I was born in Jiangsu, grew up in Vancouver, and have spent most of my life writing software and building exchanges. These days most of my attention goes to Giggle Academy, a free education project for children.
This is a place to put the whole story in one piece, in my own words, rather than in fragments.
Start at the beginningAbout
I was born in Jiangsu Province in 1977. Both of my parents were teachers. My father was a university professor, and he was sent away from the city for a period before I was old enough to understand why. It is a piece of family history I grew up hearing about rather than something I lived through myself.
In the late 1980s we emigrated to Vancouver. We did not have money. I worked night shifts at a McDonald's and overnight at a gas station while I was still in school, and I studied computer science at McGill in Montreal.
My early career was the unglamorous part of finance. I wrote order matching software for the Tokyo Stock Exchange, then built futures trading systems at Bloomberg Tradebook in New York. In 2005 I moved to Shanghai and started Fusion Systems, which made high frequency trading systems for brokers.
None of that was well known work. All of it taught me how an exchange behaves when it is under real load, which mattered a great deal later on.
In 2013 someone explained Bitcoin to me over a poker game in Shanghai. I went home and read the whitepaper. Then I sold my apartment and put the money into Bitcoin.
I joined Blockchain.info as head of development, and later became chief technology officer at OKCoin.
I started Binance in July 2017. We raised roughly fifteen million dollars in a token sale and issued BNB. About 180 days later it was the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume. In 2018 we set up SAFU, an emergency fund for users paid for out of a share of trading fees.
In November 2023 I pleaded guilty to a violation of the United States Bank Secrecy Act for failing to maintain an effective anti money laundering program at Binance. I stepped down as chief executive, paid a fifty million dollar fine, and Richard Teng took over the company. I was sentenced in April 2024, served four months, and was released that September. In October 2025 I was pardoned.
I signed the Giving Pledge in 2023, which commits me to giving away the large majority of what I have. Giggle Academy is where most of that attention now goes.
Chapters
Now
A free, gamified basic education for children who have no access to school. Reading, numbers and life skills, on a phone, at no cost. It is a non profit and it will stay that way. This is the thing I most want to be remembered for.
giggleacademy.comWhat used to be Binance Labs, relaunched as an independent fund. We back early teams in crypto, artificial intelligence and biotechnology, usually very early, usually the founders more than the deck.
yzilabs.com