume). This article focuses on the main highlights from this interview.
Q: Are you worried by the drop in exchanges’ trading volumes?
A: Not really… Depends on when you compare the volume to… If you compare to July or August, probably down a little bit because prices are very stable right now… When there is no movement in price, people trade less.. Compared to January, we’re probably down 90%… But if you compare to two or three years ago, the volume right now is great… We’re sill profitable.
Q: Are you still opening new accounts at an accelerating rate?
A: Not as fast as January or February when it was really really crazy… We’re still signing up a steady amount of new users every day… The amount of crypto that we hold is increasingly steadily…
Q: Do you think the new market is the over-the-counter (OTC) market?
A: What I’ve heard is that the OTC market is at least as large as the online reported volumes.
Q; What could be the catalyst for some market movement?
A: I really don’t know… I see all this good news, but prices are not moving… It will happen sooner or later… something will trigger it.
Q: What is Binance’s secret sauce?
A: I think our product is very fast and secure… I think security is a big big thing in the crypto industry… Today, the thing that keeps us going is our value system. We have a very strong core value of protecting users… We do many many hard things to protect users, like very recently with WEX [another crypto exchange]… The funds got stolen and somehow five or six addresses ended up on Binance. We had to freeze them very quickly. Some of those are very tough decisions. I can guarantee you that sooner or later the owners of those accounts will start Reddit and Twitter threads complaining… But we always try to do the right thing of protecting the users… So, we have a good brand right now.
Featured Image Courtesy of Binance
