CZ: Bitcoin's million-dollar run won't take 25 years, says Binance founder

CZ argues Bitcoin's million-dollar milestone is coming sooner than the "Bitcoin century" timeline implies

Speaking on stage with host Kevin at Bitcoin Asia 2026 in Hong Kong, CZ was asked what would need to happen over the next 25 years for the period to be remembered as "the Bitcoin century." He said reaching a million dollars "would be a good thing and it will happen," and when asked if that needs 25 years, he replied:

"No, I actually don't think we need 25 years. I think it's going to happen much quicker."

He added that beyond price, Bitcoin needs far more utility, including payments at massive scale and use as a retirement pension fund reserve, saying these things "will get there."

CZ also said he believes Bitcoin will overtake gold "pretty soon," noting there is currently only "like a 10x difference" between the two, and suggested the next bull run could be when it happens. He rated the odds of another digital currency overtaking Bitcoin before it overtakes gold as "quite small."

His advice to governments: a market-cap-weighted basket of the top five cryptocurrencies

Asked what percentage of national reserves he'd recommend allocating to Bitcoin, CZ said his approach is "a little bit self-serving": take the top five cryptocurrencies (excluding stablecoins, which may already sit in a dollar reserve) and allocate according to market cap. He estimated this would produce something like "50 something%" in Bitcoin, "10 20%" in ETH, with BNB also included. When pushed on why not recommend an all-Bitcoin allocation at a Bitcoin conference, he said the industry would "grow much slower" without other blockchains, arguing Ethereum, BNB Chain and others actually help Bitcoin grow rather than compete with it.

On government regulation broadly, CZ said he advises countries to build a crypto regulatory framework, establish a crypto reserve, issue their own stablecoins to capture liquidity in their own currency, and explore tokenizing assets like real estate, rare earth minerals and IP. He singled out the UAE as having "probably the most progressive crypto regulation today," noting Abu Dhabi Global Markets gave Binance.com a global license. He also pointed to the US CFTC moving quickly on futures and derivatives licensing, and named Japan, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan as countries moving fast, while calling Singapore "a little bit more conservative."

AI agents and AI companies' own tokens

Asked what money billions of AI agents will use to transact, CZ said it would start with stablecoins, since adding Bitcoin after that "is very very easy." He revealed:

"I've had discussions with multiple very large, the top tier AI companies about how to issue tokens."

He said building one gigawatt of compute costs "somewhere between 30 to 50 billion dollars," and some AI companies he's spoken with want to build "hundreds of gigawatts" over the next few years, costing trillions — motivating ideas like a data-center token offering rewards for compute access.

CZ distinguished AI payments from AI trading, saying that in his conversations, top AI companies don't see payments (hotels, bills) as a priority since people can simply swipe a credit card, whereas trading benefits more from AI's speed advantage. He suggested Bitcoin will largely remain a savings technology, while stablecoins and crypto handle machine-to-machine commerce, though he expects native crypto payments to grow as people who hold Bitcoin long-term stop converting to stablecoins before spending.

Bitcoin, government power, and what's next for the cycle

On whether Bitcoin weakens or strengthens governments, CZ argued the technology itself doesn't dictate this — government choices do. He pointed to the US as a relatively "weak" government structure that nonetheless produced "one of the strongest economies in the world," and contrasted the current SEC's reduced regulatory reach, which he said let the industry grow, with the prior SEC under Gary Gensler, which he said "stopped growth completely."

Asked what's driving the next cycle, CZ admitted:

"I'm not too sure to be very frank."

He listed RWAs, AI, stablecoins, centralized and decentralized exchanges, memecoins and DeFi as areas he expects to keep growing, but said predicting the next major trend is inherently difficult, citing his own failure to foresee ICOs or the NFT craze in advance.