Mr. Zhao founded Binance after a brief career in finance, including a stint at Bloomberg building trading software. He created the exchange when he lived in Shanghai.
But soon after, the Chinese government banned cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance from operating in the country, and many of the company’s employees fled. Mr. Zhao has an active presence on Twitter but is not always easy to track down as he has traveled between Japan, Singapore, Lithuania, Malta and Dubai.
Binance’s lack of a permanent headquarters fits the trend of remote working, said Jessica Jung, a spokeswoman for the company. In an emailed statement, Ms. Jung said the exchange had established a local presence in nearly a dozen jurisdictions, including Kazakhstan and France.
Ms. Jung said Binance had also announced that it was undergoing a corporate restructuring, “the purpose of which is to provide regulators with greater clarity about our organization.” But promises made a year ago to name a headquarters and assemble a board of directors to diversify oversight of the company remain unfulfilled.
Binance is a behemoth compared to its peers. Before the collapse of FTX, the trading volume of cryptocurrencies on Binance alone exceeded the combined totals of its seven closest competitors, according to an industry data tracker.
In a group chat with Mr. Bankman-Fried on Nov. 10, the day before FTX filed for bankruptcy, Mr. Zhao portrayed himself as crypto’s elder statesman. He accused the FTX founder of transactions that would undermine the broader crypto market, according to screenshots obtained by The Times. “Stop now, don’t do more damage,” he said. “The more damage you do now, the more jail time.”
The group chat included several other prominent crypto executives, and Mr. Zhao seemed eager to come up with a common strategy. “I think we need to coordinate a little bit to see how best we can work together to stabilize and restore confidence for the market,” he said.
