Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder and CEO of Binance, has confirmed that Binance US will close a pre-IPO funding round somewhere in the next two months.
An earlier try for raising funds was blocked by the concerns investors had regarding its independence from Binance US’s parent company. CZ said that the funding round itself would “close in about a month or two,” and that it would raise “a couple hundred million,” although an exact number hasn’t been confirmed yet.
CZ has also said that Binance, the company he created in 2017, also set up an entity for its global headquarters and is already in talks with several regulators around the globe. The CEO said that the UAE, France, and Singapore are crypto-friendly jurisdictions, but didn’t reveal where the actual headquarters is situated.
An IPO for the Binance global entity wasn’t ruled out by CZ, but he mentioned that that is a much larger firm and he would have to check where it could become a publicly traded one.
“To be honest, in five, 10 years, we might see crypto exchanges merge with stock exchanges,” he declared.
He further made it clear that the only thing that connects Binance and Binance US is the fact that he is on the board of Binance US. He highlighted the fact that he doesn’t get involved in the US exchange’s daily operations and doesn’t have the American unit’s Slack downloaded on his phone – Slack is an app the company relies on for internal communications.
Source: Coindesk.com