After being released from prison, CZ first appeared to talk about prison life and the future: Education takes time

Organized by: BlockBeats

The biggest expectation of this Binance Blockchain Week is finally here. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ), who just finished 4 months in prison, appeared at the main venue and talked about prison life, Binance, education projects, and AI. This is also CZ's first appearance after being released from prison.

After a $4.3 billion fine and 4 months in prison in the United States, CZ, who paid a huge price for freedom, looks chill, and his arm lines are more obvious than before. On the road to Bitcoin's record high of $70,000 this year, we can hear CZ's voice again after about a year, which is also a very good last day of Uptober.

The following is the full text of the speech:

Austin: I'm Austin from Altcoin Daily, CZ, this is your first interview since you got out, how was your experience in prison, it must not be very good?

CZ: It's definitely not as interesting as it is now. The whole experience was very restricted, my freedom was taken away, and there was nothing to do, but it also gave me a lot of time to reflect. I learned a lot of important lessons, such as, when everything is taken away, what do you miss the most? For me, what I miss the most is actually the connection between people. I miss my children, family, friends, colleagues, and community. I miss other things, but not as much as I miss people. You miss food, a nice bed, but those things didn't really affect me, and it refocused my priorities in life.

Austin: Do you think this is a fair sentence?

CZ: This is a very subjective question, and different people will have different views. There was a plea deal, and I agreed to some of the terms of the deal, and I'm not going to say anything negative about it, I accept it.

As for the sentence, I got four months in prison. Judges have a difficult job, and different positions will have different views. Some people will think it's too light, and some people will think it's too heavy. For the crime I committed - violating the Bank Secrecy Act - no one in the history of the United States has ever been sentenced for a single violation, and I'm the first.

Just a few weeks ago, a bank was fined $1.8 billion for similar issues, but no one was prosecuted. Whether it is fair or not is not so important to me anymore, and the judge also said a lot of good things about me in court. Although I was sentenced, my sentence was indeed very short compared to others. Most people in prison are sentenced to five years, ten years or even longer. So from this perspective, I am lucky, the sentence is over, and I am looking forward.

Austin: Did you make friends in prison?

CZ: Yes, you have to make friends, and it would be difficult to survive if you are isolated and have no one to rely on. A few prison guards did recognize me and asked me what coins they should buy. I can only say that I had no internet in prison and no information about any cryptocurrency.

I made a few friends and I still keep in touch with them. To be honest, there are a lot of good people in prison, and many of them were sentenced to long sentences for some very small things. Most of the people I met were very friendly. Although some of the guards were a little cold, I did not suffer any physical harm. From this perspective, I am very lucky.

Before I went to prison, prison counselors (this is an industry) gave me a lot of advice. They warned me not to save too much money in my account, only fifty dollars. But when I went in, I found that other people had two hundred dollars in their accounts, which made me look like a "poor person". Overall, I didn't encounter any problems. I also met some friends, and now I am trying my best to help them reduce their sentences through legal channels.

In addition, there is a friend in prison named Michael. He was imprisoned for 27 years for possessing marijuana forty years ago, and marijuana is now legal. He also obtained a college degree and read six books while in prison. There are indeed some excellent talents there, but it is difficult to achieve these in such a difficult environment. Every time I can use the computer for 15 minutes, I will be automatically kicked offline after 15 minutes, and the computer cannot paste, only manual input. So in that case, if you want to adjust the position of a paragraph, you can only rewrite it. In Michael's time, there were not even computers. So, although the conditions were difficult, many people still worked hard to study, read, and get degrees, and there were many good people there. Relationship with Binance and judgment of industry trends Austin: What is your relationship with Binance now? CZ: I have stepped down as CEO and no longer participate in the daily operations of the company. My shareholder rights have not been affected, so I am still a major shareholder of Binance to this day. I can still request some information, but I cannot make decisions or give orders. Overall, the relationship is still pretty good. Now there is a group of other people working hard, and I have been "forced to retire." The first month was a bit difficult. It was emotionally difficult to let go because I invested a lot of effort in this company for seven years.

But I always thought that a CEO’s term of office should not exceed ten years, because the world is constantly changing. Now with AI, I didn’t spend too much time to understand it before, and I didn’t have time to go deep into the details of DeFi and so on. So now looking back, being forced to step down actually has a lot of benefits. If I resigned on my own initiative, people might think I couldn’t hold on, but now I was forced, so no one complained.

Also, now I have more time, and I feel lucky. Although my reputation has changed, I still value my past achievements, which shows that there was no fraud and no users lost funds. So in some ways, my reputation is still solid. In addition, I am not young, but I am not too old, and I still have the energy to do more things. It is indeed very lucky to have the freedom and resources to do what I want now.

Austin: I heard that you were banned from managing any cryptocurrency exchange for life. Is this true? Will you continue to invest in crypto projects? CZ: Of course, first of all, according to my understanding, the words "lifetime" and "ban" do not appear in the agreement between me and the government. The agreement states that I will step down as CEO, and there is no time limit. However, the agreement can be updated and the government can change. But I have no plan to return to the position of CEO. I think the team is doing a good job and does not need me to return. Even if there is a chance, I don't want to return. I think the statement of "lifetime ban" is just an exaggeration in the media. The actual agreement is public. As for the second question, of course I will continue to invest in crypto projects. Now I mainly do two things: one is Google Academy, and the other is investment. Investments are mainly concentrated in three fields: blockchain, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. I no longer want to lead projects myself. I want to help other entrepreneurs develop their companies and provide them with funding, advice, resources and other support. I have some very important mentors, and I also hope to be a mentor to others.

Austin: Regarding the outlook for cryptocurrencies in 2025, are you still bullish about the year ahead?

CZ: I will try not to give any financial advice, however, history is not the future, I cannot predict the future, but I can analyze history. Historically, Bitcoin has gone through very clear four-year cycles. 2013 was a bull run, 2017 was a bull run, and actually 2012 was a recovery year, and a lot of people don't go back that far. 2016 was a recovery year, and 2017 was a surge. 2020 was a recovery year, and 2021 was a bull run. This year is back to near the previous highs.

So based on the existing analysis, 2024 is a recovery year, and I don't know what will happen next year, but in the long run, I am still very bullish on the entire industry. I think there's a lot more to be built, and as more people use cryptocurrency, its utility value will increase. In the long run, I'm still very optimistic.

Austin: Which aspects of cryptocurrency are you most optimistic about? DeFi or meme coins?

CZ: I'm not going to be specific about a certain area, because it's very difficult to predict which one will be the next hot spot. For example, in early 2017, I might not have predicted that ICOs would become a hot spot, but by June the trend was very obvious, so it depends on which projects break out in certain niche areas. I met with some entrepreneurs this morning who combined AI with blockchain and came up with some very interesting ideas. If one of these projects breaks out, then this field will become big. It's hard to predict, but I will continue to support other builders in the industry and see what happens.

Views on Regulation

Austin: Regarding legislation, what do you think about the future direction of crypto regulation?

CZ: The current legislation is gradually improving, and in some countries, such as here, it is progressing very quickly. In some large countries, due to the large number of departments and personnel, the progress will be slower. But overall, the trend is positive. Let me give you an example. In mid-April of this year, Elizabeth Warren announced that she would crack down on cryptocurrencies, just one week before I was sentenced. As a result, by June, Trump publicly supported cryptocurrencies, and by the end of June, both parties supported cryptocurrencies, and I was still in prison. So this also shows that when people need cryptocurrencies, the government will respond. Therefore, I think the overall direction is positive.

Austin: I live in the United States, and from my perspective, cryptocurrency has become an important election issue. Who do you think is more friendly to cryptocurrencies, Harris or Trump? CZ: Oh, I have absolutely no idea. I'm not going to comment on any election topics because I've dealt with US law enough. I know there are election interference laws in the US and anything I say in public could be taken out of context, so I'm not going to touch on that topic or even get close to that "line". I just want to keep my distance. I think it's good that there are bipartisan support for cryptocurrencies. Austin: Okay, again from the US perspective, which policy or legislation do you think is the most important? CZ: I think the most basic point is the classification of cryptocurrencies. There are a lot of disputes now, for example, in most other countries, they consider cryptocurrencies to be currencies. The United States has already recognized Bitcoin as a currency, and many other countries also consider Bitcoin to be a cryptocurrency. Of course, there are different types of cryptocurrencies, depending on the specific currency. But in the United States, this is indeed a big point of contention, and I don't want to comment too much.

About Giggle Academy

Austin: Let’s say we meet on stage at Binance Blockchain Week 2025 a year from now, not necessarily about price, but where do you think Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies will be?

CZ: It’s really hard to predict what will happen a year from now, but I think history may repeat itself and we will be in a relatively good position in the future.

Austin: I like this prediction, CZ, what are your plans next?

CZ: I am currently spending at least half of my time on Giggle Academy, which I think is a very interesting and very influential project, although it will not be a lucrative project.

Austin: Can you explain what Giggle Academy is to people who are not familiar with it?

CZ: It is a digital education platform that specifically serves those who do not have access to education. There are currently about 700 million to 800 million illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds of whom are women. In addition, according to different reports, there are about 300 million to 500 million children who do not have the opportunity to go to school. In other words, there are about 1.2 billion to 1.3 billion people in the world who do not have access to education opportunities, mainly concentrated in very poor areas.

Many educational applications and projects are carried out in areas with rich educational resources, and are more of a supplement to the existing education system. And I think now we have enough technical capabilities to combine game developers, graphic designers, teachers and AI to make applications or tools to serve people who need education without relying on teachers.

In those places, the cost of teachers is high and there is a shortage of teachers. If you want to send teachers there, it takes a long time. But now we can provide education digitally through a very interactive application, mainly on the Android platform, because Android devices are cheaper in these areas.

If we can help 100 million people get education, I think it is something meaningful to me, and I don’t care whether there is a financial return, and I don’t think it requires much money.

Today, out of the world’s 8 billion people, about 1 billion people study in school every day, with an average class of 30 or 50 people, and there are about 20 million teachers in the world. But think about it, how many different ways are there to teach first-grade English? We repeat similar teaching processes millions of times every day. If we can make these contents into an application, add AI support, and make it interactive to answer questions. Although the initial investment may be high, requiring several million dollars, once the AI ​​engine is completed, the cost per course may be about one million dollars in the future. 12 grades, 12 courses, 30 subjects, about $300 million in total. Even with a lot of buffer, it's only $1 billion. I think we can create content that meets all of today's educational needs and covers 500 languages.

The US government spends $100 billion a year on education, and we only need less than 2% of the funds to provide education to children who don't have educational opportunities, and we can even do better than traditional face-to-face teaching. In a class of 30 people, the pace of teaching is limited by the slowest students; with a platform, we can dynamically adjust the course content so that students can quickly advance in their strengths. After accumulating a lot of data, we can also help students find jobs quickly. For example, 8-year-olds can do annotation work, which is also a good source of income.

My nephew has been managing a flight sim community of 14,000 gamers since he was 12 years old, and 16-year-olds can do customer support jobs, such as answering FAQs, and 15- and 16-year-olds can be game testers or coders. So I want to get kids into the workforce earlier, not just to get a college or high school diploma.

We can help employers find the right talent. For example, this kid is at the top of the class in math, in the top 10%, and has completed many projects; other kids have high emotional intelligence and volunteer to tutor younger children through the platform, etc. In this way, we can help children find jobs earlier, thereby helping their families, siblings, and other family members get more educational opportunities.

Of course, electronic digital education lacks human interaction, but it also has its advantages. My vision is to have older children tutor and interact with younger children to make up for the lack of human interaction. For example, physical education classes are difficult to teach online, but the platform can organize 15-year-olds to lead 7-year-olds to do activities together, and the 15-year-olds can get points or credits for this. When employers come to recruit, such children will naturally be chosen first.

We can design many different ways of interaction in the platform, but the most important problem we need to solve now is to enable AI to stably generate consistent video content. This task seems simple, but it is a difficult problem for AI. At present, teachers can quickly produce content, such as PPT, but these contents are usually designed for teachers to teach themselves.

However, in an environment without teachers, we need platforms or applications to deliver these contents by themselves. In this case, in order to attract children's attention, we need very interactive videos, animations, and cute elements, which are usually not provided by teachers, and this is where AI can play a role. At present, no AI model can generate ideal content. I have discussed with many top AI experts, and we are working hard to solve this problem. However, this problem should be solved in the next few months to years. Once we get past that, we can deliver content digitally, hopefully reaching hundreds of millions or even billions of kids and people around the world, providing them with free education.

Austin: In the future, will some part of Giggle Academy be integrated into Web3 or blockchain? I think everyone here is wondering, will there be airdrops to participate in?

CZ: Not in the short term, I don't want to get into things like issuing new tokens. So we may support existing tokens like Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, etc.

We will build rewards mechanisms to make the system work well, but we may not need to issue our own tokens. For example, if I want to hire customer support or community forum administrators, I can sponsor some BNB and use those funds to pay kids and so on.

Also, another interesting thing I found today is that AI companies actually pay a lot of money to get the data generated by people on their platforms. If we get children and parents to agree to provide their data to AI companies for training, then the data generated by these children in the process of learning pronunciation, learning mathematics, etc. can be used to train AI, and parents may receive compensation ranging from 10 to 100 US dollars. For our target users, this is a considerable amount of money. In this way, we can achieve a direct payment method of "learning is getting paid" without using tokens. AI companies will become sponsors of the platform, so we don't necessarily need to issue tokens to implement this model.

Of course, in the long run, I hope to gradually integrate the economic model of Web3 into the platform. This is a platform that starts from the time a child learns to speak and accompanies them until they get a job. Even when they are 70 or 80 years old, they can continue to learn. At that time, when they find a job, we can propose (but not force) them to consider donating a certain percentage of their income back to the platform in the next one to three years. Even if only a small number of people are willing to do this, I think we can build a sustainable platform in the long run. But this is a long-term plan, which may take about ten years. But it doesn't matter, I have plenty of time.