He Yisun's endorsement letter: If the cryptocurrency industry is the Wild West, Zhao Changpeng is the guardian of the wilderness.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) previously pleaded guilty to charges of violating anti-money laundering laws and other offenses with the US Department of Justice. He is expected to be sentenced in the United States on April 30. CZ personally wrote an apology letter, and various individuals have written to the judge in support of CZ, seeking a lenient sentence.

Changpeng Zhao's full apology letter: Taking full responsibility and proud to spend the rest of my life

CZ Receives 161 Letters of Support

According to legal documents released on the 23rd, former U.S. Ambassador to China Max S. Baucus, McGill University Professor Jeremy R. Cooperstock, Columbia University Associate Professor Ronghui Gu, Morgan Stanley Managing Director Sean Yang, and members of the UAE royal family have all expressed their support for CZ.

Tigran Gambaryan, a Binance executive detained due to a regulatory dispute with Nigerian authorities, also wrote a letter of support for CZ in January of this year:

While CZ acknowledged his past mistakes, I can attest that his integrity, business acumen, and charitable actions have had a ripple effect, not only influencing Binance's corporate philosophy but also positively impacting the lives of the public.

Binance CEO Richard Teng: Headquarters location selected, full communication with Nigerian authorities

He Yi: Zhao Changpeng is the Guardian of the Wild West

Binance Co-founder He Yi also wrote a letter of support in January this year, link here. The following is the full text of He Yi's letter:

Dear Judge Richard Jones

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. I am He Yi, CZ's partner in work, and also the mother of his three children. I hope this letter can help Judge understand a more authentic Zhao Changpeng.

In the spring of 2014, I met Zhao Changpeng at a blockchain public event at a school. He is commonly known as CZ, which is the abbreviation of his real name's initials, unlike many others who use pseudonyms. That day, CZ was invited on stage to share spontaneously as soon as he arrived because the organizers found out he was working for the then-popular Bitcoin wallet blockchain.info. He passionately explained blockchain technology and the principles of Bitcoin to everyone. At that time, he had just sold his house to buy Bitcoin. Due to the price drop of Bitcoin, his assets shrank significantly, but this did not deter his passion for blockchain technology. His speech was full of idealism about how blockchain technology could bring positive changes to the world, which greatly influenced and inspired me.

Later, CZ chose to enter the cryptocurrency field and founded Binance. While he certainly wanted the company to succeed, he was not someone whose ultimate goal was merely to make money. He genuinely hoped to use technology to drive progress in the world.

In the summer of 2014, CZ's years of accumulated matching and trading technology background did not come into play at Blockchain. After my repeated invitations, he joined the cryptocurrency trading platform OKCoin where I worked. At that time, the cryptocurrency industry had entered a downturn. In the midst of industry wailing, a community member unfortunately got leukemia and could not afford his medical expenses. Therefore, a public fundraising campaign was launched. Despite CZ's personal assets shrinking significantly, he actively participated in donations. Unfortunately, the community member still passed away in the end.

Inspired by this incident, CZ and I jointly initiated the "Love BTC" charity project. He set up a website and a public Bitcoin wallet address. We raised funds through social media auctions of clothing, etc., then directly converted BTC into goods for the beneficiaries. For this, CZ even wrote a paper introducing how blockchain technology could realize 100% transparent charity work, ensuring that the ultimate beneficiaries receive 100% of the proceeds and that no donations are eroded by intermediary management fees. This paper can be found on Github, timestamped April 2014:

https://github.com/cpzhao/bitcoin_charity/blob/master/Bitcoin_Charity.md

And this was the precursor to Binance's charity work. This was three years before Binance was established, and CZ was not wealthy at the time. Many people think that charity is just for show, some use it as a means to offset taxes, and some say they will do charity work when they achieve financial freedom. But for CZ, whether poor or rich, he takes charity seriously and assumes social responsibility because he is kind and has a humanitarian spirit.

In August 2017, my first month at Binance, a young user approached me saying he had sent thousands of dollars to a Binance wallet address, but Binance did not support that token, so Binance could not receive the funds. This was a common mistake in the early days of the industry. According to industry conventions at the time, one had to bear the consequences of their mistakes. However, for this young man in his early twenties, those thousands of dollars might have been his family's annual income, his entire year's university tuition, his future hope.

After a brief discussion with CZ, he mobilized our already stretched development resources and quickly helped the user recover the assets. This was the first case in the industry of a user mistakenly sending assets to the wrong address being resolved. With the first case came numerous others. Under CZ's guidance, Binance has helped over 180,000 users recover assets totaling over $441 million. This is a project that consumes a lot of resources and may not seem worthwhile in terms of ROI, but we can ignite hope for our users in despair.

Even today, on public platforms like Coinbase, they still do not offer this service. In this new Wild West, countless practitioners and more predators than guardians exist. CZ has always insisted that we should do the right thing: protect users.

In early 2018, with Bitcoin's price soaring over $20,000, investor enthusiasm spawned a lot of fraud. One day, a group of Chinese users approached me, pointing out that they had been lured into investing in a project by an account on social media. After sending the money, the person disappeared, but based on publicly available blockchain information, the funds had just been transferred to Binance. Following the usual law enforcement process at the time, users had to first report to the police and the police provide a letter of assistance to freeze the assets. However, at that time, cryptocurrency trading was banned in China, and the Chinese police did not handle such cases.

CZ said to us, "Do the right thing." We temporarily froze the stolen funds, then organized multiple calls between the victims and the scammer. In the end, the scammer returned the money to the users, and the scammer also closed the account. This is just one of many examples of CZ's insistence on fighting wrongdoers. In the past year alone, Binance has cooperated with law enforcement agencies in various countries in over 58,000 investigations, many of which were cases initiated by Binance proactively pushing law enforcement to open investigations. This is why despite mainstream media trying to portray CZ as an evil villain, millions of community users and ordinary people see him as a hero of the industry because CZ has always had his own steadfast commitment to justice. If the cryptocurrency industry is likened to the Wild West, then CZ is the guardian in this wilderness.

Starting in 2019, the company's personnel began to grow rapidly, and the team composition became very globalized and diverse. During this period, there were Ivy League graduates from Wall Street, European dropout students, frontline NGO female warriors active in Africa, and young men from rural Southeast Asia who did not want to be fishermen. CZ truly treats everyone equally regardless of race, belief, gender, education, or family background.

Whether it was a junior employee in Southeast Asia whose house was destroyed in a fire, or the Covid pandemic sweeping the globe causing a shortage of epidemic prevention materials for employees, or the war in Russia and Ukraine posing a danger to employees, CZ spared no expense to help his employees. For a company owner, it's not uncommon to spend millions to help those scarce talents facing difficulties lead their families out of unstable living conditions, continue to provide allowances, and it's not surprising. However, when CZ made these decisions, he did not consider their backgrounds or positions. This also covered many junior employees who are easy to replace. CZ's decision had only one reason: they needed support.

CZ's leadership style may not meet the traditional expectations of an outstanding CEO. His commitment to transparency and fairness at Binance often conflicts with the power expectations of a small group of employees accustomed to elite corporate environments. This has led to some employees leaving the company feeling resentful and making unfounded accusations to the media. Although these reports sometimes make me feel discouraged, CZ has always shouldered this burden, continuing to support justice and equality because he understands that true fairness is sometimes unfair to a few privileged individuals.

In November 2022, over a weekend, FTX faced a crisis, and SBF's last call for help was to CZ. Without receiving any valid reports or documents from SBF, CZ convened a management meeting to decide whether to assist FTX and said:

"We don't need FTX as a company. We are saving FTX to save this industry. We should save FTX."

Although they ultimately had to give up the deal, subsequent information revealed that several companies associated with FTX had misappropriated user assets, leaving CZ shocked. CZ believed that transparency was the better solution, so he publicly disclosed Binance's trading platform wallet addresses, introduced products that allow users to verify their account funds and online wallet addresses, demonstrating Binance's transparency, which further promotes industry self-regulation.

So far, CZ and I have experienced the ups and downs of this industry together for ten years. These ten years have been a decade of dramatic changes in the industry. During these ten years, Bitcoin has risen from the low hundreds of dollars to over $40,000 today. We have seen numerous former celebrities fall from grace, and numerous well-known institutions collapse in an instant. Most of the time, these people were self-proclaimed geniuses, talented and talented, but they disregarded the law, thought they could deceive the public, or escape legal sanctions by luck. But not CZ; he is upright, kind, sincere, intelligent, and extremely hardworking. Due to work reasons, CZ underwent two spinal surgeries in 2020 alone. Even lying on a sickbed for 18 months, he never stopped working a day.

As CEO and largest shareholder for the past six years, he led with a salary lower than subsequent executives brought into the company, never took a bonus or cashed out. To keep Binance operational, he chose to fly to the U.S. to plead guilty. Between his personal interests and public interests, CZ always chooses to sacrifice himself, build Binance, and when it comes to Binance and users, he chooses the users.

As CZ's partner, I know how CZ has earned the respect of the community. It may be when the Chinese government banned cryptocurrency exchanges, other project parties took advantage while CZ chose to clear out users at higher prices. It may be when Binance was hacked, CZ immediately disclosed the information and took full responsibility. It may also be when many project parties issued tokens just to get rich, and CZ helped users track down industry scammers and hackers. Some cases had nothing to do with Binance, but because of his sense of mission and responsibility to the industry.

As CZ's life partner, having known CZ for nearly ten years, I understand another side of him that is not widely known. He knows nothing about the jewelry, luxury goods, luxury cars, and art auctions that the rich are fond of. He lives a simple life, buys affordable clothes on Amazon, rides a balance bike to meetings. He enthusiastically showed reporters his Toyota 6-seater van, only to be publicly mocked by the media. His purchases are based on efficiency and interest. He has no passionate desire for money, fame, or enjoyment. He wants to live a meaningful life.

At the same time, he always tries to take care of his friends' feelings as much as possible, regardless of their profession and social status. He also makes an effort to interact with his three young children at a high quality despite his busy work. The children are close to him, and they always ask now: "Why isn't Daddy home? When can Daddy come back?"

Of course, I am not saying that CZ has not made mistakes, but his biggest mistake is ignorance. As a startup company without a glamorous background, the founding team members had no legal background, and even most early management team members, except for CZ, could not even read English, like myself. With a lack of experience and legal knowledge, CZ won users over with fairness, integrity, and a sense of responsibility, while also making mistakes. Nevertheless, mistakes have been made, and both Binance and CZ have paid a huge price.

CZ has said before:

"No one wants to be a hero because no one is born wanting to stand in front of arrows to protect their family, community, ethnic group, or country and do the right thing. They become heroes because they have to protect their family, community, ethnic group, or country and do the right thing, and they have to become heroes in the process."

I humbly hope Judge Jones can consider comprehensively that in such an early and chaotic stage of the cryptocurrency industry, where there is no consensus on how to regulate the industry or define the U.S., a founder who has never managed a company of this scale will inevitably encounter blind spots. If CZ had known the severity of the situation, he would have been vigilant from day one and blocked any U.S. users. He did not want to be a hero, and certainly had no intention of being a criminal. All his actions follow universal humanitarian principles and do his best.

Today, it is a sense of responsibility that led him to choose to face trial, but he should absolutely not be viewed in the same light as those evil murderers, robbers, and scammers. I sincerely hope that Judge Richard Jones can open the eyes of God, be all-knowing, and make a fair judgment after seeing a more complete CZ. If necessary, you can contact me at any time for more details.

Sincerely wishing you well!

He Yi, Binance Cofounder & CZ's children's mother