Who Owns Binance? (3)

Part 3: A Letter From CZ (Satire)

Note: This is satire. It is not intended as news or criticism — just light comedy (but it will tell you who owns Binance, which succinctly wraps up the three-part series I have been writing these past weeks — Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here). For the original version of the letter from CZ to the Binance community that has been satirised below then go here.

When Binance launched four years ago, the crypto industry was still in its infancy — with few early adopters and no clear standards. That’s why we, a group of investors decided to band together and start a Caymans LLC and put a digital human called CZ in charge. We figured — no one’s gonna hurt a Chinese guy who can’t be found, after all, right? Also, make no mistake about it, a Caymans LLC is the most flexible vehicle in the world for doing what the fuck you want with literally dozens of partners all in one group, so Binance fit like a glove onto this standardless industry.

Within a short period, the crypto environment has drastically grown and evolved: there are now more crypto offerings, an increasing number of first-time crypto users and a lot more attention and debates on how the crypto industry should move forward. Much of this was the result of our partners (let’s call them LPs) stealing other people’s intellectual property and marketing it under our own banner! Isn’t that smart. Some of these armed robberies were amazingly cheap to commit and required no effort at all. With the project Synthetix, for example, we made billions in assets and millions in income and we didn’t even bother to change the logo or write a white paper — we just stole the whole thing from a deadbeat who was getting sued at the time! :-)

Given the recent hyper-focus on regulation when it comes to Binance, wewould like to take this opportunity to share our historical background and principles, clarify our stance and commitment, and outline our approach and plans for regulations and the sustainable development of the crypto industry going forward. It’s not that we care about the regulation per se, let alone the principles, but one or two more nervous types among the four-year-old “investor group” that funds Binance’s activities like a casino pool once a week (putting in and pulling out cash as required) says that we ought to or someone is gonna find out who we are. Of course, Caymans completely shields us from that, but OK, we figured it would be only fair to concede given the DOJ in the US is investigating us now, the UK FCA is also looking into us seriously, and a whole bunch of other regulators such as the Thai SEC are also on our case!

Protect OUR interests first

Before there were clear guidelines for the industry, we have always held Binance to the highest standard to prioritize our own’ best interests — a goal that we share with governments and regulators around the world. Therefore, we have added requirements for using our platform and set industry standards: strict insider trading policies (no active trading of any asset within 30 days except in our own case), a Secured Asset emergency fund (SAFU) to protect our assets and rigorous listing standards for projects that are not created by us or stolen from someone else and firewall to separate out the listing team (so we can’t be caught). We also invested in educational resources early on via Tutorials and Binance Academy to help users of all backgrounds make much bigger investments on crypto. For higher risk products, we set limits and protections to encourage responsible trading so no one would think we were greedily trying to steal their funds. To date, Binance is the only crypto trading platform with a massively profitable trading program.

We also protect ourselves through our work with other shady government agencies such as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the UK South East Regional Organized Crime Unit, and many more to protect ourselves from becoming victim to our massively profitable cybercrimes such as money laundering, terrorist financing and scams. In 2021 so far, we have completed assisting 5,600 investigation requests already, which is 100% more than those in 2020 — because before all the regulatory fuss kicked off, we couldn’t have given a shit less quite frankly about who did what on our platform. Most recently we supported the takedown of a prolific cybercriminal ring responsible for laundering over $500M worth of damages from dark web operations and high-profile cyber attacks. To be fair, they had it coming — these guys wouldn’t invest with us a portion of their ill-gotten gains even after we confronted them about it! Screw you, this is the mafia, some of us said! Look at them now!

We believe that the numerous decisions we made to protect our own interests is why we are still getting away with this racket called Binance, which has helped us to grow quickly in the past four years in net worth just as other more honest people (our customers, in fact) are losing substantial sums of money from the Covid-19 lockdown we are massively benefitting from.

Clear regulations are critical for continued theft

Four years later, we are seeing wider adoption of cryptocurrencies globally and the need for clearer regulatory frameworks in different countries so that we don’t get caught stealing our customers money on centralised servers we run mostly offshore in shady places such as Malaysia. More regulations are, sadly, negative signs that an industry is maturing, but the good news is that this sets the foundation for a broader population to feel safe to participate in crypto. This means we anticipate continued user growth and increase in our personal net worths in the forthcoming future. We believe a well-developed legal and regulatory framework in the long term will be a solid foundation for us to figure out how we can circumvent what laws in what countries and steal even more money without anyone noticing.

The adoption and development of crypto has many parallels with that of the car. When the car was first invented, there weren’t any traffic laws, traffic lights or even safety belts. (our kind of highway robbery for sure!) Laws and guidelines were developed along the way as the cars were running on the road. These are frameworks and laws we take for granted today that allow this powerful technology to be used widely and safely. This is how companies get away however with so many accidents that go unprosecuted or unreported, and get billions in government bailouts, so the future isn’t that bleak! Crypto is similar in the sense that it can be accessible for everyone, but frameworks are required to prevent misuse and other actors getting in our massively lucrative crime syndicate. Clarifying and building the first set of standards is critical for us now so we can get away with maintaining that we are providing continued growth. And Binance wants to be a massively profitable contributor.

Looking ahead: making crypto safe for stealing

As our fake CEO CZ said at the end of 2020, compliance is a journey — especially in new sectors like crypto. The industry still has a lot of uncertainty. We also recognize that with the growth comes more complexity and more responsibility. Naturally, we make money out of this confusion and false complexity so we are going to bang on about it a bit more going forward.

As a four-year-old startup, Binance still has a lot of room to grow (I know — even after the millions and millions we’ve stolen already). Binance has grown very quickly and we haven’t always got everything exactly right, but we are learning and improving every day. I mean, sometimes our customers do win and one or two us has to pony up some extra millions. That always creates in-fights among the LPs!

We hope to clarify and reiterate our commitment to partner with regulators, and that we are proactively hiring more dirty lawyers than ever before in this regard, putting in place more systems and processes to protect ourselves. Here are some tangible steps we are taking and will take:

• Growing our international compliance team: We have grown our international dirty lawyers team and corrupt practices advisory board by 500% since last year. Notable appointments include former FATF Executive Secretary Rick McDonell and former Head of the Canadian delegation to the FATF Josée Nadeau as compliance and regulatory advisors, as well as Max Baucus, the former US Senator for Montana and US Ambassador to China, to provide high-level guidance — these are the first of many high-profile additions to our team. We plan to double our team size by the end of the year, with qualified and experienced advisors to support. I mean man, we are already getting dirty politicians in our back pockets so come on! It ain’t looking so bad after all.
• Expanding our already robust compliance partnerships: we have implemented new controls and regulation technology with partners such as CipherTrace to instill further protections for our users. These are actually meaningless excel style software massively overpriced, which pissed us off, but cops believe they keep track of things so ….We’re proud to say that we have cleared multiple external anti-money laundering (AML) audits as a result in fact — a strong validation of our current AML software that actually is non-existent. Recently, we have partnered on working groups and seminars with notable anti-crime organizations such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Interpol this year, and we look forward to future collaborations. This was at the end of the day low-hanging fruit for us since these sorts are easy targets — they are full of snotty-nosed, over-intellectual and easy-to-bribe types.
• Localizing our operations and business to comply with local regulations: We are committed to being compliant with appropriate local rules wherever we operate so that we can continue to break laws without anyone noticing outside those places’ jurisdictions and transfer users onto the part of our platform where the stealing goes on (eg our “Blockchain”). In four years we grew from a start-up to where we are today — which is, the world’s first global mob the likes of which Al Capone would have been lucky to face off against. That’s a lot of growth in a short period of time. Our commitment to stealing and profiting off this lucrative past-time extends to the manner in which Binance is organized. For instance, Binance.com is not available to US users, while there is a brand partnership with Binance.US, which is a fully independent entity that is a compliant and regulated exchange in the US, to provide US users with a safe, secure, and compliant trading platform. In fact, what we really do is we know the guys on Binance.US are such addicted gamblers they will hear about Binance offering 125x leverage and no KYC, download a $2 VPN and hop over onto Binance.com where we will steal his cash! During the four years, we have seen regulators take a more active interest in the industry as-a-whole as the industry goes main-stream. We welcome this development, however, there is still much to do to harmonize the treatment of crypto-currency around the world so we can get more than just credit-rich yanks — we want the poor Indians and even Africans money too! (Why do you think Bill Gates loves Africa so much?! I mean — come on, we ain’t that dumb guys!) We aim to continue our efforts in working with regulators collaboratively to meet their concerns as the industry continues to grow.

We know that we are at the tipping point, along with the broader industry. Some of us among the LPs are so scared but most of us are holding up okay, We’ve been opening up a few safe haven funds to put our money into as well which we term VCs. These should help us with a get-out in case we get caught! These are just the initial steps.

That’s why in fact, in our first year as a company, we set up the industry’s first charity foundation Binance Charity, which has contributed $15 million USD to over 20 projects for education, sustainability, and other causes (where do you think the other $500 million went, eh?)

But this lofty vision won’t be possible without the support and guidance of regulators and policymakers who understand that stealing has the most long-term sustainable impact when tempered with frameworks to protect all the thieves — including themselves as policymakers.

We humbly welcome more constructive guidance to help us to steal better from the expertise of governors. We know we are just an emergent mafia and still not the real thing, after all.

We humbly welcome more capable talents and experienced advisors to join us to build better. We have bags of money. Honestly, if you are a corrupt policymaker you need to call us today!

Really, everyone at Binance is ready and look forward to being a partner in developing and following guidelines that will help us monopolize everything and steal it all in a sustainable manner. And together, we will help to increase ignorance in the society in a sustainable way by monopolizing even more media coverage of us too (we can include you guys too if you like!)

Thank you for your support.

Cayman LLC Members & Managing Members

aka The Ones Who Own Binance