Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, widely known as CZ, closed the discussion with one of his most expansive and bullish statements on the future of blockchain — arguing that despite a decade of growth, the industry remains in its earliest stages and that the opportunity for ordinary people to build meaningful wealth within it is far from over.The question came from community member Director Mo Yu, who referenced one of the most striking moments in Freedom of Money — the point at which CZ sold his apartment to go all in on Bitcoin after reading the white paper. With the landscape now dramatically different — Bitcoin ETFs approved, institutional capital flowing in, and traditional finance increasingly engaged with the space — Mo Yu asked whether the window for ordinary people to cross the class barrier through crypto had effectively closed, and what advantages remained for those without institutional backing.CZ was direct in saying he does not predict prices, particularly over the short to medium term, and that anyone claiming otherwise should be treated with skepticism. But on the broader question of whether the industry still holds transformative potential, his conviction was absolute.He framed his answer around what he described as the three defining technologies of his adult life — the internet, blockchain, and AI. All three, he argued, will have profound and lasting impacts on how the world operates. The current excitement around AI, he said, does not diminish what blockchain has yet to accomplish. If anything, it obscures it. Blockchain has spent the entirety of its existence operating under heavy regulatory pressure, with governments and financial institutions consistently treating anything that touches money with suspicion and restriction. That suppression, CZ argued, has significantly delayed the technology's development — and means that what the world has seen so far represents only a fraction of what blockchain is capable of delivering.To illustrate how far the industry still has to go, CZ pointed to the breadth of financial activity that remains entirely untouched by blockchain technology. Mortgage markets, consumer lending, microlending, foreign exchange trading, oil markets, commodities — virtually none of it operates on the blockchain today. Payments, while growing, remain a marginal use case. Every country, in his view, should eventually have its own stablecoin or national currency represented on chain. FX markets should operate around the clock on decentralised infrastructure. The list of sectors yet to be transformed is, he said, enormous.He also put the current state of adoption in numerical context. Roughly seven to ten percent of the global population has some exposure to crypto — but within that group, crypto typically represents less than ten percent of their total wealth. The result is that less than one percent of global net worth currently sits in crypto. That figure alone, CZ argued, represents a potential one hundred times increase just from existing participants deepening their exposure — before accounting for the billions of people who have not yet entered the space at all.He pushed back on the instinct to measure blockchain's potential against the size of today's financial markets, drawing comparisons to other transformative technologies. Evaluating the potential of the internet by the size of the postal industry, or the potential of Uber by the size of the taxi market, would have produced wildly inaccurate conclusions. The same logic applies to blockchain, which he believes will not simply replicate existing financial infrastructure but fundamentally expand what is possible — enabling entirely new categories of transaction, including AI agent-to-agent payments that no existing financial rails are equipped to handle.On that point, CZ made a case for why blockchain and AI are not competing narratives but deeply complementary ones. As AI agents become more capable and more autonomous, they will increasingly need to transact with each other and with people across borders — instantly, without relying on bank accounts, Swift transfers, or payment networks that vary by country. Stablecoins and blockchain-native assets, he argued, are the natural infrastructure for that world. The use cases, he said, have barely been explored.He also offered an unexpected perspective on the current moment in the market. The flow of attention and capital toward AI has drawn some participants away from crypto — but CZ said he views this as a net positive for the builders who remain. Those who are still actively developing blockchain projects today, despite a more glamorous alternative competing for their attention, are demonstrating exactly the kind of long-term commitment and mission-driven focus that CZ said he looks for in founders. The builders left in the space, he suggested, are the real ones.CZ closed by reaffirming that his conviction in the long-term potential of crypto and blockchain remains as strong as it has ever been — and that for those willing to build with patience and genuine purpose, the opportunity ahead is larger than anything that has come before.
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