Zhang Bingchao appears to be an ordinary person, so the waiters at one of London's most luxurious hotels didn't know him when he arrived for an interview with Fortune magazine.
In fact, it is hard to imagine that people would not recognize Mark Zuckerberg, for example, if they saw him in a public place.
In this report, published by the American "Fortune" magazine, writer Vivian Walt says that unlike Zuckerberg, Zhang Bingchao is virtually unknown outside his industry, but the 44-year-old founder and CEO of Binance deserves the same standing as he is. President of META Corporation.
According to Bloomberg, Zhao's net worth is $96 billion.
Although this number fluctuates a lot in the cryptocurrency market - as by late March his fortune was only around $74 billion - he is still considered one of the richest people in the world.
The writer points out that Zhao has reached the top in the industry at lightning speed even by technical standards, he founded Binance from scratch in 2017 to become the largest crypto exchange in the world.
The writer touched on Zhao's childhood, who grew up in a rural village in the Chinese province of Jiangsu. Zhao says that his father - a university professor - was exiled from a larger city because of his bourgeois tendencies.
But Zhao's humble life changed dramatically in 1989, after the Tiananmen Square student uprising and violent government crackdown.
At the time, Zhao's father was a doctoral student in Vancouver, Canada, and Zhao's mother took advantage of this chaotic moment and stood with her children in front of the Canadian Consulate in Beijing, taking turns waiting 36 hours for visas to be reunited with the family.
Moving to Vancouver was an inspiration for the then 12-year-old Chow.
"I drank fresh milk for the first time, and my high school years were great," Zhao says.
He states that for the first time he felt he had money to spend, earning $3.5 an hour flipping hamburgers at a McDonald's, $12.6 an hour judging volleyball, and working night shifts at a Chevron gas station.
The author explains that Zhao became a software developer through training, spending years working in Tokyo and New York and helping to build Bloomberg's trading platform, then finally returning to China, where he heard about Bitcoin in 2013 while playing a poker game with friends.
At their suggestion, Zhao sold his apartment in Shanghai and invested $1 million in cryptocurrency.
Daming Zhou, a friend of Zhao's, recalls, "None of us understood what Zhao was doing when Binance started, but he was very persistent."
Zhou has invested about 1 million renminbi (about $157,000) in his friend's startup, and says, "This is the best investment I've ever made."
Bitcoin trading at the time could take days or even weeks to complete, Zhao recalls, "We said we'd cut that response, hopefully in an hour."
Then individual merchants “and retailers” responded enthusiastically and the site crammed with users with the rise of cryptocurrencies.
When I asked the writer Zhao how it felt to be immeasurably rich, he replied that he couldn't get over it. "I went from an entrepreneur to a tens of billionaires," he says.
He points out that he bought his suit 4 years ago for $300, and he was wearing an Apple Watch, and even the hotel in which they met does not cost more than two thousand dollars.
Zhao says he is surprised by some of the huge prices of digital assets, especially non-fungible tokens.
When the author said that investors seem crazy to spend millions on digital artwork, Zhao added, "I agree, I think people may have lost their minds."
Zhao touched on the crucial role that cryptocurrency has played in supporting Ukraine. The Kyiv government collected more than $65 million in crypto donations for its military campaign against Russia in just one month, which was impossible to collect through normal banking institutions.
But Zhao's decision to continue trading in the Russian ruble was criticized in Ukraine.
“It is time for them to make their decision, do they want to continue to support the system or do they want to join the civilized world?” Michael Chobanyan, founder of the Kiev-based cryptocurrency exchange CONA, told COIN Disc news site.
For his part, Zhao insisted that many innocent people would be harmed by the freezing of all Russian Binance accounts.
Binance confirms that its compliance team has examined about 6,000 accounts, and closed about 150 of them for their links to sanctioned individuals.
The world is currently experiencing the first war in the age of encryption, which is already showing its bright and dark side.
Zhao says he prefers to be an optimist and sees the underlying blockchain technology for cryptography as an advance in bridging the disparities in legacy global banking, and creating some transparency in a crisis like Ukraine. “This is the first time in human history that we can collectively agree and keep On a record, where no one person takes responsibility for what happens, and that has profound implications."