On January 21, 2026, Zhao Changpeng (CZ), as the founder of Binance, appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos alongside co-CEO Richard Teng. In public speeches and panel discussions, he introduced three main lines of cryptocurrency development: asset tokenization, payment integration, and AI settlement, once again bringing the already crowded global regulatory agenda into the spotlight. On one side, countries like the UAE, Bahrain, and Kazakhstan are accelerating legislation, while traditional financial centers like the United States are slowly negotiating market structure bills. The contradiction between fragmented regulation and the industry's desire for unified standards was summarized by him as a struggle for a "regulatory passport." Supporting this discourse is Binance's record of processing $7 billion in withdrawals in a single day during the market crash in December 2023; in response, on January 22, the on-chain address 0xb5a6 established a long position of 73.7 BTC, with a nominal scale of approximately $6.62 million, serving as a small yet sharp annotation of market-side expectations for Davos.
The Struggle for Regulatory Passports: A Global Contest of Fragmented Rules
● The proposal for a regulatory passport stems from CZ's vision of a unified compliance framework across countries: if a compliant institution passes a thorough review in a rigorous jurisdiction, it could receive "passport" treatment in other countries, reducing redundant approvals and regulatory arbitrage opportunities. In the current reality of highly fragmented regulation, this idea appears quite radical, as it effectively layers an "industry standard" on top of existing sovereign regulatory systems, touching sensitive nerves regarding financial sovereignty and capital flow control in various countries.
● The UAE, Bahrain, and Kazakhstan are establishing clearer licensing and regulatory frameworks for crypto businesses through local legislation, while the U.S. is experiencing significant delays in advancing market structure bills, reflecting a clear divergence in paths under a multipolar regulatory landscape. The former attempts to attract asset tokenization, trading matching, and custody businesses by establishing rules ahead of time, while the latter repeatedly weighs investor protection, market integrity, and innovation space, making the "passport" appear both enticing and difficult to implement across different regulatory cultures.
● For Binance, seeking compliance across multiple jurisdictions has become a survival issue: from license applications to business line splits and local compliance team building, costs continue to rise. CZ's call for "seeking standardization" is both a hedge against regulatory uncertainty and an implicit demand to turn compliance thresholds into industry moats; in this process, making concessions on baseline issues like anti-money laundering and customer protection while seeking compromises on data localization and tax information sharing has become a negotiable but difficult-to-control space.
● The potential risk in this struggle for regulatory passports lies in the fact that policy cycles often outlast technological iterations and market sentiment fluctuations. The rules in places like the UAE are still being revised, and relevant U.S. bills are still in the advancement stage; any specific terms must be based on public texts and formal announcements. Overly extrapolating on unformed regulatory arrangements not only risks misleading market expectations but may also create decision traps of information asymmetry between enterprises and investors.
The Exit of Bank Branches? The Path of Tokenization Replacing Old Infrastructure
● CZ predicted in Davos that "the scale of offline bank branches will significantly shrink in the next decade," linking this trend to the enhancement of blockchain KYC and on-chain settlement capabilities, effectively outlining a path for the migration of financial infrastructure: identity verification moving on-chain and digital, transaction instructions executed via smart contracts, and the functions of traditional bank branches such as account opening, transfers, and compliance checks gradually dismantled and outsourced to technology and protocol layers, thereby weakening the necessity of physical branches.
● On this path, asset tokenization becomes the core pivot in CZ's narrative: whether it is securities, bonds, or potential physical assets on-chain, all point to rewriting clearing and custody logic with programmable tokens. When assets circulate on-chain in token form, the traditional clearing institutions' T+1 or even longer settlement cycles are compressed, custody shifts from centralized ledger management to multi-party verification, and even exchanges themselves may partially retreat to the role of liquidity aggregators at the protocol layer, thus redesigning the "back end" of the entire financial market.
● Emerging financial centers like the UAE are actively promoting asset tokenization legislation, which, to some extent, is a "preemptive bet" on the next generation of market infrastructure. Compared to traditional financial powerhouses, these regions have weaker path dependencies on existing financial systems and can provide clear rules for tokenization platforms, compliant custody, and secondary circulation markets, attracting new asset forms and related services to gather locally, with lower opportunity costs for betting on a structural migration in the global financial landscape.
● Regarding the external focus on "discussions with several governments about asset tokenization cooperation," it can currently be confirmed that there are contacts and discussions with multiple governments, but the specific list of countries involved has not been publicly disclosed, and there is a lack of cross-verified official materials. Under this premise, it is reasonable to interpret publicly available information as a broad exploration of cooperation possibilities, but any extended interpretations about "finalized" or "confirmed lists" should be regarded as unverified rumors rather than established facts.
Payment Integration and AI Settlement: Exploring the Boundaries of New Technologies
● In the narrative at Davos, CZ attempted to weave payment integration and AI settlement into a complete scenario: on-chain payments provide a globally programmable value transfer channel, while AI systems automatically trigger payroll, supply chain receivables and payables settlements, and algorithmic asset allocation within this channel, ultimately leading to a financial world of "machine-to-machine" real-time clearing. Humans in this context are more like rule setters and monitors rather than direct initiators of every transaction.
● However, when AI combines with crypto, KYC, anti-money laundering, and data compliance immediately become thorny issues: traditional compliance models are based on identifiable natural persons or legal entities, while when algorithms automatically execute payments, questions arise about who the responsible party is, how to apply different financial and data laws across jurisdictions, and how regulators can track high-frequency small transactions triggered by complex models, all of which have yet to reach consensus. Once technology outpaces the rules, debates over "whether algorithms constitute regulated entities" are bound to intensify.
● Regarding the view that "AI prefers blockchain settlement," there is currently a lack of large-scale, reproducible empirical data to support it, especially concerning key indicators like the proportion of AI agents favoring crypto assets and the degree of replacement of traditional clearing systems; public research remains quite scarce. Therefore, when discussing the combination of AI and on-chain settlement, a more prudent expression is to view it as a potential direction rather than an established trend, avoiding deriving asset prices or business models from unverified technological paths.
● From an ethical perspective, when AI conducts fund transfers and asset allocations without human intervention, the risks of bias amplification and black-box decision-making can be exponentially increased. Discriminatory training data, the model's erroneous preference for high-risk assets, or systematic misjudgments of certain user types can all become irreversibly solidified on-chain in the form of transactions; once funds are transferred, pledged, or settled, the real users' losses are often difficult to recover, necessitating the establishment of stricter safety thresholds in algorithm transparency, interpretability, and revocability in advance.
Meme Frenzy and Liquidation Bloodbath: The Cost of High-Risk Innovation
● CZ categorized meme tokens as "high-risk innovation areas" at Davos, a relatively restrained statement that sharply contrasts with the case of RALPH meme coin, which plummeted 67% in a single day, evaporating a market value of approximately $12.31 million. On the surface, this is the result of cooling community sentiment, but fundamentally it is an inevitable outcome of assets with extremely concentrated liquidity, lacking fundamental support, and narratives entirely dependent on topic popularity, when faced with selling pressure and shorting forces resonating together; the surge and collapse are merely a matter of timing.
● From chasing surges to stampeding to escape, meme tokens embody a collective psychological magnifying glass resulting from the combination of regulatory uncertainty, concentrated liquidity, and speculative impulses. During the upward phase, social media and KOLs amplify the "wealth creation myth," attracting a large influx of short-term funds; when incremental funds stagnate and early holders begin to take profits, price declines and panic emotions feedback on each other, amplifying losses through slippage, and liquidation lines are continuously breached, ultimately resulting in a "liquidation bloodbath" in a short time.
● In contrast, the address 0xb5a6 established a long position of 73.7 BTC, approximately $6.62 million, on January 22, demonstrating a starkly different operational approach by professional funds in a high-risk environment. Such funds not only possess more refined position management and risk hedging tools but often have deeper insights into on-chain flows, market structures, and liquidity conditions; their positioning near meme and highly volatile assets resembles hunting at both ends of the volatility curve rather than merely betting on a linear logic of "getting rich by getting in."
● Behind the meme frenzy, the tension between regulation and innovation becomes increasingly prominent: a blanket ban on extreme speculative assets could directly stifle some experiments regarding community organization forms and new distribution mechanisms; yet complete laissez-faire would inevitably amplify harm to retail investors and systemic reputational risks. How to set moderate guardrails in terms of information disclosure, leverage limits, and compliance thresholds for listing tokens, allowing "high-risk innovation" to occur within controllable ranges, becomes a challenging issue that regulators and the market must face together.
From Rivals to Allies? The Narrative Shift of BNB Chain and Ethereum
● The community discussions around "BNB Chain and Ethereum possibly shifting from competition to cooperation" reflect a narrative trend of public chain ecosystems transitioning from early zero-sum struggles to multi-chain collaboration. The once-labeled "Ethereum killer" tag has gradually been replaced by "interoperability" and "coexistence" following the popularization of cross-chain bridges, Rollups, and multi-chain wallets, with developers and users beginning to focus more on experience and cost rather than the ideological affiliation of a single chain; this soft landing in narrative has, to some extent, alleviated community antagonism.
● From a functional structure perspective, Ethereum still holds advantages in underlying security, decentralization, and the native ecosystems of DeFi/NFT, while BNB Chain has formed its own traffic pool in high-performance applications, cost-sensitive users, and certain emerging asset issuances. There is significant complementary space between the two in areas such as cross-chain infrastructure, dual asset listings, liquidity sharing, and compatibility of development toolchains; cooperation scenarios under multi-chain coexistence may gradually be tested and solidified in specific projects in the future.
● It is important to emphasize that the current expectations of cooperation between BNB Chain and Ethereum "shifting from enemies to friends" mainly stem from a single community source of public opinion fermentation and have not been clearly confirmed by official channels from either side. This narrative is better understood as a discussion at the emotional and expectation levels rather than a substantive agreement upon which investment decisions can be made; therefore, it must be clearly labeled as "unverified opinion" in dissemination and interpretation to avoid blurring the boundaries between fact and imagination.
● When the relationship between public chains shifts from being adversarial to limited cooperation, it also echoes CZ's repeated emphasis on industry standardization and interoperability at Davos: if assets and data can be freely transferred between chains under security premises, then the cross-border applications of regulatory passports, asset tokenization, and AI settlement would have a realistic foundation. From personal statements to ecological games, the "easing" of attitudes between public chains constitutes another implicit narrative thread in this Davos battle.
After Davos: The Counterplay Between New Regulatory Order and Technological Paradigms
In the complex situation of fragmented regulation, asset tokenization, payment and AI integration, and the coexistence of high-risk innovation, what CZ is trying to secure for the crypto industry is not a gray area outside the system, but a future "incorporated into the rules": striving for unified standards through the concept of regulatory passports, rewriting clearing and custody infrastructure through tokenization, and advancing crypto from speculative assets to the underlying components of the machine economy through AI settlement—these narratives collectively form the long-term chips he threw out at Davos.
Looking ahead, the accelerated legislative progress in markets like the UAE, the slow advancement of the U.S. market structure bill amidst negotiations, and the ongoing experimentation by institutions and whales with new asset forms will drive the crypto industry into a new phase of simultaneous competition between regulatory frameworks and technological paradigms. The boundaries of rules and the boundaries of code will frequently collide, and whichever side makes a compromise first will often be quickly reflected in the market surface through price, liquidity, and the survival of projects.
In this process, readers need to learn to distinguish between verified facts and unverified expectations: whether it is the number of users on a platform, the specific list of collaborations with multiple governments, or the conclusive statement that "AI prefers certain types of assets," as long as there is a lack of publicly available, verifiable data support, these should be regarded as high-risk information that requires skepticism, rather than the basis for investment decisions. Treating narratives as narratives and data as data is the first line of defense in protecting oneself in uncertain times.
For participants, as the long-term main lines such as tokenization infrastructure and AI settlement gradually heat up, short-term risks will not automatically disappear: the volatility of meme assets, liquidity crunches, and sudden regulatory variables can still reshape a market curve within hours. The real strategy may be to understand how macro narratives change the rules of the game while acknowledging that the micro level is still filled with human nature and greed, learning to maintain sufficient safety margins and patience between the two.
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