CZ AMA by Binance

Hi everyone, thanks for joining. As usual we have CZ for around 30 minutes for this Twitter space so we'll try and fit in as many questions as we normally do. If you'd like to ask a question just raise your hand and I'll bring people onto the stage. Once you're brought onto the stage please just remain muted until I call on you. We'll try and go in in the order of when people are brought onto the stage to keep it fair. And just have your question ready and just ask it straight away please so we can keep it efficient. Okay great CZs here so start bringing us people on. Hi CZ. Hey guys. How are you doing? All right. Great. Okay so we've got Devs here. Devs trying to go ahead. Devs here. Oh all right thank you. Hi good day. I thank you for having me here. So just you know around this quickly we see a lot happening at Binance. Binance taking the lead especially as it relates to high level global and strategic collaborations being led by CZ. So my question to CZ is that CZ what is your take on regulatory compliance policies especially in terms of how they will impact mainstream adoption and also development of the Web 3 economy especially emerging markets like Africa. Sure. Okay. I think I can you hear me? Sorry Spidey you just stay muted for a second CZ go ahead. Yeah so regulatory clarity is important for adoption especially positive regulations. You know regulations like to buy France, buy rain. This places the regulations are very favorable towards innovation and the pro-business environment. So and with regulatory clarity businesses or industry players knows what we will know what we cannot cannot do which makes adoption easier and users figure out what they cannot cannot do. Bank can work with us. We can integrate with traditional financial industries etc. So all of those things so having that clarity is very helpful but certain regulations are bad like you know China banks big coin many times. So there's no China banks changes, banks mining so there's not a whole lot to do there. So that's not good. For emerging markets I think this technology is especially important because in Africa the banking penetration is like what 11% most people don't have access to financial products. Basically that people don't have financial access. They cannot make loans from banks they can't even do they in certain parts of Africa it takes like a few days to do a bill payment. So now with Web3 it was blockchain technology people are people with their smartphone can access all this financial tools. So it's really really important for for less developed countries or regions to to adopt this technology and actually think that this technology will be adopted faster in those regions because of the strong need for it. So whereas in countries where they have a very established financial financial services industry there's less need for you know using crypto for payments using crypto to pay for lunch or other services but crypto is still a better tool than most traditional money or all financial services. So yeah that's kind of my view. Perfect thank you Debs for the question so handing over to crypto warrior okay if not then we can go to bones. Yeah hi thank you so much yeah I guess I just wanted to ask about some of the fun we've seen over the last 24 to 48 hours. I guess I didn't want to ask too directly about it. I just wanted to kind of let CZ answer in broad just about some of the stuff we've seen regarding some of the cash withdrawals from Binance but thank you. Sure I mean look we have always had a lot of fun around Binance right so there was a multiple even like a few years ago Bloomberg wise articles Binance is on the investigation though this alleged investigation etc. And then there's always you know there's far everywhere you know the the block which we now understand is pretty much owned by SPF writes a lot of negative articles about Binance. That's okay though so he actually makes us more resilient. And in the last couple of hours well with a sent bank from Manfree's arrest I think people you know people generalize right so if you get hurt by one bank you're gonna think all the other banks are bad. If one politician is corrupt you think all the politicians are corrupt but the fact is that just because one bank is bad doesn't mean all the other banks are bad and just because one politician is bad doesn't mean all the other politicians are bad but people generalize so people get hurt by one change and they lost money there and they generalize that and that's just human behavior so that's fine right so people want people want to withdraw their funds from Binance great they can do it is their freedom. Later on when they want to trade they will deposit back that's their freedom. So and we hold cash reserves we hold crypto reserves and cash reserves one to one we hold user asset reserves one to one there's no amount of funds there's no amount of withdraw that will put us under pressure so yeah we just we just handle that so there is a lot especially yesterday I can you can just feel the overall market is quite ag right everyone's really concerned everyone's really worried mass psychology just works like that with a certain times everybody feels the same feels the same way and they get affected by the other people what we call market sentiment but you know today things things things things have come down and we actually today seen that deposits already and with no yet over the last 24 hours also based on the chart that posted by spider I think there was like $66 billion with draws but the $6.5 billion of deposits over the last 24 hours so we're seeing the money flowing back already so it is what it is it's just very normal market behavior and as an industry player we just got to be we just got to be solid and this thing doesn't affect us so that's that really excellent thanks CZ and thanks bones for the question so next up is Matt Hi CZ yes I do recall you addressing a lot over the years in relation to Chinese media back in the day and yeah different different outlets and media outlets over the years so yes this is yet another another issue uh finances been dealing with um in relation to the proof of reserves um that you their finances has started to address I did notice that recently there was upcoming plans divulged that were there was going to be another batch of proof of reserves coming out that we're going to include additional assets uh I'm just going to know from yourself for the team uh how that is tracking and what the public should expect in that regard um whether we'll say some more proof reserves including those assets by the end of this calendar year or how that's tracking otherwise um based on my knowledge I've seen some some some chatter yesterday internally already about all the other assets um there were some discussions about um the actual work that's going on in order to do the proof of reserve um it does take effort um and also other smaller exchanges might do it faster but at our size we're like you know we're we're quite a lot bigger we're almost a magnitude bigger than the other the other guys in terms of cash asset holdings etc and wallet structure and number of coins we support etc so um yesterday I saw some chatter each chatter internally about like signing the wallet so that they can verify it and there are many wallets involved right so it's not it's not it's not as simple as it is as people just think so that's ongoing um I do expect that to uh I do expect the next batch to come up in the next couple weeks I don't know exactly um in by in by this internally we don't usually use a lot of deadlines people work pretty fast already and we try not to push um especially on the wallet side when we uh we are and that if we overly push it they may be security risks etc especially for tasks related to wallets etc so um the the team is fully uh it's fully working on it and they always have worked very diligently very hard very fast um we don't have specific deadlines but when they're finished they'll finish the world leasing um I do expect over the next couple weeks we will see more and more updates um so that's that's ongoing um yeah that's that great thank you Matt for the question so then handing over to Ken who's next on the line how you see the uh can getting yeah okay thanks for the opportunity here to ask question so I just want to ask what's yours what's your tick on the so-called city influencers who could farm engagement by using farts and all the controversy or topics you know that there's been so many funds lately uh what's so tick on them um it uh thanks for asking um it is a very annoying technique that people use right you you say something bad about Elon Musk and trying to force him to respond and he has a hundred million followers so when he responds your your tweet or your your your post does get a lot more engagement um but I think long term though um anything that hurts for reputation is bad um so then people people you may get a few more followers for that tweet but over over time people your existing uh followers will think you are you know not not so good like you you become more of a person that just breathes false information or just creates conflicts um or just you know post just nonsense uh nonsense code stuff over the long run it hurts reputation and I think people's reputation is the most valuable asset uh it takes a long time to build um it can be destroyed very quickly um and people with strong reputation typically have a lot more opportunities in life um just having a few followers um doesn't give you that access uh having a lot of followers requires you to have some level of uh uh credibility so I think the short term versus long term effects so I don't encourage people to do it I don't think it works uh it may it may seem that you work in the short term um also there there are boundaries right so um it's not black and white like most people like to talk about uh uh controversial topics debates uh fights um they like to put that kind of narrative on things some level of that is okay um but too much of that you're just you know making spreading false information um or just creating fights or perception fights out of nothing those things are generally not good so um yeah but look it's a free world um people are free to do what they want to say or say what they want to say to a very large extent um but um they are also hidden agendas um they also um you know um they are we now understand they are media who's owned by sbf and probably there's a lot more media who's paid by sbf to do to have certain agendas that were set against finance or other industry players etc um and then there are people who would just feel uh um on balance right so they they feel unfair because they lost money on FTX and the other guys are still safe on on bias that people have weird psychology sometimes and just because they are hurting themselves they want everybody else to be in pain they're there's more number of those but overall I think look uh for most people do the right thing just do the proper thing your followership will grow slowly but you will grow more consistently so um and your reputation will be better um yeah so that's what I think yeah all right thanks again Ken for the question i was an interesting one so next up cz i think you might have some competition here next in line is busy so maybe he's one better than cz not sure we can find out but please bz go ahead hi guys yeah thanks um so cz um so my question is like um you can kind of correct me from wrong but uh you want to preach in like a video that company should like try strive to have a decent 10 years of run rate um which of course can be quite difficult if you like an upstarting company um i was just wondering like if you weren't doing finance right now in this like a new and despair bear market as a first time founder what would you work on if it were if it wasn't behind you i mean there's a lot of stuff to work on um you know uh well for me like if you give them my background and my experience i've much more um suited to run i centralized exchange just like no my background comes from trading systems a developer etc so um so that's that's that's that that's for me right um but if if i don't do that right now there's a lot of opportunities that defy which is you know pretty hard a lot of people moving money to defy right now when the mainstream when they what we call the old school media thoughts about you know a centralised exchange more of the money goes to twice platforms um they don't go back to traditional financial industries um they don't go back to stock markets so um uh so it's actually good for the industry that those old school media trying to push people further along the adoption curve in crypto so that part actually it's not that bad um we also offer uh we also contribute and offer uh defy solutions you know that we have a defy wallet trust wallet um uh we contribute to a lot of investing a lot of other defy projects so the more the more crypto adoption the better um and uh there are many other things like uh but i think okay so let me back up back up a bit principal wise what i always recommend people is uh uh you got to find the intersection of what you can do well what you interested in and what's valuable right so uh i don't think there's a general advice for everybody to do something but for me um if i don't do if i don't do a sleigh-fi right now i probably would would be working on defy um and um i might be looking at biomedical research and stuff like that so um yeah those are just some of the interest areas for me cool okay thanks again busy for the questions so next up is Rob? yes hello everyone thank you very much for a pass of minute mic hope everyone as well cizia was wondering um is the finance fund caused by the FTX and solency or was it something else specifically do you think also could i ask you to make some kind of comment in regards to something that would alay people's fears um well actually i think i don't know the answer to both of those questions because um what's causing the fun i don't really know right like it's not like those guys tell me um when you know a journalist writes something negative about about Binance etc uh they may be paid by FTX or they may not be i don't know um um so um i don't know the motives of other people so i mentioned to some earlier you know they could be jealousy they could be competitors they could be a traditional financial players getting pissed off etc i think we people losing money and just you know um getting angry etc so there's a lot of different potential possibilities and um um there also people who are just selling clicks and find a sell sell ads etc so uh what would come people down um i if there was a magical answer that would that would be fantastic but i think more fundamentally look we just got to keep building right so we're we just got to when when the whole world is in volatility and moving around and just shaking we just got to be the stable guys right so we just got to keep our heads down make sure make sure our platform is solid as uh uh uh uh as solid as possible and make sure our system works smoothly people can deposit people can withdraw people can trade um just make sure like we do we do the best work we do and we continue to develop and continue to do all our new features um that's really it um i think building the best way to fight fun um yeah so that's it great nice and easy so next up is NFT collector slash trader okay if not then there's hand it to Griff yeah hey uh thanks for me up yeah hey cz i just uh i wanted to know um you know what what you could say to to those heavily investors in swan right now and those have been fucked by uh and thank you for your patience and wisdom here appreciate it um sure i try not to comment on specific projects look like salona continue to build on it if you don't um if you want to build somewhere else is your choice um so many projects especially salona well salona was my perception was salona was very heavily tied into the ftx ecosystem and we're heavily invested by either ftx or spf or a lot matter um but i don't know the details uh at least not on top of my head um so i think look um uh if you're an institution that's heard by the reason events um if you have enough cash runway continue to build um if you don't have um you can also look at not take your head up a bit look at the look at the landscape see if you want to repivot uh your strategy and then if you decide to repivot repivot if you don't then continue to build so i think at the end of the day there will be multiple blockchains multiple wallets multiple exchanges multiple everything um so based on based on what i heard in the industry i haven't actually never really used salona myself um but that same goes for many other blockchains i'm not like i'm pretty busy running a business so i'm not the uh i'm no longer the early adopter of every new tool that's out there i don't have time to try them myself um by having said that i know previously salona was pretty hard they do have a lot of developers etc so continue to build um and um uh if uh if people are financially uh crunched right now there is a industry uh recovery initiative where by and as putting a billion dollars of our own money not uh and then other people have followed on to about to the tune of about a couple hundred million dollars now um is a lose initiative is not a fund but um if you apply for for for for that if you're from project we're happy to we're happy to help so um yeah so there's a very generic question so i can't really but like the advice needs to be very specific to each person's situation so um yeah that's really that yeah great thanks again griff for asking the question so handing over the mic to zk cheering hey zz thanks for your opportunity to speak uh can you hear me so nice um yeah i just have a question regarding customer service at Binance because i feel like that's one of the most important things that lets your customers trust the exchange that you we can have fast contact with you uh that's one thing that i was happy with fdx that within two three hours i always had like a reply and i remember in a tweet one or two years ago you said Binance was improving the customer service implementing strategies i was wondering how that's going and if we can expect faster return time for our inquiries as customers sure yeah so uh customer service is actually a huge topic it's actually a very important topic i always said look it's product and service right if you don't have those two things nothing else you do no matter no matter how many you know twitter AMAs marketing superboa ads those that don't work so product service so services for us is really customer service so when Binance first started five years ago um you know in 2017 if you raise a support ticket on a crypto exchange you typically will be waiting for like a couple of months like you know two three months and you may not get a reply ever um and this is when you know your bitcoin was for maybe stuck and the price is moving around you stuck there for weeks um so we said that's not very good but we said 24 hours is the maximum response time no matter how many csa agents we've got a higher so and we kind of did that well internally we actually see what we actually say one hour and the industry had to follow us because um if you provide very poor service then don't want to use this your exchange so the exchange the server customer service in the exchange has been improved dramatically in 2017 and 2018 in 2018 i had another friend who says hey i haven't used exchanges quickly exchanges for a while um now this customer service so much better was like oh great and today uh so and also two years ago almost exactly two years ago beginning of 2021 there was an influx of users um that's when the that's kind of the middle of the beginning of the board market there's a lot of influx of users um at the time we had somewhere around like a few hundreds customers support agents i want to say like three to five hundred agents um and our system was quite manual so most uh incoming inquiries has to be handled by a person um there was no pre-filter there was no uh there was no AI etc so um and with with that growth of the user a demand we we couldn't handle it um again um people had to wait for days um people had to wait for like you know three five ten days for the response um and i was at the at the time when crypto is growing and bitcoin prices going up um i think people bitcoin price broke the previous um uh all time high twenty thousand and we're kind of growing and so we were suffering uh uh a year almost two years ago a year a year and ten months ago um and there was a lot of complaints in the in the community and our Binance Angels gave us a lot of feedback logs that no we get it but improving customer support is not easy right so we can't just scale from five like five hundred customer support agents to five thousand overnight it takes time to hire them it takes time to train it just takes time and um we you know but we started hiring very aggressively back then and um on top of that we said our system sucked um we need to introduce AI systems we need we need to introduce tips um at the fingertip of uh uh uh for customers when whichever action they're about to perform there should be a video link beside an on Binance to Binance Academy about the withdrawal about the KYC process about whatever that they're doing. So, and we also have an AI bot now that handle 70, 70-something percent of the, the handles almost 100% of the first inquiries and able to solve them, are able to solve 75% of them within the first interaction. So 75% of customer support requests to buy and do not need a person involved now. So now our customer support team, I would say the size probably around 3 to 4,000. I would guess it's probably 3,500-ish. And it increases every day, so I don't know the specific number. So, and then a couple of weeks ago, I saw once that in one week, we had the 250,000 customer incoming request and the average pickup time is 18 seconds. So now we offer live chat support in most languages that we support, in like 20-something languages. We're actually starting to offer phone support for some languages now. We're piloting that. So customer service is super, super important. And we want to continue to do, continue to move the bar higher. So let's see how that goes. Awesome, well thanks, cheering for the question. Hanging over to Victor. Yeah, thank you very much, CZ. Thank you, team. Victor from Nigeria. Yeah, so my question goes this way, right? So due to the FTX collapse, it has severely affected the confidence and trust of most people in the space. And then some people who feel like they are like, Nese, Estoniste, technology feel like, oh, they were right. And then confidence. I think we lost them. Yeah, we lost them. OK, I'll meet him. We're bringing it back in a second. Aussie, Beth, do you want to go ahead? Sure, thank you for taking my question. Hi, CZ. Just a question as far as the development of crypto and the defy compared to trade fire around the world, you've been traveling around many countries and you've got financial licenses in many countries without talking about the negative ones. Do you want to mention any of the countries that are more favorable towards crypto and where you think that the development will be faster and higher? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty obvious. So Binance has a little bit of a magnet effect. In terms of where we go, we tend to attract the industry players to other industry players to follow us for our two reasons. So why is we have the largest liquidity? Most if you're a crypto business, eventually you're going to issue a coin and or an NFT or something. And the next question would be when Binance, right? When would you get listed on Binance? So people like to be physically close to us so that it's easier to communicate, et cetera. But that's a smaller reason. The bigger reason is what you ask, which Binance is the most scrutinized organization by regulators all around the world. There's no other organization like that. There's no other organization that operates with the level of geographic coverage and with the level of scrutiny that we're under. But guess what? We also scrutinized the other way. We would only go to places that are favorable to crypto. So Dubai, France, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, we have 15 licenses all around the world now. And we also, there's also Binance US, which is an independent entity, but you know, Binance US has 44 state licenses and of which I think 12 of them were gotten in the last year. So they're still getting new ones. They're only really missing two now, I think. So yeah, basically if look at where we are, those are generally the places that are pro crypto and pro innovation. And so I do encourage all the other crypto players to look at Dubai, Bahrain, France, et cetera. Different people like different regions for different reasons. There are still little differences between the, even the more favorable jurisdictions. The US actually so gives the best banking support to crypto businesses, right? So crypto exchanges like Binance US, coin base, et cetera. They can deduct from the user's bank account automatically using the SCH protocol. Most other countries don't have that level of banking support. Most other, maybe South Korea have similar. And some areas like, you know, they limit the number of coins a exchange can list, not Japan, Thailand. Japan is about to change that, is the current news. By Thailand and other places. So that limits the size of the offerings for the crypto exchanges. Some countries have like, you know, limitations on electric power. Actually, some countries offer free electricity to their citizens. And of course, many people use that to mine. And of course, they will have to be rules to and restrict or control mining in certain ways. So different places have different type of consideration factors. There's a lot of details that I don't even know about. That's just some of the examples on top of my head. But try, look at where we operate. Those are generally, I believe those are generally the one, some of the most favorable places on the planet for crypto. Perfect. Thanks, Shingan. I'll see you for the question. It's handing over to David. Good morning, CZ. How's everything? Good. Question. The capital, Larry, ever tried to invest into finance. And also, if Washington ever called you down to come down and talk about cryptocurrency, would you? Well, Calvin, I don't think we have any commercial relationship with him. No investments, either way, et cetera. I didn't really know who he was until. I think we were actually on a panel together in the Dubai conference we organized last year. Actually, early this year, I think March this year. But I had COVID, so I only attended virtually. And that was to the extent of our interactions, in my belief. And for countries that give us licenses and invite us to operate, but US is a very special case. I try not to go to the US so that we're not seen as soliciting binost.com, would not be seen as soliciting users from US, from the US. So that's why I try to stay out of it. So, and I'm also quite busy visiting many other countries. So, the Binost US is an independent company. It has a very strong CEO. I'm the chairman on the board, but I'm not involved in the day-to-day operations in Binost US. And they use Slack for internal work communications. I don't even have Slack installed on my phone. So I'm not involved in the day-to-day operations there at all. So I try to keep a distance from, so that we're very clear on the level of separation of binost.com. So that's the reason, really. And I think we have enough coverage in the US. They have a very strong team. They build very good products. They offer very services. They offer good services. So I'm not against traveling to the US. I think US is great. I lived there for four years in New York and New Jersey. And New York Astoria, when I was working for Bloomberg. So I like the place. But I'm busy with other priorities. OK. So this next one, I'm not sure how to pronounce your name. I'm going to go for it anyway. So C7, AVG, henchman, please. Go ahead. Thank you very much. My name's Craig, but the guy is a savage henchman of the immune cartel. CZMI questions simply where you see the foreseeable future of the NFT marker on your plans with Binance NFT? How they fit into the near term? Sure. I think NFTs is still very early. Selling JetPacks is one of the most rudimentary use cases. It's more like sending email using the internet. But there's a lot more you can do with NFTs. Tick, sports, workout ticketing. So why shouldn't people be like you're scanning a QR code using an NFT? And that has residual value afterwards. Virtual assets in games is kind of coming, but it's not down here very. No one has really cracked it. No one has really made it really big. There's so many other use cases. Merchandise authentication. There's so many different use cases. Somebody we just need entrepreneurs to build those use cases, to build usable products that's used by mainstream people, by a large number of people for NFTs. So I think NFTs has a huge future. NFTs not limited just selling JetPacks. So that's kind of my view. We're happy to invest in those areas. And we need from projects to progress the development. Perfect. OK, thanks, Craig, for the questions. Then moving over to Simon. OK, Simon's not there. Shabby, you there? Yes, I am. Great, go ahead. Hi, CZ. Thanks for passing me the mic. I just have a quick question for you. There is a rumor going on for Binance. I wanted to you to address. I just wanted to see if Binance facilitated or addressed any transaction for Iranian government despite the sanctions. Thank you. So look, the rumors are not true. And as much as we try not to give rumors at all, we have a very strong compliance team. We have a very strong sanctions team led by Chandra. Chandra comes from the law enforcement background with very strong credibility. So those rumors are not true. OK, great. Nice and simple. Then crypto diamonds. See that. Oh, yeah. Hi, CZ. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, it's pleasure to talk to you. I'm a big fan of yours. I just want to ask you, whenever there is a Binance word, the BNB gets dumped. Why is that? Like, BNB chain is an independent blockchain. And Binance is just a supporter. Then why is that happening? Well, there could be a number of reasons. I can only speculate. But the thing in trading is we, as an exchange, don't know why people selling a token or not, even BNB. So today, most of the trading of BNB happens on Binance. So Binance is still the largest trading venue for BNB. And so that means most people who are holding BNB are probably having most of their BNB on Binance.com. And if there's a negative news, they may be scared. They want to withdraw. They may sell BNB to withdraw US dollars or others on other stablecoin. That may be one behavior. Other people may associate BNB more closely to Binance, because it's a coin that's more closely associated with us. Even though it has two independent blockchains running it, it has a DeFi ecosystem, et cetera. But people's perception, because it's called BNB, people still associate with Binance very heavily. And there's a perception that if there's a negative people who believe FUD, people who believe rumors, when they see something, then they may say, oh, by this maybe some kind of trouble, I want to reduce my risk sales on BNB. So I think that's probably it. I don't know for sure. When people submit orders to sell, they don't want to attach a reason. So even as an exchange, we just see a bunch of orders. We don't know why people are doing it. Cool. All right. Captain Dominic, please go ahead. Thank you. Oh yeah, go ahead. Thank you for giving me this chance. I was asking what are the blockchain things that are going to open in Canada. So what are the blockchain? Sorry. Can you repeat the question? Yeah, I was asking what is Binance doing in Africa in regards to blockchain in empowering the youths? Oh, that's a very broad one. We're doing a lot. We piloted, well, we can go back a long way. Even four and a half years ago, I went to visit Togo, Uganda. And we set up a local presence in Uganda. I met with the Uganda president and also the local president. Actually, interestingly, four years ago, when I was meeting in the central banking Togo, we were literally laughed out of the meeting. But that was four and a half years ago. Things have changed. And we set up a multiple programs in Africa. We built about 100 different schools. We donated to kids lunch for, I don't know for how long, like a year, two years, something like that, to keep kids in school. Because the kids, if they don't have lunch in school, they don't go to school. They just hungry there. So by providing lunch, we really bring them to school. We piloted Binance Master Class in Africa. And over the last three years or so, our county shows we have taught, this is a classroom education setting. We have taught more than 600,000 students in Africa along. We launched multiple charities targeted specifically for Africa. And most importantly, we provide our services very well in Africa. We actually tailored our solutions to be more Africa friendly. I think most other platforms, they focus on more developed countries, where there is high revenue. Whereas in Africa, we have a large number of users, but the per user revenues much, much lower. And most in Africa, people don't really trade. They use more of the savings products, earn products, payments products, et cetera, where most, almost all of those are zero fee for us, zero revenue for us. So we've done a lot. We have a fairly large team focus on Africa. We view that Africa is 1.2 billion people. And that 1.2 billion people are probably in higher need of financial access than the rest of the world. And that's where we're going to help. So yeah, that's kind of our Africa. Alex, I think the last couple of minutes, let's invite Ren and Alex from Trafias. I see them in the audience. OK, no problem. I'll bring him up in the meantime. While I bring him up, we've got Barrett here. He was on last time. It's Mike didn't want to go ahead, Barrett. OK, if not, just invite Alex to speak. So he should be here in a second. And Ren wanted to do a talk with me before. But yeah, my name is Roger. Let him ask for a question here. Ren, you're Ren? No problem. Just searching for him in one second. OK. I guess Ren, if you raise your hand, it's easier. Yeah, that'll be helpful. Yeah. Elizabeth, are you there in the meantime? Will we bring people on? The Twitter space UI is not the best. Maybe we can pass that onto Elon later. OK, you buy them into the space. Yeah, I'll send him a DM. Might need a second. So it's easy. Well, we have a little little. Could you just share a broad of view what any ambitions and thoughts for going into 2023 with finance? Actually, not too much. I'm not a big grand plan, it's kind of guy. I think look, it's a strategy that's very simple, right? We just got to keep building products people use and be the stable source of energy. And the stable source of positive energy in the industry. Just make sure our platforms are sorted. That's it, really. I think that in my experience, in this type of environment, that's all it takes to be a strong player, to be a leader. So it's simple. Yeah. I think Ren can go. Yeah, we've got Ren here now. Sorry for the delay, Ren, please. I've just joined. I've just just joined. Sorry, I've been in the meeting. I've just joined. OK. I saw your profile, therefore, quite a while. Yeah, now I was on because I was on earlier when you guys started, and then I've just joined. But I'm here, and I'm listening. And I'll be asking questions if there's a need. You want to, OK, sub to you. Do you want to ask a question now? I think we finished in about a few minutes. No, no. OK, now guys, I was going to listen to recording, because I had a meeting at the exact same time, my apologies. My apologies. OK. No worries. Yeah, let's take another couple of other questions to analytics. OK, no problem. I'm just going to bring a couple of people on. I see Greg's in the audience as well. Greg, I've invited you. Come in there. OK. So we've just got a few people connecting now. OK, Yusuf, you're in. Do you want to go ahead? Thanks. Hi, CZ. This is actually a measant speaking to you right now. I'm building something in Africa, Nigeria precisely. We're building the first green ecological off-grid city in Abuja. And basically, I'm trying to also put it on the blockchain. So when I saw you in the room, I said, you know what? This would be a good opportunity to see how we can have it worked out. So I wanted to see how this could possibly work, because my app, the solar company already, here in America, partnered with a couple MIT. Yusuf. Let me interact with you there. This is not a good forum to discuss how we can work together. Oh, sorry. Sorry about that. It's also not a good forum for us to see how we can help your projects, et cetera. That will take a long time and probably not in a bad interest for everybody. OK, all right. Is there something specific you wanted to ask Yusuf for? So I just wanted to ask how we can build on the blockchain, basically, because my field of finance is the brand, like he said, we've been using finance for a very long time. And because I travel around, it's much easier for me to use finance. And we mostly use finance for transaction, not necessarily trading. So. OK, yeah. Thanks. I think the question is clear. What's the question? It's a broad question. How do you use a blockchain? I can, as it gave you a very long answer, or yeah, I need to know your specific situation quite a lot more, but before I can answer, how do you put a green thing, green project onto the blockchain, et cetera. So it's a bit too vague to broad. So I'll skip to the next question. I'll probably go for the next question. CZ is run again and you may have addressed something while I was not on it, maybe just for my benefit. If you don't mind addressing it again. I think in the last couple of days, obviously, there has been a lot of fad. I think people have a lot of PTSD after the FTX collapse. But it seems to me also like the fad is coming from the same, from the same, I want to say people, organizations, but it seems like the bullets keep being fired by the same people. Do you have any idea as to why certain people, organizations, which don't seem to be direct competitors to you guys would have an agenda? So interestingly, somebody else asked me this question before too. It's like, wait a second. Ethan, Sam already gone. And why are these guys still writing fad about Binance? I don't know. So there's a few possible explanations. They may have already been paid already in full. So they need to carry out their end of the service just for their credibility or honor or whatever contractual obligations. They may be other people who are pissed off that somehow destroyed their source of revenue or source of income. So they are still attacking us. There's many different possibilities. And the end of the day, we don't really try to spend time on it. We try to keep our platform solid. So I think those things people may be curious about. But as long as we keep our product and platform solid and make sure that we want a very good platform, those things will die eventually. So they may be pissed off at us for whatever reason. That if you have a newspaper that got $43 million from funding from the guy, and somehow those guys may have a perception that we cost them to lose that source of fund. And they may continue to attack us. So what can we do? Number one, we didn't cost the problem state pad. We were not part of it. We never really attacked other industry players. We just wanted to sell some tokens that we got. Nothing wrong with that, I hope. Yeah. That was it. So now all we focus on is just how do you we always focus on ourselves? How do you make sure that we provide the best product services we totally saw it? We have no backups on withdrawals, deposits, everything works smoothly. So that's all we care about. I must say I think that a stressedist, like Luan, I don't even know if you want to call the last couple of days a stressedist because if you look at it in the big scheme I think that was very, very small. So then there's a real stressedist. I think those are healthy because we want to stress this industry. I think in the old days, as Simon Dickson mentioned on one of my charges that we used to do a certain day of the month where it's like your keys, your Bitcoin day or whatever, where you, you know, everyone would do their Bitcoin of exchanges to see if it changes the solvent. I do want to ask you one more question. And it's going to be very tough for you to answer it. But as people that are not inside finance and obviously big fans of finance, there is a situation now where finance especially, because if the X collapsed has consolidated and become even stronger and more powerful in this industry. And if you look at the reserves on Binance and you compare it to all the other competitors. And if you look at the trade on Binance and you compare it to all the other competitors, Binance is by multiples bigger than the nearest competitor and maybe even most other competitors put together. Now, you'll understand that for an industry which is unregulated or not sufficiently regulated, for an industry which is multi-gearestictional, which is crypto is very unique, that one central point of potential failure is very, very scary for the industry. Now, it is testament to how well you guys have done and to the fact that you guys have done things right and that you've earned the trust of the community in the past. But what are your views on the fact that you are so big in the industry and that there is potentially one potential point of failure from the way outside of it? What are your views on how that gets fixed going forward? Or does it need to be fixed going forward? Yeah, so that's actually a very good question, right? That's actually some really interesting topics we can dig into. First of all, under withdrawals. So there has always been this concept for January 3rd, everywhere should withdraw their money from the exchanges, etc. I think that's actually a very good idea, but in practice, there was a lot of fun yesterday over the last 48 hours or so. People say, look, there was billions with strong net withdrawals from Binance. Guess what? That's less than 2% of the assets on Binance, right? So it's actually quite hard to get people to move. So it's very difficult to do this test. There's many different reasons. Number one, it costs money to do this, right? So for 120 million users and each have multiple different assets. So I don't know what the average is, probably 10, 20 different assets. For people to withdraw all of that, that'll be like a billion transactions. Each transaction costs $10, right? So that's going to be a lot of money. So practically, you can't do it to any meaningful sense. So yes, there's fun. Some people withdraw. You see it on social media. People say, hey, look, I've withdrawn, etc. But if you count the total number, it's actually a very, very small number. It does cost some stress on system side. I think pre-for-reserves is resolved that, to be honest, I think that what I mentioned was something we've used to do in the olden days. But I think today we're already starting to see multiple pre-for-reserves. I think the Nansen dashboard, yesterday, for example, was very, very helpful in showing exactly the extent of the inadvertent comments. Yeah. Let's go to the point around. Yeah. You guys doing things too right for too long and building a business that's maybe too big. Yeah. And at the other point, I think microsseller said it best. There is no second place. In a decentralized world, you're free to choose whichever platform you want to use. And most platforms are global, other than US, right? So most platforms are global. Why would you choose to use a second place change? Where you have probably second grade security practices, second amount of investments in security team, security infrastructure, et cetera. The second number of users using it, the second selection of available coins to trade on, the second reputation in the industry, et cetera. Why would people choose that instead of go for the first place? So by now, given our scale, we're able to invest heavily on security. We have to do the test of time, multiple times, we're attacked all the time by fraud by this and that. So we earn a trust. So why wouldn't people come to us? So why would people spread out, et cetera? So when people look at the industry holistically, they say, hey, look, finance is too large. But if you look at Uniswap, Uniswap has 70% of the DeFi trading volume by value, by trading value. And then, Kencake probably has more active users, but the high value stuff trade on Uniswap. So why don't people use some other thing? Because it's liquidity there. So in a free market, there is network effect. There is people moving to the first place. So that naturally happens. Does that mean there's no room for somebody to innovate better? No, there's no restrictions on somebody building a better exchange. There's no restrictions on somebody building a better Uniswap or better swap. I think Kencake's trying that, a bunch of other people are trying that. When people do, those are the new platforms for takeover because more and more people will use those. So I think artificially forcing people to use second-tier exchanges is very bad. It's dangerous for the users. People individually will never make that decision because people individually, if I tell you look, go use the second-tier exchange because we want to spread things out. They won't do it, right? So if that are a problem for the industry, it's not a problem because if you want innovation, you've got to let people win, right? Or you've got to let people choose. People choose the best service that's available at the time. But the industry does not prevent somebody from building a new exchange. So in 2017, when I started, the highest amount of advice I got is the exchange space is saturated. There's no point. All the big exchanges are too big, very big already. Just do something different. Everybody tries to do an exchange, most of you fail. So that's the most advice I got in 2017 when we were starting. Today, if you want to start an exchange, that's probably still the same advice, but it doesn't mean that somebody couldn't build a better one. By now, we're still constantly improving ourselves. There's many areas we can improve. So this is just free market behavior. And also, is there any risk if we fail? It depends on how we fail. If you look, if you say, look, we're running out of money and there's no longer sustainable business because everybody moved to DeFi or everybody does something else. As long as we fail, like credibly, we let people withdraw their funds, we just, the company ran out of money, that's okay. So then people don't get hurt. If in the case of FTX, they took customers money away and that hurt a lot of people. That kind of failures have an outsized impact than their own failure. It's a small exchange fails and returns customer assets. That's fine. It's not a big issue. So it depends on how we fail, if we fail, knock on wood, I hope we use it. Can I just ask you, can I just extend a turn? And I'm taking some time, but this is really the last question. Can you guys measure yourselves internally at finance? Do you ever measure yourself as a success metric? How much money is deposited on the exchange? Do you like celebrate when the number on the exchange goes from 55 billion to 60 billion to 70 billion? And while I ask that is probably the next question is, which is, do you encourage people to actually take their money off centralized exchanges as an exchange owner and store it in a wallet? The first question is, do you celebrate when numbers go up and then do you, or do you celebrate when numbers go down and encourage people to actually put money into cold storage away from centralized plans? Sure, there's no. We never had a KPI in terms of user assets storage on finance. We never had a KPI in our existence to the best of my knowledge. So internally, we never, I've never seen a discussion like that. We never said, okay, no, our goal is to get more people to deposit with us. That's never our target. Number two is yesterday, for example, they were actually, they were suggesting internally in finance saying like there was more people want the borrow of BUSD and not enough people put BUSD into the savings program so that it can be lent out. We were actually, they were discussing about raising the interest rate on the, on the USD stable coin somehow, somehow. We said, don't make that change because that could be seen as we increase the interest rate trying to prevent people from withdrawing or trying to persuade people from now withdrawing. We tried to, we tried to be very neutral. We don't comment, we don't tell people not to withdraw, we don't tell people to withdraw. We don't want to be, we don't, we want to be neutral. So if people want to withdraw, they withdraw, if people want to deposit, they deposit. We don't encourage people to withdraw away from centralized changes for two reasons. Number one, we are a centralized exchange and you will, it makes people, you will, you can just imagine the memes, right? So CZ tells people to withdraw so by that's must be having issues. You can just imagine that. Number two is more fundamentally, today most people use centralized exchanges because they're not able to hold crypto safely themselves, right? So I always say that you can hold, if you're technically capable of holding crypto yourself safely, please hold it yourself. And if you don't trade, yeah, if you're trading, you're going to have to have some sponsor buy ads. But for most people, for 99% of people today, I think them to hold crypto on their own, they will end up losing it much, much more likely than they actually put it on a solid crypto centralized exchange. So most people are not able to back up their security keys, they will lose the device, they will not have the proper encryption for that backup, they will write it on a piece of paper. They will see it and they will steal this funds. And also today, we're very fundamentally, if a person passes away, they don't have a way to give to them.