Ivan on Tech, a prominent YouTuber with nearly 200,000 subscribers, recently interviewed Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the CEO of the world’s largest and most popular crypto exchange, Binance.
Per the interview, CZ talked about a number of things, including the future of Binance, decentralization, when the bear market will end, and their proprietary blockchain Binance Chain, along with its first decentralized application (dapp), the Binance DEX.
CZ on Decentralization and the Binance DEX
Binance launched the testnet for public testing of Binance Chain, as well as their DEX, on February 20. According to CZ, this testnet will initially be somewhat centralized, as all of the nodes running the network are being run by Binance and their trusted partners, but this will change later on.
When asked about Binance Chain and the DEX, CZ first spoke about decentralization, as this is an important topic among community members since Binance as a company is in fact centralized.
Per the interview, CZ said he views centralization and decentralization on a gradient scale, and it’s a matter of how decentralized you are. Further explaining that Binance Chain and the DEX are not aiming for 100% decentralization, but rather trying to increase security, ease of use, and freedom.
CZ then added:
“Socially we have a lot of influence because it is called the Binance DEX, so we have a lot of influence. But I don’t waste time debating how decentralized we are. At least to me, it’s not how decentralized you have to be, it’s how useful you will become. We are focusing on user adoption.”
CZ then explained what aspects of their DEX are truly decentralized, stating that it is technically fully decentralized:
“On the technical side of the Binance DEX, it is technically fully decentralized. So users hold their own private keys and the network never has access to keys. The network nodes will be decentralized, so we would definitely want one of those nodes at least, but we haven’t decided who’s going to run these nodes for the mainnet.”
CZ on Binance Chain
Later in the interview, Ivan asked CZ about some of the perks of Binance Chain, its technicalities, the BNB token, and the long-term vision for the blockchain project.
CZ first addressed the question about Binance’s BNB token, stating that BNB will be moved to Binance Chain and will be used as the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency to pay gas for transactions on the network.
He then proclaimed that Binance Chain will not support smart contracts, but users will be able to issue coins and submit a proposal to get them listed on the Binance DEX and Binance’s current centralized exchange. He also said the listing of Binance Chain coins on the DEX is decentralized, as the community nodes will vote for which coins make the cut.
Moreover CZ had some interesting things to say about the speed of Binance Chain:
“What’s also interesting about the Binance Chain is that the blocks are one-second blocks. So every second there’s new blocks, and every one block is final. So basically, now when you send somebody some coins or some tokens, within one second you get confirmation and that’s final.”
CZ believes that Binance Chain will one day support some really interesting applications like payments and e-commerce because of the ultra-fast block times.
Another interesting comment from CZ is that cryptocurrencies from other blockchains will be able to migrate to Binance Chain.
CZ said:
“We already have 8 projects that will be migrating from Ethereum’s blockchain to Binance Chain, so this is huge because big real projects will be moving to Binance Chain.”
The Future of Binance
To finish off the interview, Ivan on Tech asked CZ what he believes the future of Binance and the cryptocurrency industry to be.
CS responded by saying:
“I still think we are in the very early early stage and I expect there to be millions of tokens and thousands of blockchains, so I think we will see many different special-purpose blockchains coming out and Binance Chain is one of the special-purpose chains.”
Further elaborating, he said:
“We don’t do smart contracts, it’s not generic. But we use very fast transactions and handle very high volume. So maybe [in the future] we will try e-commerce on there or maybe not. It’s very hard to predict the outcomes in a decentralized world and how industries will evolve.”
You can check out the complete CZ interview with Ivan on Tech below:
Do you think Binance Chain should focus more on decentralization? Do you think we’re looking to see an explosion of blockchains and cryptocurrencies in the coming years? Let us know in the comments section below!
