Wei Zhou, CFO of Binance: "We want the institutions to come in" [INTERVIEW]

A year after becoming top brass at the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, Binance CFO Wei Zhou says his firm wants to "Grow the pie bigger" and opening up an exchange in the U.S. just might be the best way to do it.

Zhou's core responsibility at Binance has been to bolster the firm's offerings in the fiat-to-crypto market, and it would certainly look like he's been fulfilling his duties.

Zhou lauded BUSD, the exchange's newly launched, regulated USD stablecoin, as a step towards improving the accessibility of crypto in the U.S. Ultimately, he said it would be Binance and "The brand itself" that would "Help to grow the market" there with its soon-to-launch fiat-to-crypto exchange, Binance.

US. "[BUSD is] a big step in terms of enabling fiat-USD as an on-and-off-ramp within the Binance ecosystem, and at the same time it's really important to expand-physically-the exchange business itself into the United States.

Binance's announcement of a U.S. chapter may have been received as nothing more than an attempt by the firm to head off Coinbase and consolidate power in the world's biggest economy, but Zhou feels more philosophical about what the exchange is trying to do.

In such an era of mistrust, Binance would exist to "Encourage people in general to take back control of their own money." Naturally, Binance wants to be an integral part of this process.

"We want to enable more crypto ownership, and we want Binance to be entry point into crypto. Secondly, we want them to trade, or exchange, their crypto with any one of Binance's services. And the third one is actually a key element of it, we want to see higher ownership of BNB, and we want to see more use cases for BNB around the world."

Binance is at its core a "Retail-driven organization," in Zhou's words, but if the name of the game is to "Grow the pie" that is the cryptocurrency market, then the exchange needs to set its sights on the institutions, who he says "For historical purposes, control all the wealth in the world."

"If you ask me if we want to attract more trading on Binance, then 'yes' and if that trading is done by 'institutions,' then we're going to be targeting these customers, these users, because they do have all pretty much all the liquidity and wealth in the world."

Zhou said his firm had struggled with "Institutional malaise" on at least one occasion, when after a "Six-month dance" with one of the big banks on Jersey Island, Binance was rejected by the unnamed firm's risk committee-this, despite the exchange having "Proper KYC, proper AML, everything that there is." The end result was that Binance wound up being unable to secure a local bank account for its fiat-to-crypto exchange there.