Where is Bitcoin Giant Binance headquartered? Answer comes “At the right time”

by James · July 19, 2022

In May last year, when the CEO of the world’s largest crypto exchange was asked where his company is headquartered, Changpeng Zhaos, or CZ for short, the answer was that Binance has no headquarters – it is a decentralized company, in line with the decentralized ethos. of the crypto industry.

He also challenged the definition of a headquarters: “Is there an office where people sit? I have worked from home for the last three and a half years. Our management team does not sit in one office, we do not have a clear place where we can go after most people. normal definitions of a headquarters that we can call a headquarters. “

A little over a year later, CZ’s answer to the question has changed. He still can not say where Binance has headquarters, but he says the answer will come soon.

“We have a global holding company, a global holding unit for the centralized stock exchange,” he said in the latest episode of Decryptsin gm podcast.

So, where is it? “We have not announced it yet,” he said with a laugh. “We want to announce it well in advance. But it’s very simple. It’s not that complicated.”

It is CZ that has made it complicated. Binance is five years old, and spent much of its short history colliding with regulators around the world, even though it grew enormously. During the first years, the company was reportedly based in China, Japan, Taiwan and Malta at various times.

In 2017, it was registered in the Cayman Islands. In 2019, it was also registered in the Seychelles. But by 2020, the authorities began to draw attention to the company’s lack of licenses: Malta issued a statement saying that Binance does not have the license to operate there. Malaysia followed suit and said Binance was operating illegally in the country.

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Now CZ has changed its approach, which he admits did not work with regulators.

“We capitulated,” he said Decrypt. “When we started five years ago, there was very little regulatory framework. And in fact, most of the regulators we talked to … they said to us, ‘We do not regulate this industry, you are off, we are not involved.’ So back in that day, we embraced the decentralized philosophy, and it worked very well for us. “

Now that the industry has matured, regulators are not saying “you’re up and running”. Now their first question is: Where is your headquarters? “And we said, look, if we want this, what’s the best way forward … as a centralized business, as a centralized stock exchange? The best way is to give them that structure. So we set up local offices, local units. , hired local compliance, legally, this whole structure. “

During the pandemic, Binance has opened offices in cities such as Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Dubai and Paris, a list from CZ rattles off with pride. “When people ask about our headquarters … We have the structure set up now. So now we satisfy both sides.”

Of course, there is still no answer to headquarters questions. Many large companies have offices all over the world; they still retain a single address. What does CZ say when a regulator asks him where the company is based? “Well, if we’re in France, we say ‘Look, right here in Paris,'” he said. “If we’re talking about the Middle East, it’s Bahrain and Dubai and Abu Dhabi. So now people can go to their nearest office, and if they have a problem, they can find us, they can talk to us.”

It may sound just more dismissive, but for CZ, it really represents progress. He also boasts that Binance US, the company’s separate entity in the US that was launched three years ago, has received money transfer licenses in 46 states – a difficult process since each state sets different requirements. (New York, Vermont, Texas, and Hawaii are waiting times starting July 10.)

Along with his efforts to play nice with regulators, CZ sounds more like a politician – perhaps taking a page from his rival Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder who has made so many trips to Washington (even after moving the company its to the Bahamas) to lobby on behalf of the industry.

CZ is reluctant to say that the United States has stricter crypto regulations than anyone else – even when other industry leaders ponder the cold shoulder of SEC leader Gary Gensler.

“I do not think the United States is behind it,” CZ said. “The United States is stricter when it comes to yield-generating products, interest-generating products, futures, et cetera. Different countries are a little different … The United States has so many different political parties, so many different agencies. And even in the Senate, you can see that some senators is very pro-innovation. Some senators want, like, “Let’s protect the US dollar as much as possible, for as long as we can, and not have the next one.” Or maybe they do not realize that they do not want the next one. But you know, it’s a debate. It’s a democracy. “