Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1808
At the end of the last cryptocurrency bull market two years ago, “LatePost” had a conversation with Zhao Changpeng, the founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange . This is a founder and company shrouded in a cryptographic fog of 0s and 1s. It has been noticed, discussed, but never fully restored due to the huge wealth effect, the erratic trail of the founder, and the mystique of thousands of employees scattered around the world.
In 2022, which has gradually entered a bear market, the average daily trading volume of Binance will also be 65 billion US dollars, which is about 1/2 of the average daily trading volume of A shares in 2022 and more than 4 times that of Hong Kong stocks. According to data from CoinGecko, on one day in November last year, Binance’s daily transaction volume reached 136.7 billion US dollars. A practitioner said that even after some fees were waived last year, Binance’s profits still accounted for about 4/10,000 of the transaction volume. That is to say, in these 24 hours, Binance earned more than 50 million US dollars in profits from the transaction business alone. “What is the concept of having a ‘casino’ where people from all over the world play.”
The ability to make money like a money printing machine, and the special position of the cryptocurrency world outside the supervision also pushed Binance into the whirlpool. In June of this year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) formally sued Changpeng Zhao and Binance, which he founded, alleging that Binance allegedly made profits “through an extensive network of deception,” put investors at significant risk, and helped U.S. customers evade fraud. Supervision. Thirteen charges are laid out in the 136-page indictment.
The SEC’s prosecution of Changpeng Zhao and Binance is still ongoing. The story of Binance and Changpeng Zhao is mixed with the new elements of this era: cutting-edge computer technology, decentralized organizational transformation; it is also mixed with the desire for wealth that has been surging in human nature for a long time, and the myth of the boundary between freedom and rules. From a business perspective alone, Binance’s unusual rise and new organizational approach also make it one of the most worthwhile companies to study right now.
Restoring the story of this company and “finding Changpeng Zhao” are both a huge project. Today’s article is a small start: it comes from our special author Wang Hanyang. More than 4,000 resumes from people claiming to have worked or interned at Binance. Their backgrounds and experiences pieced together the tip of the iceberg of this mysterious company.
The following is the original text, this article is also published on the newsletter “https://crypto4.wtf/”, and the English version is published on the newsletter “https://picapica.wtf/”.
For most people who don’t care about blockchain, Binance may just be a company that occasionally appears in the technology news. But today, Binance has become one of the most special and important companies in the two fields of finance and technology: According to reports, Binance has about 8,000 employees (recently it was reported that Binance is laying off employees), but This company does not have a headquarters, and its employees are remotely distributed all over the world. Many people may not have seen several of their colleagues from the time they join the company to when they leave the company. Binance may have become the largest distributed company ever. If people study the history of the Internet 30 years later (almost from the time when the Internet was born to today), the organizational form of Binance is definitely a chapter that cannot be bypassed.
From the perspective of business influence and profitability, Binance is also very important. You can make a comparison with Apple, the leader in the smartphone industry: According to Tokeninsight data, Binance’s market share in cryptocurrency exchanges in Q2 2023 is 50.6%, while according to StrategyAnalytics data, Apple’s smartphone market share in Q4 2022 Its share is 24%, which is the highest in the world and Apple’s highest Q4 market share in history-but this figure is much inferior to Binance’s share. Even in 2022, the cold winter of cryptocurrencies, according to CoinDesk data, Binance’s spot trading volume still reached 5.29 trillion US dollars. In 2022, the business and sales of the Apple App Store ecosystem will be 1.1 trillion US dollars, of which more than 90% will be zero commission. Binance transactions have handling fees most of the time. So if Apple is the overlord of smartphones, then Binance is the absolute overlord in the cryptocurrency market at the moment.
The absolute supremacy of the entire industry combined with the pioneering work model makes Binance one of the most important companies of our time.
On the other hand, Binance is another mystery. Even Binance is one of the biggest mysteries of the global internet today: Rarely has a company been so important to the industry yet we understand so little about it.
On the 42nd day after Binance launched the product, its trading volume ranked tenth in the world; on the 92nd day, it ranked fifth in the world; on the 156th day, it ranked third in the world; on 165 days, it became the number one in the world—until now. How does it do all this?
I read almost all the articles about Binance on the Internet in Chinese and English, but I still can’t answer my questions about Binance, and I can’t even ask key questions through these online information. So I plan to fill in the blanks about Binance through a lot of research and interviews, analysis and organization.
Researching and accessing Binance is not easy. I hope to use all available opportunities and all available information to start this project from a small point of view. With the help of a series of articles, try to tell the story of Binance as interesting and comprehensive as possible. More importantly, you can encourage more friends to study and analyze Binance, a company that cannot be avoided in our era.
In the first article, let’s talk about what kind of people made Binance. Thanks to @paincompiler for his help, he collected more than 4,000 people who work or have worked in Binance from the Internet, and copied them on paper with a pencil.
Please note: Not all information we collect may be accurate, nor can it cover all of Binance’s circumstances.
The data for this article is based on 4,182 people who “claimed” to be at Binance, Binance US, or had worked there, on paper that we transcribed from the web. Many people have incomplete information. Among them, the data of 3714 people is relatively more comprehensive. Among these 3714 people, 1624 people should work or have worked in Binance, and the others are freelancers who have interns, part-time jobs or have cooperated with Binance. Unless otherwise specified, the following data use 1624 full-time workers as the denominator.
“Borderless” companies: Singapore and the Middle East have the most employees
Although blockchain has no borders, blockchain companies have borders. But Binance appears to be borderless more than any other company: In our sample, the people who built Binance came from 69 different countries. in:
Singapore: 176 people
UK: 78 people
United Arab Emirates: 75 people
United States: 27 people
India: 24 people
Similar to your stereotype, Binance has a large number of employees in Singapore. The data in the notebook shows that there is another employee working in the Cayman Islands-I thought this island was only used for company registration.
You may ask, what about Dubai? After all, the founders, Changpeng Zhao and Yi He, are both in Dubai—Dubai is the economic center of the United Arab Emirates, but it is a city, not a country. If we were to rank by city, Dubai would be number one. There are 65 people in Dubai, 64 in London and 16 in Amsterdam. These employees are located in 86 cities in total.
As a company born in China, Binance still has people working here – but the data we collected was only one person. It is not ruled out that Binance employees working in mainland China will deliberately hide their company.
Before Binance, among the famous telecommuting companies, the largest should be GitLab. GitLab, an open source software company, claims to be the world’s largest remote work organization: 2,038 full-time employees and their 358 pets in 65 different countries.
If we can have clearer information, I believe that the title of “the world’s largest remote work organization” should be transferred to Binance. But I don’t just want to compare the volume, but I want to prove that Binance is indeed a remote working company by comparing GitLab. Many people don’t believe that Binance works remotely. They more or less think that Binance is just afraid of supervision, so they say that they have no headquarters and are all remote. Some people also think that the so-called remoteness of Binance is just a common state of multinational companies-but this is probably not the case. Both Binance and GitLab should be considered the largest remote organizations on the planet.
If we look beyond full-time jobs, the 3,714 people on our notebook who have worked with Binance come from a total of 114 countries. This is much wider than the scope of the Apple Store. There are only 26 countries or regions in the world with Apple Stores. However, Apple Music is available in 167 countries or regions around the world, but only 47 countries or regions are clearly supported by Binance on the official website.
Although geographically, the distribution of Binance employees is very diverse, but in terms of schools, three of the Top 5 universities that Binance employees attend are located in Singapore, which shows that Singapore is indeed one of the centers of the encryption world.
National University of Singapore: 54 people
Nanyang Technological University: 47 people
University of London: 25 people
Singapore Management University: 24 people
National Taiwan University: 23 people
If the conditions are relaxed to all the 3714 people who have cooperated with Binance, there are quite a few people with British learning experience:
Cambridge University: 219 people
National University of Singapore: 179 people
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore: 128 people
Singapore Management University: 90 people
University of London: 90 people
One speculation is: as a fast-growing company, Binance should have a large demand for interns. As a Chinese-dominated company, Chinese who can speak English is an ideal recruitment choice. But it is not easy to recruit in China, so Chinese students studying abroad are very suitable.
There are 170,000 Chinese students in the UK, the largest source of students. Binance can give these students suitable internship opportunities. According to my observation, it is more difficult for Chinese students studying in the UK to find internships and jobs locally than Chinese students studying in North America, so more people will flood into blockchain companies that can recruit globally. There are only 50,000 international students in Singapore, and Chinese people account for 1/3. Therefore, the number of interns must not be particularly large.
Changpeng Zhao, who loves Uber, recruited the most ex-Amazon employees, thinking about layout adjustments like Internet CEOs
A former Binance executive told me that Zhao Changpeng is a person who loves to read. In the early years, Binance had a core management group of more than 40 people. Zhao Changpeng would often throw in the books he had read to let everyone think together, and jokingly “threatened”: If you don’t read it, you will be kicked out.
Most of these books are management and company biographies. Among the many companies, Zhao Changpeng likes the biographies about Uber and Netflix. Especially Uber, because the ride-hailing giant faced regulatory challenges similar to those faced by Binance in its early years.
Zhao Changpeng not only read, but also applied what he learned, and later recruited many people from Uber. This is evidenced in our sample of full-timers: 110 people had previous work experience at Uber, the sixth-highest number in our data. The top five are:
Amazon: 204 people
Shopee: 153 people
Citibank: 134 people
Agoda: 119 people (an online hotel booking site)
Coinbase: 111 (an American cryptocurrency exchange)
So what are these people doing at Binance?
Business related: 761 people (accounting for 46.86% of the total number)
Technology-related: 329 people (20.26% of the total number)
Operation related: 243 people (accounting for 14.96% of the total number)
Not sure: 291 people (accounting for 17.92% of the total number)
We were unable to identify the positions of many people because the collected data was not necessarily accurate and lacked many key information. In this limited data set, it can be seen that nearly half of the positions are related to business, which may reflect Binance’s emphasis on business development, sales, marketing and strategy-essentially the pursuit of growth and expanding market share.
This leads me to a story told by an interviewee who participated in revamping CMC (CoinMarketCap), a cryptocurrency price tracking site and data provider, after Binance acquired it. At the meeting to discuss the revision, Zhao Changpeng checked the different locations one by one to see if they were suitable for advertising. In the end, Changpeng Zhao asked to remove all the advertisements in very prominent positions on the homepage, leaving only some small places for advertisements, and suggested that the team add advertisements in places where users would not feel them, and put user experience first.
The removed advertisements accounted for the bulk of CMC’s revenue, but Zhao Changpeng believes that “if the user experience is worse than competing products, the end users will only be lost, and the current income is meaningless no matter how high it is.” The final effect is to keep only small ads and insert some smooth ads in places that users don’t feel. But after all, the bulk of the advertising revenue is gone, and Changpeng Zhao adjusted the KPIs of the employees accordingly. This interviewee commented on Changpeng Zhao: he has a big picture and focuses on key points.
More than a quarter of the sample got a promotion at Binance
I tried to use the data to determine what industries Binance tends to hire from, and it was unsurprisingly tech and finance. An interesting thing is: through our small sample data, it can be seen that the proportion of internal promotions among Binance employees is about 26.46%. This may indicate that Binance is very focused on promoting within the organization, or transferring employees between different branches or subsidiaries.
Judging from these employees’ descriptions of their positions, Binance’s requirements for skills are mainly concentrated in three areas: cryptocurrency and blockchain knowledge, customer service skills, and compliance and anti-money laundering expertise – Binance seems to pay attention to compliance. regulation.
Binance and compliance is a very controversial topic, in most countries, Binance is not compliant. Especially the dispute between Binance and the SEC. Although Binance has been sued by the SEC, most observers believe that this is just a prelude to a more intense struggle, and the real big struggle should still be behind. Moreover, the process of Binance’s efforts to pursue compliance can basically string together the entire history of Binance’s company, which is worth describing in detail later.
This article is just some fundamental analysis of Binance, and it leaves far more questions than answers.
Judging from the limited data, Binance is an exchange with a global distribution and extremely fast growth. How does its staff organize and collaborate? Who manages it, and by what specific method? How does it face growing challenges? Where might it go wrong? These issues remain to be further explored.
Binance is like a map full of fog of war, and we hope that through hard work we can gradually explore the whole picture. Because Binance is destined to become one of the most important companies of this era.
Welcome to continue to pay attention, I will continue to update the in-depth news, stories and reports of Binance and the general blockchain industry. If you have anything you would like me to write about, open private messages on my Twitter @HanyangWang, or send an email to [email protected].
The title image is from steemit.com, photographed by belenguerra.
This article is transferred from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1808
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