The CEO of the Binance exchange, Changpeng Zhao "CZ", has always distinguished himself from other top executives of large crypto projects by his utmost prudence, restraint, diplomacy and foresight. In addition, he is 45 years old and one of the most mature tops in crypto, not counting Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Rocket(tm), who is 47 years old.
His tweets don't have the same reach as Musk with his 142M followers, CZ only has 8.4 million followers, but the world's largest exchange has over 130 million customers, which is comparable in influence to Musk's audience. Only CZ's audience is more crypto-oriented.
Recently, however, Binance has been having a lot of problems with regulators in different countries.
And it is Binance's regulatory problems that are paving the way for CEO Zhao's apparent successor. And so recently Richard Tan was promoted, (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-05/binance-s-richard-teng-emerges-as-cz-s-heir-apparent-as-regulators-circle?srnd=cryptocurrencies-v2) and appointed to the position of manager of all markets outside the US.
According to people with direct knowledge of the matter, Tan has emerged as the leader to take over as CEO if Zhao leaves the position. The succession issue has taken on added urgency as U.S. regulators have increased scrutiny of Binance in recent months, sources said. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Binance and Zhao himself in late March for allegedly violating derivatives rules and accused it of "bogus" compliance.
Binance did not respond to requests for comment on the succession. Zhao disputed the characterization of many of the problems alleged by the CFTC.
Binance still processes more transactions than all the other leading centralized crypto exchanges combined, but its position has never seemed more precarious. At least four U.S. federal agencies are investigating or taking enforcement action against it, and regulators in Canada and Australia are looking into its business. Even Dubai, Zhao's adopted home and seen as a free-floating cryptocurrency center, has tightened its scrutiny of license applicants, including Binance.
Two months before Binance Australia announced that payment solutions provider Cuscal had stopped supporting deposit services in Australian dollars, a U.K. banking partner stopped supporting the exchange for transactions in British pounds sterling.
Richard Teng, Binance's head of Asia, Europe and the Middle East, with more than thirty years of experience in finance and regulation.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Teng worked at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the city-state's central bank, for 13 years until 2007. After that, he moved to the Singapore Stock Exchange, working as chief regulatory officer. This was followed by a six-year stint at the Abu Dhabi Global Market. According to his profile, he earned a master's degree in applied finance from the University of Western Australia.
Watch for further developments with the world's premier crypto exchange. If there are reports online that CZ is resigning due to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission taking legal action against him personally as an individual to take legal risks away from the platform, I think we can already gradually move assets to another platform.
Not that it will cause a collapse of Binance, the exchange is too large to go bankrupt, but the outflow of funds from the platform will be enormous.
