The future of banks according to Binance’s CZ

At the close of the second day of Paris Blockchain Week organized by Binance in the French capital, an interesting Q&A was held with CEO CZ Zhao, who made himself available for about 30 minutes to answer questions that could be asked via Twitter or through a site by scanning a QR code.

One of the first questions to come to the exchange CEO was on the topic of retail banks with a very candid answer from CZ:

“Banks that want to survive will have to do so,” referring to the support for cryptocurrencies, in terms of usability and not putting limits on cashing out.

Binance and the $1 billion insurance

Given what is happening in the crypto world on a daily basis, where hacker attacks and bugs are commonplace, CZ Zhao explains that Binance has insurance to that effect, worth well over $1 billion.

Specifically, it is a fund called the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) that is composed of 7,952 Bitcoin (BTC), 1,036,269 Binance Coin (BNB), $300 million in BUSD, which is the dollar-pegged stablecoin created by the exchange itself.

This is not third-party insurance, as these practically do not exist for crypto services, or if there are, they have very high fees and do not cover such large sums, but funds that are found on various public addresses. 

Almost all the insurances used by crypto exchanges are in fact private insurances and not third-party insurances, which makes them less secure but Binance is trying to do its best by protecting users with this fund for any problems with the platform.

The metaverse according to CZ

Then the question about the metaverse: “what do you think about the metaverse in different sectors such as healthcare?”

According to CZ we are still in the early days for the metaverse industry and technology. Some ideas for applications are good, but we are still early stage especially if we talk about healthcare, to remove for example consultations or do remote surgery. So it could be interesting for the metaverse to have real-world applications, but it is not possible yet. 

So we have to wait for the technology to mature, according to CZ, but it is still early days. “That’s why I’m very bullish about this technology,” the exchange’s CEO explains.

NFTs and possibilities for the future

As for NFTs, according to the CEO of Binance we are still in the early days, but there are already many real-world applications, such as tickets for soccer matches, as in the case of Lazio, whose sponsor is Binance itself, which created Non-Fungible Tokens to access the Italian team’s matches. 

However, so many applications are not yet well developed. For example, CZ explains that sports clubs have a lot of problems for merchandising because of a high level of counterfeiting, so it might be interesting to link it to NFTs. 

Or even for concerts, on which singers often do not really get the full amount of tickets, because many retailers scalp tickets, but if these were NFTs the musicians could receive royalties. 

“There are no plans related to this yet but it can be done, I look at this technology like the Internet in 1994 where we had email, but we could already think about video conferencing.

Regulation: how can we change the opinion of skeptical people? Education, Binance master classes, academy, free content, events like these….

The government of Portugal links us on their website without permission, even though it can still be done, it’s free… the regulator often has never used crypto and that’s why their cooperation should be asked because they have to understand our problems. That’s why we try to cooperate with them and educate.”