Investing in Humanity: Ella Zhang on Why Binance Labs Became Easy Labs at KBW2025

Thank you. Hi everyone. Good afternoon. It's a long day for today uh the conference. I hope you still some have some energy uh to listen to my presentation.

Uh so I'm Ella uh the head of easy labs uh formerly Binance Labs. I'm very happy to come back. I stand here uh seven years ago. the stage feel familiar. Um so I came from tra traditional finance um background.

I started venture investing 15 years ago at uh Clar Perkins uh after my work uh from Google one of the most successful technology companies. I followed the legendary investors uh Mariker, Jangdor, they um teach me a lot in investing. Uh in traditional venture investing, normally the investment takes on average 8 to 12 years to exits. That's every venture capitalist is best um bet for a home run. So after um I graduated from uh business school at Stanford in se uh 2017, I joined um Binance, established the Binance Labs back then with the mission to help um and incubate blockchain and uh crypto ecosystem to grow.

Um probably everyone know here knows that the life cycle of crypto projects uh is relatively shorter and uh investors expectation of investment and get the return back is much shorter. Some investors extremely want to get investment back uh in six to 12 months. However, um in the past seven years at U Binance Labs and now easy labs, our uh approach never changed. So I want today I want to share that the how our long-term principle work in through the cycles and in the crypto industry and I want to discuss some opportunities we see here and share with you some our principles. So some fact um some um fact sheet here.

So, Easy Labs, we are extremely long-term. Um, we don't have ex internal LPS. So, we don't have the stress to have to distribute money back to LPS. And we are impact first. Um, which means doesn't mean that we don't care about the investment return.

It simply means that we believe impact making which is very aligned with today's conference that we believe when you get the adoption you're making impact the returns will follow by nature naturally and we're taking a very hands-on approach to investing. Um since easy the the majority of the money come from the founder of uh Binance. I myself being in founder shoes for several years building two AI startup uh companies. We actually invest in founders from the founder perspective. We grow with the founders.

We have the empathy to understand the founders ups and downs and also uh that's very important is we optimize for the human society for the humanity. We don't like to compete on on hot deals. We bet the very bold ideas someone else don't want to bet on and for simply for those hardest deals. CZ's uh philosophy is that those problems already been taken care by many people enough sufficient capital we don't need to instead we try to find those hidden gems for the professor in Israel they're taking the stem uh stem cells to create the organs to save people's life we like to but project recent investment like Kanton chain the founder is underwater for over 10 11 years. The founder being stopped uh started to build canon chain even before Ethereum came to life.

Um it they're solving the institutional adoption of blockchain um uh technology. Come to some um some quantitative numbers. In the past seven years, we made over 300 uh investment and there are 59 exits. um also 59 51 writeoffs. There's a lot of failures, but we welcome founders to come back to build with us.

So far so good. Our moy is um 12.5x and uh DPI uh 9.5x. So I want to share is that long-term investing in crypto still working and it work relatively well.

So I want to borrow this quote my favorite quote by Mustafa um um the co-founder of deep mind in his new book the coming waves because as investor every day we're thinking what's the next big thing where should I allocate my capital and where should I alloc allocate my time so here is we're very lucky to stand at a point in history that never we have never met none of us are prepared and we are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change soon. You will live in an economy surrounded by robotics. just found the uh last founder last speaker. Operate your business and run government governance services and you will live in the world with DNA printer and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robots assistants and abundant energy.

So this is a historical moment why we renamed Binance Labs early this year into easy labs to bring our investment focus beyond web 3 to AI and biotech. Here is our why we are investing in the three areas. I I draw this um picture by follow through the inspiration of Jason Huan's three stage of scaling law in AI which pre-training post-training and the referencing. So our stage um at easy labs of investing in the three areas AGI basically we believe is changing the nature of human neighbor. It's building the smarter automated thoughts and and method and labors to serve human beings to work with human beings.

And then we invest in crypto and the web 3 because it's democratize the ownership the relationship of how people working with each other. Basically change the relationship between creators, users and owners. And eventually everybody what we care in in the end of the day is a healthier happier longer life. That's where we're spending our time investing in those biotech innovations. So here's a quick stack of what we look into AI.

We look into the um foundation layer, the computing layer and research and the different developer tools in AI and the vertical AI solutions for enterprise and uh agents. I don't have time to cover all of them today but happy to trade notes with the investors and whoever uh interested in this AI area. Also robotics is where we spend significant time where we want to identify the next 100 bill trillion dollar market. Um but our belief and vision is that in the future anything that move and any shape they will be robotics and all the robotics will serve you be your assistant managing your life and help you trade help you buy things through your crypto cop uh crypto wallet. So um other than invest in pure AI pure B biotech companies and startups we're particularly interested in the intersection um of AI biotech and web 3.

For example, AI and web 3, there are many unsolved problems can be addressed by addressed by the technology combined together. The decentralized we see project building decentralized computation um layer and the data ownership and the monetization. the onchain autonomous agent and people are using AI to inc increase the security um onchain and um do the smart contract auditing and also in the intersection between biotech and AI. AI is already addressing a lot of biotech uh problems. Doctors are using AI to improve the scanning accuracy and for pathology to accurately deliver the drugs and for drug um discovery.

Traditional method will use 10 years for clinic trials and 1 billion at least to launch one drug. AI significantly shorten the time and lower the cost. However, there's problems because in AI training the models were lack of data and where the data the data the the patient data today stuck silos they are stuck in the clinics in the hospital in the private labs and they stuck in different traditional forms like the PDFs and different papers. So how do we leverage the intersection of the biotech and blockchain to solve the problem? It's actually perfect solution because nowadays patient can share with your biioarker your data with an onchain platform without disclose your privacy and there's a lot of and also a lot of bio project are raising funding where they to help their innovations move forward and those are the areas very very interesting and we're spending a lot of time and today I want to discuss one example which is a buzzwords today at the conference the DAT and uh we use this example to show you how from investors perspective we're building something and investing something really long-term why this is worth our time and capital to invest in so BNB DAT um digital asset treasury in the sense it's a BMBB as uh for micro strategy Y everyone probably knows Micro Strategy right they it's a software company it started to uh buy BT Bitcoin since 2020 since 2020 they announced the first purchase of the Bitcoin four years later this company reached 100 billion market cap and this business is very beautiful driven by two drivers one is NAV which is a net asset value.

Another one is MNAV which is a multiple on top of the net asset value. And we believe BMBB is very undervalued asset and today after the mass adoption of retail investors it's at a inflection point for institutional adoption and here is why. So the first drive of BMBB NAV is similar. The second of the MNAF is similar to micro strategy. There are the two key components of the drivers.

However, the more beautiful thing of BMBBDAT is that it have the high holding yields which bring you 15 to 20% um of the APY which can be distributed as a dividend and also it's a deflationary supply where it it's burn it's double burn mechanism will eventually reduce the BMBB supply chain uh the the supply of u to 100 million BNB. I will touch on the four aspect of how we evaluate and eventually build the accumulated value. So first of all the nav the net asset value is driven by the intrinsic value of the asset. So if you look purely look at BMBB today, it's a number four by market cap in all among all the cryptocurrencies and it's the only asset actually uh resistance through three cycles and outperform BTC and Ethereum. The reason it's because it's driven by a robust ecosystem behind.

So this chart is a priced indexed um we rebased back to 100 and you can see the yellow line here represents um BMBB. So BMBB is actually the only um token actually founded by the Echos ecosystem across CFI to D5. can see in this this is just a snapshot of a few applications in the BMBB ecosystem. There's there's actually thousands of D apps uh in application. There's um Binance um and BMBB chain.

List the DAO it's a lending protocol. Pancake swap is one of the biggest stacks and coin market cap is the number one crypto analytics platform and trust wallet have over 200 million of wallet of crypto users and aster I heard some of investors they they mentioned aster they're very scared that the CZ is pushing this on fire. So accumulately this ecosystem have almost half billion of crypto users in this ecosystem. Um this together is driven can afford the intrinsic value and also some excitement recently the Binance alpha driven the BNB chain DEX surge to over 72% of market share. Can see the yellow ones um on the recent few months.

Um and also thanks to genius act passed the US law the middle of this year which bring stable coin to the mainstream and it's definitely a milestone um of crypto entire crypto industry. However, if you look at the Binance chain, it has started to build towards today, five years ago, it pushing for uh stable coin payments and the art the real world um asset, the stable coin adoption and the RW tokenized the RWA and by today you can see the uh yellow bar is the uh stable coin wallet on BNB chain which take a significant market share. um and definitely leading the growth. This is how vibrate the ecosystem is and BMBB ecosystem is essentially by nature it's the largest asset insurance pipeline because it create this this chart shows that how many assets which actually excluded the assets are small cap but only focus on the mid to long-term cap which distributed in those ecosystem globally because it's have the whole the closed the loop of issuance adoption and also trading and also this flywheels of this ecosystem where BMBB chain essentially is an infrastructure for builders um and founders and innovators to build the product on it and then easy labs here is to and with our venture partners in the ecosystem a lot of investors were incubating those those um projects and investing them help them to grow to the next level. And essentially the exchanges include the centralized exchange and dex dexes um accumulately you see we have half billion of the users will together become naturally become the go-to market channel for those innovate innovations and project pre provide them the liquidity the goto market channel and user adoption.

So this is a flywheel to for BMBB ecosystem to become the asset insurance ecosystem. Second the MNAF we talk about it how to calculate this is a beauty of the DAT business the DAT business. Um so this is a comparison on the left hand side and and and right hand side. So if you buy one BMBB if the MNAV is two so you're thinking about why I'm paying 1 BNB's price to get 0.5 of BNB but you see the drivers here is depend on the treasury company acceleration to buy more treasury which is the G according to micro strategy the last year G equal to 0.

6 six and seven. So if you and T is a year. So if you use 1.5 times 1.5 which is one is 2.

25 25 and two years later you're today you're paying 1 BMBB's price to own 1.1 BNB two years later and also the K is the price the current price divide by the NAV which means the market is irrational like yesterday our first BNC company because of the share release it it's there's some companies are shorting it it's actually very good opportunity for long-term holders to buy more treasury and for the company to buy more treasury because the K is less than one and all those combined together you invest in DAT company actually give the leverage to hold BMBB directly this is the beauty and the third one is a high holding yield which give you the BMB holder uh the DAT holder uh 15 to 20% APY which can eventually become the dividend distribute to the investors and those API was supported by the whole vibrate BMBB ecosystem listed on the right hand side and again the last this is a deflationary supply can see historically every quarter we're um BMBB ecosystem is burning by two mechanism quarterly bate burning it's driven by the algorithm um by the price of BMBB and the block produced on BMBB chain and also driven by the realtime burning by every transaction we are burning the uh portion of the gas fee never missed the one quarter so there are accumulatively 62 million of BMBB being burned by today's price BMBB price it's over 62 billion of USD being burnt people may ask why CZ is doing so burning so much money because that's commitment. So according to CD um he he joked about it after his jail time. He said I'm originally retired but because we launched the BMBB I have to be responsible for BMBB holders. To his definition, the BMBB success is not about its price.

It's about how many people we can eventually help through the community. So this is also what inspired us. The mission and vision of BMBB ecosystem is to become a true decentralized most efficient global financial ecosystem and easy labs is here. We are driven by incubate invest and making impact. Thank you all.