Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao: Bitcoin Will Soon Surpass Gold
Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, told a large audience at the Bitcoin Asia Summit in Hong Kong that Bitcoin will definitely become more important than gold and is expected to surpass it soon. He noted that the UAE has the most progressive regulations, Hong Kong is advancing quite rapidly, while Singapore is more conservative.
On the same day, he held a book club event at Central Trading Plaza themed around his memoir "Freedom of Money" (Chinese title: "币安人生"), discussing the integration of Hong Kong finance with Web3, tokenized securities, and decentralized exchanges. He emphasized that these are personal judgments, not new licenses or investment commitments from Binance. He predicted that real-world assets will become a major direction for Web3, and stablecoins are a form of real-world assets that put fiat currency claims on the blockchain.
In response to a question from a university student about entrepreneurship, he suggested working at a large company for two to five years, with two years as the minimum. He cited his own four years at Bloomberg as an example, stating that the complete management system of a large company is something one cannot experience immediately after graduation. In a globally competitive environment, one must develop a specialty that ranks in the top 1% or even 0.1%, as generic programming skills cannot outperform everyone else by a factor of two.
The book was published in April, is 364 pages long in English, and has the subtitle "Protecting Users, Resilience, and Founding Binance." Some parts were written during his four-month prison sentence in California. Binance had previously reached a settlement of about $4.3 billion regarding money laundering allegations, and he personally pleaded guilty and served time before being pardoned by Donald Trump. The summit organizers noted that capital, talent, and public attention are shifting from crypto to artificial intelligence, making the industry feel smaller; however, he still believes people overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term, with significant opportunities in payments, stablecoins, tokenization, and financial infrastructure over the next decade.
The audience comprised Hong Kong media, students, and conference attendees who are interested in compliance stories, while the sellers are personal brands and books. The flow of funds is directed towards ticket sales, book sales, and summit sponsorships, rather than announcements of new exchange expansions. The beneficiaries are those who reposition individuals back into the Asian media landscape; the pressures are on token prices, which are still in a correction phase, and the attention drawn away by artificial intelligence. This is an event driven by itinerary, not by regulatory approvals for new businesses.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
After turning Binance into the world's largest spot exchange, Zhao Changpeng exchanged his guilty plea for a reduction in U.S. criminal risks in 2023, and in 2025-2026, he aims to reclaim narrative control through a pardon and autobiography. The book avoids traditional publishers, making distribution a direct channel to users, consistent with the exchange's habit of "launching first and supplementing licenses later." The Hong Kong trip places the book club in the trading plaza and the main show at the convention center, embedding the figure into the local financial geography rather than just speaking in crypto circles.
Resources are directed towards educational projects like Giggle Academy, government consulting, and speaking tours. The motivation is to continue offering quotes to licensed jurisdictions under the constraint of no longer being Binance's CEO: whoever brings him to the stage will receive verbal endorsement of "this is faster than Singapore." Tokenized stocks and real-world assets are his assignments for Hong Kong, addressing the structural demand of not being able to open U.S. stock accounts in Asia and time zone mismatches, rather than new public chain white papers.
This is similar to how Jack Ma maintained Alibaba's narrative through public speaking after stepping down, and akin to the need for a figure who can still stand on the main stage after SBF's downfall. The crypto industry is transitioning from expansion to control: trading volumes remain, but pricing power is being diverted by AI narratives and institutional fund flows. The summit organizers themselves admit that the atmosphere at the venue is dampened by a cold wave, and speakers must frame a year's decline as an infrastructure development period over a decade.
The essence is the transfer of pricing power. Exchange traffic once set pricing for founders, but criminal judgments have handed pricing power to the courts; pardons and memoirs have bought back some pricing power in media coverage. When individuals occupy newspaper space before products, the licensed cities sell proximity, and readers buy sentences like "the winter is over," while on-chain prices do not automatically follow suit.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
The first book after prison sells the right to explain.
The main stage of the conference does not bring licenses, only citations.
As attention shifts to artificial intelligence, old narratives need to be retold through the city.