Binance Exchange founder Changpeng Zhao is looking into the possibility of buying banks as a way to bridge the gap between the worlds of traditional finance and cryptocurrency.
“We want our crypto exchange to become a bridge between traditional finance and crypto,” CZ said Thursday at the Web Summit.
“There are people with certain types of local licenses, traditional banking, payment service providers, even banks…we are looking at these things,” says Binance’s CEO.
CZ also noted that investing in banks is a smart strategy for Binance because when a cryptocurrency exchange works with a bank, it often ends up paying many new users to us, which increases the bank’s valuation.
CZ did not mention any specific goals, and also said that it is open to investing in banks either through a minority stake purchase or a full acquisition.
CZ has said in the past that Binance has more than $1 billion to spend on acquisitions, and recently committed $500 million to help fund Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
So far, the acquisition strategy has focused on expanding deployment, decentralized finance (DeFi), and non-fungible tokens (NFT) projects.
