Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive officer of Binance, is worth about $100 billion, putting him on a par with tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.
Bloomberg reported on Monday that Zhao's net worth is $96 billion, ranking him as the world's 11th wealthiest person.
Zhao, dubbed "CZ" in crypto circles, is currently rated 11th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, behind Mukesh Ambani, CEO of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, and Larry Ellison, cofounder of Oracle, who is valued at an estimated $107 billion.
Zhao was a former McDonald's burger flipper and software programmer who rose to the ranks of the world's wealthiest individuals almost overnight.
Bloomberg is the first to assess the 44-year-old Chinese tech mogul's worth.
Zhao's riches might be substantially bigger, as the wealth estimate excludes his personal cryptocurrency holdings, which include Bitcoin and his company's own token, Binance Coin, which rose almost 1,300% last year.
Zhao's closest crypto colleagues are FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried ($15.5 billion) and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong ($9 billion), according to Bloomberg's index.
Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, according to CoinGecko, with a 24-hour trading volume of $106 billion as of Jan. 6. Bloomberg said that it earned at least $20 billion in revenue last year.
According to Bloomberg, the projection is based on Zhao's ownership in Binance, which produced upwards of $20 billion in sales in 2021 and Zhao holds 90% of Binance's shares, according to an analysis of the firm's regulatory filings.
When his personal crypto holdings are included, Zhao's fortune is estimated to be comparable to that of Bill Gates, the world's fourth richest person with a $135 billion net worth, and Mark Zuckerberg, the world's fifth richest person with a $124 billion net worth.
Zhao has not disclosed the extent of his personal crypto assets publicly, although he previously told the Associated Press that his personal holdings account for the "bulk" of his net worth.
Even with recent drops, Binance's success demonstrates the immense wealth being made in the unfettered cryptoverse, yet controversy has circled around the company.
Expelled from China, where it was formed, Binance is now subject to regulatory scrutiny on a worldwide scale. According to persons familiar with the situation, the U.S. Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service are examining whether one of Zhao's entities, Binance Holdings, acts as a conduit for money laundering and tax fraud.
Binance, which does not reveal its financial statistics, conducts up to $170 billion in cryptocurrency deals every day, several times the volume of any competitor.
