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00:00Hi this is I think something interesting that you've actually been talking about lately. To me it looks like people are learning about the use cases of all coins and that's why they're getting in two different different investments like ether. Of course it could also be that people just see the prices going up and there's a lower cost of entry for these old coins and they're jumping on them for that reason. What's your take. I mean it's always a variety of reasons. That's probably close to 300 million people in the crypto market now. So everyone do do it for different reasons. Some people are trading for speculative returns. They look at it was was rising and they just tried to jump point. But I think what you mentioned about the use cases is actually a very very accurate. I think for the people that I interact with more I think they find that what most people learn about Bitcoin as a first cryptocurrency if you learn about crypto currencies Lockhart you have to go through Bitcoin you'll learn about Bitcoin first. But after that they do ban jars they hate. Well now there's a blog Chen blocked as not just Bitcoin. You can't. You don't. There's a lot more you can you can do. But in addition to just transferring value you can do smart contracts. You can do many other things you can do. And FTSE. So all of this use cases are booming right now and people need the other coins to do this to do this type of new transactions. If fumes one of those clear examples. That's partly why if it was going up say. Sisi my concern is and you've been tweeting about this a lot of people rip on Bitcoin and they don't even know what a public key is. Or you have people investing in your B and B but they don't know the use case. They're just jumping in because the price is rising. And if you have too many people like that that's irrational exuberance that's froth in the system. And it doesn't provide a solid base for prices. That's why we get even more volatility. How do you look at volatility and people that are serious investors in crypto. So I think it's the same proportion of people who use traditional stock markets or any markets that's actively traded. There's always guys who do fundamental research and understand the underlying assets. A lot of detail. Some some people understand DMB more than I do. And then there are people who could just follow other people who were just following the herd. And there's always a large number of your following. Having the herd mentality you've been the guys who actually do serious research. That's just that's just how advanced our civilization is right now which is just like which is which is everywhere. So it's not unique to crypto. It is encrypted using crypto like that. If the hurtful hours are less committed but whenever there's some negative news they run away. When whenever there's positive news they try to rush in. So they do cause more volatility versus the sort of the die fans who understand and really love the projects. But but it's the same thing. Stock markets is nothing new in crypto. So volatility is everywhere. And actually bitcoin. Yeah because part of less volatile than a similar sized Katla similar sized assets like Apple stock or even Tesla stock. Of course finance in some ways benefits benefits from all the volatility given you are the biggest crypto exchange in the world by volume. What is the composition of your customer looking like. How is it separated between kind of retail investors who are just chasing the rally and actual institutional investors and as you get more institutional buying. Does that mean volatility is going to go down. Yes. So I think of our makeup so far right now as still major retail but the institutions have been rising much more quicker than retail over the last year or so. So I think right now it's roughly about 70 30 and also depends on how you define retail versus institutions. Most of the retail people do just do just do simple by themselves. Where's the institutions that are more sophisticated. There are also large institutions that do volatility trading. They seek volatility and they sometimes even want to generate volatility. So is not to say that just because there's more institutions trading then there's less volatility. The guys like MicroStrategy they buy hold in large amounts of those guys reduce volatility and they push the price up permanently. So we do see we do see a mix of users but our user base is still more retail today. You're also launching finance and FTSE next month. It'll be a marketplace for non venerable tokens specifically. Do you expect institutional investors to be interested in that. How big is that market opportunity to be honest initially. The short answer is I don't know. Initially logic says that the institution NFTE Tracy Alloway a very different style. They've traded more like auction type of style because there's only one item to be traded and they're not fungible. So it's not like bitcoin can buy like PA parts of it and every bitcoin you buy is the same you see interchangeable. So non-refundable tokens right now is still the early agent of the early days of NFTE. So most likely most of the trading mechanism are more like auctions. One big item goes for millions of dollars hopefully and the smaller items as well for people to buy. But I don't think that's I don't think our today the institutional traders who are doing high frequency trading in fungible tokens can migrate to that very easily. Those are more like our collectors etc.. For the initial for the initial iteration. And so people understand art and people have to know what the meanings behind it. And they have to have a pretty good sense of how whether it's going to go up or down later on. So it's a different type of users. I wonder about finance. I talked to Anthony Trench have about this with next so as well they don't have any plans to go public right now. And you've said you don't have any plans to go public. Why not access the public markets especially right now when your popularity the momentum is there. Sure. So I think we have a very good example of a private company that's done really really well. And Bloomberg. Right. So I to my ex employer as well. So Bloomberg never went public. I think going public is a good option for most. But for many companies it's a good way to raise money. It's a good way too for early investors and sometimes founders to exit partially or completely at least have the option to do so later on and also have a publicly discoverable pricing on the on the on the trading market. But for many organizations they are sufficiently well-funded. They have sufficiently solid businesses that are profit generating. Same as Bloomberg. So they don't really need to go. They don't need to. They don't have no need to raise the money. And then and then their investors may be long term driven. They are not really looking for a public exit anytime soon. There are still other ways to exit a business. If you really want to. So I think basically it's not like only a very tiny percentage of businesses even the profitable long term businesses actually go list. I'll go public. So public is an option for many but is not a mandatory thing for every business. This has kind of ties to the private versus public but different ways of thinking about digital currency. You of course have bitcoin and ether crypto currencies in that space and then you also have things like the digital you want controlled by central banks. The PBS see in China do you see those coexisting or is one day currencies controlled by governments and central banks going to displace the likes of Bitcoin. I think. Well my obviously I believe they're going to co-exist for a while. I think that they will co-exist as long as a people are willing to hold people willing to hold either or both. I think most most of the first generation central bank digital currencies or central bank blotch and currencies will use blocking technology. But they won't. They will most likely miss a few key properties of sort of what we call short crypto currencies such as permission lists. So no one's in control of digital currency limit to supply. So there's no more additional minting after the first. Well at least we set up about and that is never going to go over that mathematically. And also more freedom of transactions. Most central bank digital currencies are gonna have quite a lot of surveillance and control attached to it. That would be my expectation. And that's logical to expect. I think so. I think property. What you mean are they all going to you. They most likely will use the blocks and technology. They will have encryption. They will have private keys. Public keys are blocks that that forms a chance. That's all fine. But at the end of the day there's those core properties that users care about that matter. So I think they will coexist for a while to come.

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Binance CEO on Bitcoin, Crypto Volatility, Going Public

Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao discusses customer use of cryptocurrencies, the upcoming launch of Binance NFT, and explains why he sees no need for the company to go public on “Bloomberg Surveillance Early Edition.” (Source: Bloomberg)