In the world of cryptocurrency, where billion-dollar fortunes can be made overnight, speed is everything— and CZ is the fastest of them all. From closet-size offices in Tokyo—"I would touch four people if I turned around in a circle"—the 41-year-old Chinese-Canadian coder runs Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange that has gone from a standing start to the largest on the planet in just under 180 days. CZ (born Changpeng Zhao) cut his teeth making high-frequency trading systems for Wall Streets flash boys, and he built Binance to be a Ferrari. His exchange can process a blazing 1.4 million transactions a second and on a peak trading day in January processed 3.5 billion new orders, cancels and trades. Speculators (some 25% of them from the U.S.) use Binance to trade 120 different coins, generating $200 million in profits for CZ's exchange last quarter. BNB, the virtual coin CZ created in August that gives holders a 50% discount on trading fees, has a market cap of $1.3 billion. His stake in Binance and his coins give CZ a personal fortune worth as much as $2 billion.
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