It is difficult to find anyone with even a shred of interest in Crypto who doesn’t know the famous figure CZ Binance.
 |
| Freedom of Money Book Cover |
His full name is Changpeng Zhao — a Chinese-Canadian entrepreneur who went from flipping burgers in Vancouver to building the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
He is the founder and retired CEO of Binance, a platform that at its peak processed billions of dollars in daily trading volume and served users across hundreds of countries.
CZ released his book titled Freedom of Money recently, following a turbulent period that saw him plead guilty to U.S. anti-money-laundering violations and serve a four-month prison sentence — the price, it seems, of operating a global exchange without a clear regulatory home.
He was subsequently granted a Presidential Pardon by Donald Trump, clearing his record and marking a dramatic return to public life. The book is, in many ways, his answer to everything that happened.
Truth be told, unless you have a very deep interest in Crypto, you might not enjoy the book that much.
Only about 25% of it is a biography; the rest focuses on the life of the company he founded — Binance — and the regulatory battles, internal crises, and relentless growth that defined it.
It reads less like a memoir and more like a founder’s defence brief, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does require patience.
Whatever the case, you should read it and judge for yourself.
The book costs nearly ₦13k for a digital copy on Amazon. However, for those who wish to read it but can’t afford it, I have provided a download link 👉 here.
13 Lines Worth Quoting from Freedom of Money
What makes Freedom of Money worth your time — even if you skim the rest — is the occasional sentence that stops you cold.
CZ is not a literary writer, but he is an honest one, and that honesty surfaces in lines that feel less like book promotion and more like hard-won observation.
Below are 13 that spoke to me.
I didn’t include anything from the Supplementary Essay; these are all from the main text.
I suspect there are plenty more I overlooked.
Quote 1:
The media version of events rarely matches the lived experience.
Quote 2:
Ambition is necessary if you want to achieve anything significant.
Quote 3:
If freedom does not cost anything, it is probably an illusion.
Quote 4:
Building a narrative on speculation is a form of self-deception.
Quote 5:
Freedom is real, it is valuable, and it is costly. Do not pursue it blindly. Do not imagine that it comes without obligation. Do not forget that your freedom can affect others, for better and for worse.
Quote 6:
Markets invite overreaction, and public narratives punish nuance, so it was tempting to confuse decisiveness with haste.
Quote 7:
The meal I could assemble in ninety seconds took me sixty minutes to earn the money to buy.
Quote 8:
The sanctions issue also revealed something about the nature of global regulation. The U.S. sanctions regime is extraterritorial — it applies not just to U.S. entities but to any entity that touches the U.S. financial system. Since virtually all global banks have U.S. operations, this effectively means U.S. sanctions apply globally.
Quote 9:
I learned that systems are only as strong as their weakest points, and that the weakest point is usually a human being who is tired or distracted or simply not paying attention.
Quote 10:
When a customer yelled at you for getting an order wrong, you could either absorb the insult as a personal failure or you could share the story later with coworkers who understood that sometimes people just needed someone to yell at, and you happened to be standing behind the counter.
Quote 11:
The skills I had learned — observing before acting, finding the logic in unfamiliar systems, building competence before confidence — transferred to new contexts.
Quote 12:
Canadians do not boast. They apologize when someone else bumps into them. They treat success with suspicion and failure with sympathy.
Quote 13:
When my father bought me a 286 DOS computer — an extravagance we could barely afford — he was making a bet that technical skills would open doors that social connections could not.
Open For Add-ups
If you have more qoutes to add from the book, please drop them in the comment section, they'll be added.
Comments
Post a Comment