Changpeng Zhao Believes YZi Winter Investments Will Yield the Best Returns

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao added after retweeting his comments from a Hong Kong book club: he firmly believes that the investments made by YZi Labs in the past few months will become some of the best performers, as they were made during the depths of the crypto winter.

The retweeted content was his judgment from a Q&A session at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in late August: quick money is shifting to artificial intelligence, while those remaining in blockchain have a stronger sense of mission and can endure longer; when hot money floods in during a bull market, it is hard to distinguish whether teams are in it for the long haul or just to make a quick profit, making it easier to filter after funds are diverted. The new post applies the same logic to his investment portfolio.

YZi Labs, formerly known as Binance Labs, claims to manage over $10 billion, with a portfolio of over 300 projects across approximately 25 countries, and has incubated more than 65 projects. Around August 25, it announced 24 early-stage projects for EASY Residency Season 4, with selections in Web3, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, with individual investments up to $500,000, totaling about $12 million for the season, with a residency in Bhutan lasting about 10 weeks. The list leans towards stablecoin payments, cross-border settlements, on-chain foreign exchange and credit, institutional liquidity and market-making, privacy compliance, and AI agent trading and interfaces.

Public databases show that the institution has made hundreds of investments, with a historical retail return multiple of about 1.61 times, which does not represent the realization of new positions in recent months. The portfolio includes both older positions like Sui, Ethena, Aptos, and Celestia that are still trading, as well as exits announced to cease operations or close by 2026. The prediction market Predict.fun received additional investment after incubation and brought in Susquehanna Crypto; another approximately $100 million entered BNB treasury company CEA Industries, which later concluded with a governance agreement. Zhao has emphasized that some governance actions are unrelated to him personally.

"Buying in a winter is the best" is a valuation cycle rhetoric, not an audited fund annual report. Buying at low prices increases potential multiples but also raises the proportion of projects that may not survive to the next round. Small incubation checks and fragmented tracks mean returns must wait for token issuance, listings, and user retention, rather than being priced on the day of posting.

Mechanically, what is bought is the expectation of revaluation of the remaining founders, as well as the liquidity and listing pathways that the Binance ecosystem may provide; what is sold is purely AI-packaged crypto shells without products. Beneficiaries are teams that just received $500,000 residency checks and trading platforms that can still distribute traffic to portfolio projects; those under pressure are projects in the same track that financed at bull market valuations and now cannot raise funds. Physical funds remain largely stuck in AI, with thin trading in the crypto primary market, and narrative power has returned to those still writing checks.

The cost of winter is low, but it does not automatically mean that fund rankings will be high.

Source: Public Information