Cryptocurrency founders show true love for their start-ups with tattoos of company logos
- Binance founder Zhao Changpeng’s first tattoo is the logo of the cryptocurrency exchange
How can entrepreneurs show true love for their own start-up when the relationship gets tough? With a tattoo of the company logo, of course – and some of the biggest names in the cryptocurrency world are doing just that.
Zhao Changpeng, founder of Binance, one of the world’s biggest digital-asset exchanges, has had the company logo tattooed on his right forearm, the Chinese Canadian entrepreneur revealed in a Medium post published last week.
Zhao, who goes by CZ, said he got the tattoo – his first – in Singapore with Luke Wagman, a former Goldman Sachs analyst and co-founder of data tracking site CoinMarketCap, and Gareth Lai, a South African blockchain investor currently based in Hong Kong.
Wagman, who already has a bitcoin logo tattoo on his arm, told Zhao over dinner that he planned to have tattoos of the CoinMarketCap and Binance logos done as well, according to Zhao, who added that he was inspired to follow suit even though he never considered himself a “tattoo guy”.
“Here is a cool dude, who has contributed so much to the crypto space, and a strong supporter of Binance, and he is going to get a Binance tat, and I’m just going to sit here and watch? No, I can’t do that,” Zhao wrote.
Lai ended up getting the same Binance tattoo on his arm after learning that the design of a perfectly symmetrical square represented blockchains and crypto trades, according to Zhao. “Luke and I explained separately that he should only get the tattoo of his own will, and that there’s no need to be peer-pressured. But Gareth was committed,” Zhao wrote.
The commitments to tattoo are happening against the backdrop of a prolonged bear market in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has lost more than 70 per cent of its value since it hit an all-time high of US$19,000 last December, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Nearly US$500 billion has been erased from the total market cap of cryptocurrencies so far this year.
Zhao, 41, founded Binance in Hong Kong in July 2017, just before China’s ban on cryptocurrency trading. As Chinese exchange operators scrambled to keep up with new regulations on the Chinese mainland, Binance played catch up by moving its servers and employees overseas and targeting non-Chinese clients. The exchange claims to have made a first half year profit of US$350 million, mostly from transaction fees.
Zhao and Wagman are not the first big names in cryptocurrency to have their own logos tattooed on their bodies. Brendan Blumer, Hong Kong-based CEO of Block.one, publisher of the EOSIO platform, has a tattoo of the blockchain’s logo on his left wrist.
Zhao wrote in jest on his post that blockchain projects which hope their digital tokens get listed on Binance should answer this question: “As a founder, have you tattooed your logo on your body yet?”
