FTX has a native cryptocurrency token called FTT, which traders use for operations like paying transaction fees. Last year, Mr. Zhao sold his stake in FTX back to Mr. Bankman-Fried, who paid for it partially with FTT tokens.

On Nov. 2, the crypto publication CoinDesk reported on a leaked document that appeared to show that Alameda Research, a hedge fund run by Mr. Bankman-Fried, held an unusually large amount of FTT tokens. FTX and Alameda are meant to be separate businesses, but the report claimed that they had close financial ties.

Binance announced on Nov. 6 that it would sell its FTT tokens “due to recent revelations.” In response, FTT’s price plummeted and traders rushed to pull out of FTX, fearful that it would be yet another fallen crypto company.

FTX scrambled to process requests for withdrawals, which amounted to an estimated $6 billion over three days. It seemed to enter a liquidity crunch, meaning it lacked the money to fulfill requests.

On Tuesday, Binance said it had reached an agreement to bail out FTX by buying the company. But, Mr. Zhao added in the announcement, “Binance has the discretion to pull out from the deal at any time.”

In a concurrent announcement, Mr. Bankman-Fried said the deal would protect customers and allow FTX to finish processing their withdrawals. He attempted to dispel rumors of conflict between FTX and Binance, adding, “we are in the best of hands.”

On Wednesday, Binance announced it would no longer buy FTX, saying it had arrived at that decision “as a result of corporate due diligence.” It also cited regulatory investigations and reports of mishandled funds.

“Every time a major player in an industry fails, retail consumers will suffer,” Binance said in a statement. “We have seen over the last several years that the crypto ecosystem is becoming more resilient and we believe in time that outliers that misuse user funds will be weeded out by the free market.”

On Thursday, FTX announced it had reached an agreement with Tron, a blockchain platform, to swap certain tokens from FTX to other crypto wallets.

The cryptocurrency industry has long struggled to convince regulators, investors and ordinary customers that it is trustworthy. The fall of FTX, which seemed more stable than other companies, and the pullout by Binance have jolted the market.

FTT’s price has fallen about 80 percent since Tuesday. The prices of Bitcoin and Ether, some of the most valuable tokens, have both fluctuated widely since Tuesday, at one point dropping more than 20 percent.

Was it a lack of U.S. regulation? Sort of, but not really: FTX was based in the Bahamas. Should the U.S. have moved faster to create an attractive regulatory environment so companies like FTX would have moved here and had to abide by Washington’s rules? Maybe. But if the FTX case turns out to be fraud, regulation unto itself may not have been enough to stop it. Madoff didn’t live on an island beyond U.S. jurisdiction — he was based on Lexington Avenue.

If we ultimately learn that FTX’s undoing is the first of many in an industry that has been built on a pile of offshore fairy-dust leverage, the regulatory lesson will actually be the opposite: The S.E.C., C.F.T.C. and Treasury will have proved prescient for all their warnings to the public that crypto was too risky. Privately, the crypto skeptics in Washington’s regulatory complex are already pointing to FTX’s collapse more as a badge of honor than an example of a failure to stop it.

Which brings us to the investment community, a group that has long argued that the free market is the best form of regulation and venerated the charismatic founder — remember Elizabeth Holmes? — above all else. FTX proves just how high a cost that strategy may exact. The venture capitalists behind FTX failed, and the libertarian views of Silicon Valley it was based upon might need to re-evaluated. It is hard enough in this environment to raise new funds; it is likely to only become harder for crypto-focused V.C.s, several executives told me.

from

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/business/dealbook/ftx-bankruptcy-regulators-investors-cz-sbf.html?searchResultPosition=2

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/technology/ftx-binance-crypto-explained.html?searchResultPosition=7

One of the many strengths that our employees at Binance must possess is thick skin. After all, this industry is the subject of a lot of negative sentiment (much of it is unwarranted, but it’s the reality right now). In recent months, our thick skin has been tested by a noticeable increase in attacks on our company’s reputation. These come from both the media and behind closed doors in meetings with policymakers.

Just last week, a former Washington Post journalist sent a tweet to one of our executives during a run-of-the-mill disagreement over “media bias” on Twitter. Out of the blue they asked, “While I have you here, who's Guangying Chen?” 

While that journalist possibly didn’t understand it, that question is emblematic of the disdain that our employees face on a daily basis in both the East and West. This question originates from an old campaign that a competitor launched via an anonymous microsite. The goal? To erode trust in our brand as we were expanding and competing to attract new partners and investors. 

If you look at companies like ours and FTX, Crypto.com, etc., you’ll find our organizations have very similar employee profiles. However, over the past two years, as we expanded into Europe and the Middle East and recruited a more senior leadership team, Binance’s executive team is now more heavily dominated by Europeans and Americans. Our broader employee base is even more globally distributed. Despite these facts, some people insist on calling us a “Chinese company,” and in doing so, they don’t mean well.

These types of negative campaigns are far more common than people realize. We’ve even seen crypto exchanges and projects create their own “news” sites to bash competitors, and these sites are now frequently miscategorized as independent news sources by Google News. I would laugh too, if it wasn’t so serious and disheartening how often I had to explain the differences between an organization like CoinGeek versus CoinDesk to people in positions of real power. 

And these types of attacks are only becoming more sophisticated. Just recently, CryptoLeaks published a report alleging how one firm is using litigation to sow doubt about rival blockchain projects. And while it is tempting to launch counter-attacks on the industry’s bad actors who engage in these activities, we will not debase ourselves nor abandon our values.
These types of campaigns erode trust in the entire industry. We are builders. We can compete in this space and still cheer on each other’s successes. 

Our Responsibility

We are the largest crypto exchange and Web3 company on the planet. With that comes a great responsibility and an expectation of facing additional scrutiny. However, it’s important to remember that our industry is still in its infancy.

When your company suddenly goes from start-up to Fortune 100 overnight, nobody shows up at your office the next day with 1,000 experienced executives, streamlined processes, and technologies to suddenly operate like a two-hundred-year-old, established financial institution. 

Like every other crypto exchange, growing and upscaling our staff and maturing our systems to match the growth of the industry has been the greatest challenge of my career. This is something that I have embraced and invested heavily in thus far.

Crypto Industry Blossoms in Asia

Before returning to my main point, let me provide a quick, oversimplified history of the crypto industry that surprisingly few people understand. Sometime around 2015 or 2016, the industry saw the first massive wave of crypto fever among Korean and Japanese millennials. 

This was at a time when both societies were panicking over young males’ increasing engagement in a culture that mostly existed online. This manifested into the notion that young men and women would simply waste their lives away online and a whole generation would be lost.

So you can only imagine how the rise of crypto fed into these issues. What resulted was a series of crypto crackdowns in both Korea and Japan. During this time, China quickly realized that embracing this nascent industry had the potential to reap sizable benefits for its economy.

While the Chinese government maintained a stern public position on crypto, it quietly, behind the scenes, helped bolster the fledgling industry and supported its growth within its borders. The best Web3-curious engineers and investors flocked to Shanghai and Hong Kong. 

Complex History With China

On August 6th 1989, my mother and I left China and emigrated thousands of miles away to Canada. For those who know Chinese history, this is 2 months after the events of June 4th 1989. 

I was 12 years old. 

My parents were teachers/professors. We lived on campus at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei at the time, one of the top four universities in China. While I didn’t understand much of what was going on, I did hear snippets of conversations from older college kids and from what I pieced together, I was lucky to have been able to leave at that time. 

It normally took four years to get a passport, and it would have taken another 2-3 years to get a Canadian visa if we were lucky. But due to the incident, the Canadian embassy opened up and gave us visas quickly. I remember the line outside the Canadian embassy was three days long. We had to take shifts at night to keep our position in the queue. 

It changed my life forever and opened up endless possibilities for me. 

I spent my best years as a teenager in Vancouver and then went to McGill in Montreal for college. After that, I worked in Tokyo and New York (Bloomberg) for a few years. 

In 2005, the web tech industry started to explode in China, so I went to Shanghai to launch an IT start-up together with five other expats; two Americans, two Brits, one Japanese, and me, a Canadian. The company was designated as a “Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise” (WOFE), as none of us were Chinese nationals. 

This point was a considerable business hurdle to overcome. When I was financially stable enough to purchase a condo in Shanghai, I had to pay 25% more tax because I was a foreigner. Yes, the same apartment I sold to buy bitcoin in 2014. 

Without the fee, I could have 25% more bitcoin today. 

Between 2005 and 2015, I tried to set up several different start-up projects before eventually dipping my toes into the crypto space. I was a serial entrepreneur looking to build a successful start-up before I understood my passion. 

This is by far the most fundamental challenge for any young entrepreneur.

Two years before Binance, I started a company called Bijie Tech, providing exchange-as-a-service platforms to other exchanges. We got 30 clients on board, and business was good. They were mostly exchanges of art and items like stamps, baseball cards, etc. 

Unfortunately, in March 2017, the Chinese government shut down all such exchanges. All of our clients went out of business. Later on, the idea of Binance would start to take shape. It was a simple notion that a more streamlined crypto exchange could provide a more frictionless user experience without sacrificing useful features. 

Leaving China

I took quite a few people from the Bijie team to Binance and together, we launched Binance on July 14th 2017.

However, a mere month and a half later, before Binance could even be properly established, we faced our first significant disruption. 

On September 4th 2017, the Chinese government issued a memo stating that crypto exchanges were not allowed to operate in China. 

They then blocked our platform behind the Great Firewall. At this point, most of our employees left China. Only a small number of customer service agents remained by late 2018.

The irony that I was once again forced to leave China – approximately thirty years after my parents fled with my sister and I – was not lost on me.

Our leadership team jointly decided that we would work remotely. Soon, COVID-19 spread across the globe, and the whole world moved to remote working. This allowed us to continue growing as a company and entice top talent, although we were still looking for a place to plant our roots.

Coinbase even famously listed on NASDAQ without an HQ named in its S-1 registration statement.

Our remote working model has since become normalized across the globe and we are active in pursuing top talent, no matter where they may hail from. As I mentioned, when we started Binance just five years ago, we were a ragtag group of crypto enthusiasts and engineers. We also had to deal with the challenge of launching a business at the height of the bear market set off by the clampdown in Korea and Japan. 

On the plus side, it was a relatively good time to get into crypto because prices were low. This is why many major exchanges, such as FTX and Crypto.com, were set up in Hong Kong during this time.

“While I Have You Here. Who Is Guangying Chen?”

So with that background, who IS Guangying Chen? 

I first met Guangying (Heina) Chen when she was working at my friend’s wine store in 2010. She later worked as a service manager at a large commercial bank where she also managed the back office (HR/finance/admin). 

In 2015, when I started Bijie Tech, I asked Guangying to work for me. We asked her to manage the back office as the early team was mainly engineers. Because of restrictive laws in China surrounding foreigners (like me, a Canadian citizen), it’s much easier to have a Chinese national as the listed legal representative. 

Given that Guangying was both a Chinese national and was managing the back office for us, she agreed. This is a very common practice in China. 

Because her name is listed on the early Bijie Tech documents, Binance’s detractors have leaped at the opportunity to spread a conspiracy theory that Guangying was secretly the owner of Bijie Tech and possibly even Binance. 

As a result, both she and her family have been targeted and harassed by the media and online trolls. Had I known how much of a negative impact this would have on her life, I never would have asked her to do what seemed like such an innocuous step at the time. 

Like many early Binance employees, Guangying had to leave her family, her home, and her friends behind when most of us left China in 2017. It was a tremendous sacrifice and she is one of the very few people who will ever truly understand the impact that this has had on all of us. She still carries this burden today as spurious Chinese media outlets continue to spread conspiracy theories about her. 

Today, Heina Chen is a passport holder in a European country where she lives in relative peace with her family. I say “relative peace” because ever so often, tabloids dig up these old conspiracy theories, triggering another round of harassment for her and her loved ones. As we have grown these past five years, many of the original employees and founders have taken on new roles in the organization. Guangying currently oversees the admin and clearing team for the organization. 

So in conclusion, she does not own Binance and she is not some secret Chinese government agent. 

So Is Binance a Chinese Company?

No. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of corporate law or how companies work will understand this: Binance was never incorporated in China. Nor do we operate like a Chinese company culturally. We have subsidiaries in many countries, including France, Spain, Italy, UAE, and Bahrain (to name a few). But we don’t have any legal entities in China, and we do not have plans to. I believe it’s critical today that we come forward with these facts. 

The greatest challenge that Binance faces today is that we (and every other offshore exchange) have been designated a criminal entity in China. At the same time, our opposition in the West bends over backward to paint us as a “Chinese company.” 

The inference is that because we have ethnically Chinese employees, and perhaps because I am ethnically Chinese, we are secretly in the pocket of the Chinese government. We are an easy target for special interests, media, and even policymakers that hate our industry. 

This is obviously not true. 

My favorite are the news stories that go out of their way to note that I am a “Chinese Canadian CEO” or, even better, “born in China, educated in Canada.” I am a Canadian citizen, period. 

Simply being of Chinese descent or having emigrated from China should not be a scarlet letter one has to wear for the rest of their life. Nor should it give people free rein to cast aspersions, lay false claims, or question one’s loyalty to their country.

1. Twitter：

   https://twitter.com/_gnoland?lang=en

2. Discord：

   https://discord.gg/hbXJGVUw

3. 官网：

   https://gno.land/

二、项目介绍

Gno.land是基于 Gnolang 语言开发的可互操作的并发智能合约平台，是兼容 IBC 的L1层。

开发者可以在 Gnoland 上建立自己的应用链或其他项目。

创始人 Jae Kwon（Cosmos 创始人）认为 Cosmos Hub 功能应该单一而简单，而且 Atom 治理代币和 gas 代币为一体的单代币模型不利于网络安全，价格上涨也会导致 gas 成本过高。所以 Gnoland 正是设计用来解决上述问题，一方面是因为 Gnolang 语言承继自 Golang，go 语言内集成的 Goroutines 对于多线程优化和执行效率都好过 Solidity 和 Rust，另一方面 Gnoland 采用双代币模式：$GNOT为gas代币，$GNOSH 为治理代币。

有兴趣可以直接看一下对 Jae kwon 的采访中关于 Gnoland 的部分：

https://medium.com/onbloc/highlights-from-jaes-interview-on-cryptocito-6f35c495a73d

三、代币经济学

The proposed distribution is the following:

• 750 million $GNOT distributed through airdrops for $ATOM holders and stakers on 05/20/2022 (see snapshot here). A larger ratio will be given to those who voted NO and NO WITH VETO on Cosmos Hub Proposal #69 and YES (see Peace Declaration) in different proportions.

• 100 million $GNOT will be attributed between New Tendermint Inc. and Jae Kwon; the repartition is expected to be communicated publicly.

• 100 million $GNOT will be given to the Core Mission DAO, which will manage the community efforts and ecosystem around the project. This DAO is yet to be defined.

• 50 million $GNOT will be distributed to early GitHub and ecosystem contributors. In this amount, 10k were attributed to test1 testnet, 100k to test2, 2M between faucet0 and faucet1.

https://gnoland.space/docs/tokenomics

四、如何参与项目前期建设

（1）有能力的开发者可以参与到项目核心代码的开发中，可能获得 $GNOSH 分配

https://github.com/gnolang/gno

（2）为 Gnoland 项目做推广，加入 Twitter, Telegram 和 Discord ，积极参与 Gnoland 社区治理，可能获得 GNOSH治理代币

（3）参与到 test2 的测试中，测试网地址：https://test2.gno.land，下面为测试指引

https://medium.com/onbloc/a-beginners-guide-to-the-gnoland-testnet-6fdc693a48f4

Gnoland test2 任务中文教程

https://mirror.xyz/0x10F374bC9E1265322dC0E3760B22b1f2a9a51F0a/w0RaHYF0rw2G2SIG2rho04BE_TCLo0hJRzwr045wgRI

（4）积极关注并参与相关生态项目的进程，参加相关测试

目前生态项目不多，以下是钱包项目：

https://twitter.com/adenaapp

Gnoland is still early. It's not too late to contribute to Gnoland.