A chat with CZ

One of the highlights of the recent ASEAN Tech Summit Manila was my fireside chat with Binance founder CZ, his first public appearance in the Philippines.

Going in, I told him upfront: no safe questions, no safe answers. To his credit, he didn’t ask for any, though his team tried, his assistant asking more than once for an advance copy of my questions. I declined every time. A pre-approved fireside chat isn’t a conversation, it’s a performance, and I wanted the real thing: candid, unfiltered, unrestricted. What followed was 40 minutes I think every practitioner in fintech, banking, or policy should sit with.

Start with a number I can’t shake. Filipinos abroad sent home over $35 billion last year. Somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion never reached the people it was meant for. It went to fees. CZ didn’t soften that. Remittance costs today, he said bluntly, are simply out of hand. Route that money over blockchain rails instead, he argued and the cost could approach zero.

I’ve sat in a lot of rooms where financial inclusion gets discussed in the abstract. This wasn’t abstract. This was billions of pesos that could be feeding, schooling and housing Filipino families instead of disappearing into fees, a gap that’s addressable with technology that already exists.

So is “practically free” actually true? Free doesn’t always mean sustainable, and I pushed him on it. His answer was refreshingly honest: a business earning zero revenue everywhere eventually collapses, or worse, the user quietly becomes the product. His model looks more like the free internet. Google’s tools cost nothing because the ecosystem around them pays elsewhere. Applied to stablecoins, the transaction itself trends toward free, even if the platform around it isn’t.

One exchange stuck with me as strategic advice, not commentary. I asked what a country gives up when it builds on someone else’s dollar-pegged stablecoin instead of its own rail. His answer: sovereignty, influence, eventually control of your own economy. A homegrown, peso-backed stablecoin isn’t a nice-to-have, in his view it’s necessary. Skip it, and you’re running your economy on someone else’s currency, by someone else’s rules.

What became clear over the conversation is that the barrier was never the smartphone. Half of ASEAN remains under- or unbanked, and when I asked CZ which barrier actually holds people back, connectivity, hardware, or literacy, his answer was direct. The phones are already in people’s pockets. Infrastructure is basically solved. What isn’t solved is financial literacy. Most people, he pointed out, don’t know what dollar-cost averaging means, a term anyone building wealth responsibly needs on day one.

That lines up with something I’ve repeated in nearly every talk this year. Technology adoption was never going to be the hard part here. Trust and understanding are the hardest. No stablecoin, no digital wallet, no AI-powered app closes that gap by itself. Only education does.

I also asked a question I don’t think enough people are asking yet: when an autonomous AI agent executes a bad trade or falls for a scam, who’s accountable, the user, the developer, or the platform? He didn’t dodge it. There’s no settled rulebook for this yet, he admitted. His practical answer: responsibility is shared, but never hand an AI agent more money than you can afford to lose. Let it book a hotel or a plane ticket. Not your life savings. The technology isn’t mature enough for blind trust, and treating it that way is on us, as much as on the developers building it.

On crypto’s reputation problem, the data he cited is worth putting on the record: illicit transactions make up an estimated 0.0014 percent of crypto activity, against two percent to five percent in traditional finance. The dollar figures in fiat look bigger because traditional finance is a far bigger pie, but the point holds. Technology isn’t the bad actor. The people misusing it are, and that distinction should matter every time a regulator decides how to treat this industry.

Then there’s the harder problem, the one that isn’t technical at all. We talked about ASEAN’s push toward interoperable digital rails across 10 regulatory regimes, what I’ve been calling license portability and what CZ called regulatory passporting. The technology is identical everywhere. It was never the obstacle. What’s hard is getting 11 countries with different tax structures, FX controls, and risk appetites to recognize each other’s due diligence. A platform already licensed by a credible regulator elsewhere shouldn’t have to start from zero somewhere else. Passporting doesn’t need to be automatic, but it should be dramatically simpler than it is today. That’s not just faster market entry. It’s more foreign investment, more competition, and ultimately better rates and security for the consumer.

Regulators aren’t the enemy of innovation here. They’re doing one of the hardest jobs in the room, balancing consumer protection, political reality and legal frameworks built for a different era. Founders, CZ said, need a little patience. Coming from someone who’s admitted patience isn’t his strength, that landed.

I left that stage more convinced than when I walked on. The technology is ready. What we’re short on is political will for regional interoperability, and sustained investment in financial literacy beyond a fintech marketing deck.

CZ said something near the end that should anchor how we build from here. Even in his most pessimistic scenario, the industry doesn’t disappear. It just means we stay exactly where we are, still paying billions in fees we don’t have to pay.

That’s not a future I’m willing to sit still for.

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Lito Villanueva is the Philippines’ leading and award-winning thought leader in inclusive digital finance. As EVP and chief innovation and inclusion officer of RCBC, he has driven large-scale digital initiatives that advanced financial inclusion. He is the founding chairman of FinTech Alliance PH, representing 95 percent of the country’s digital retail financial transactions with an aggregate user base in excess of 100 million, and the co-founder and Global Ambassador of the Asia FinTech Alliance. Recognized as a People Asia Men Who Matter 2025, Digital Leader of the Year, Asia Trailblazer and AGORA Awardee, he continues to shape the fintech landscape in the Philippines and beyond.