The story has been told dozens of times. Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, sold his Shanghai apartment in early 2014 and put the cash straight into Bitcoin while the price was sliding from $800 toward $400. He dollar-cost averaged around $600 per coin, with no stable employment at the time.

On the All-In podcast, CZ laid it out himself. As zenkaixbt posted on X, the clip shows CZ explaining how the apartment sale proceeds arrived in installments and he bought every single one.

“And so I sold the apartment for roughly nine hundred thousand dollars, like just under a million bucks. And then started buying… The first trench at eight hundred dollars and Bitcoin’s dropping — six hundred dollars, four hundred dollars — kind of averaged to about six hundred dollars.”

zenkaixbt summed it up plainly on X: no job, no fallback, all in on a crashing asset. “Buy the dip and never sell your bitcoin.” That version of events has been repeated so often it has become a founding myth of crypto conviction.

The Part CZ Leaves Out

OKX founder Star Xu is not buying the legend as packaged. On April 8, the same day CZ released his 457-page memoir Freedom of Money, Xu posted a series of statements on X that went somewhere no major outlet had gone.

Star Xu, posting as @star_okx on X, raised a question about where the down payment for that Shanghai apartment originally came from. Xu alleged the funds came from the parents of CZ’s wife, who supported the couple during that period and are now elderly. His point was that CZ retells the apartment sale as a personal act of conviction while leaving out the family context behind how the property was acquired in the first place.

“CZ constantly talks about the story of ‘selling a house to buy Bitcoin.’ But what is the full truth behind it? Where did the down payment for that house originally come from? And whose house was actually sold?”

Xu also questioned whether CZ, while repeatedly showcasing the story as proof of visionary thinking, had considered the feelings of those in-laws. He added that he had kept these details private for years and would not have surfaced them at all if not for what he described as a book full of falsehoods pulling him back into old disputes.

“Taking advantage of someone’s misfortune or using private life for moral attacks has never been my principle. If it weren’t for that book full of falsehoods dragging me into this, I would never have brought up these old matters again.”

A Memoir That Reignited Everything

The release of Freedom of Money was already contentious before the apartment angle surfaced. CZ’s book revisits a contract dispute from his time as CTO at OKCoin in 2014, claims rivals used coordinated FUD to undermine him, and alleges that Huobi founder Leon Li told him in 2025 that Star Xu had reported him to Chinese authorities during the 2020 crackdown.

Xu denied that account and called CZ a habitual liar in his X posts. He disputed multiple claims in the memoir including the OKCoin history, the Roger Ver contract dispute, and what he described as misrepresentations about CZ’s current personal life.

The book was written mostly during CZ’s four-month federal prison sentence, completed in September 2024, following a $50 million personal fine and Binance’s $4.3 billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice over anti-money laundering violations. CZ has said all proceeds from Freedom of Money go to charity.

The Bitcoin Position Behind the Story

What is not in dispute: CZ bought roughly 1,500 BTC at an average price near $600 per coin. He received the apartment sale proceeds in installments, bought each tranche as it arrived, and the price kept falling. He kept buying. The position built during that period is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The CZ Bitcoin apartment story has been cited by retail investors and podcast hosts alike as the template for conviction buying. Xu’s challenge does not dispute the trade itself. It disputes the framing, specifically the omission of the people behind the property and the cost that decision carried for others beyond CZ.

CZ had not publicly responded to Xu’s apartment-specific claims as of publication time.