CZ Expects YZi Labs' $10 Billion Winter Bets to Outperform as Bitcoin (BTC) Recovers

Timing the Depth of the Crypto Winter

Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder widely known as CZ, expects the investments his family office YZi Labs made over the past few months to rank among the firm's best performers — and he credits one factor above all: timing. In his September 4 post on X, Zhao wrote that he strongly believes the recent YZi Labs investments will be among the best performing, because they were executed during what he calls the depth of the crypto winter. The comment sits on top of a summary of an August 28 book club session in Hong Kong, where Zhao told the audience that money flooding into artificial intelligence is filtering out short-term crypto teams. In his view, AI capital rotating back into digital assets is already underway, with only teams serving durable, real-economy use cases surviving that rotation. The winter framing has measurable support. Bitcoin had fallen 47% from its peak by early June, a slide that fueled a broader debate over whether this cycle amounts to the coldest crypto winter on record. Prices have clawed back ground since, yet they remain far below the October high, which the market has so far failed to retest. At the time of writing, Bitcoin changes hands near $79,864, leaving the asset well inside the window Zhao's family office treated as an accumulation zone. The underlying logic is contrarian and simple: capital deployed when sentiment, funding and valuations compress buys more upside per dollar than capital that arrives after a trend is confirmed. Zhao is positioning accordingly — YZi Labs, which manages his private billions, kept writing checks straight through the drawdown. What the post does not include is evidence. Zhao published no returns data, so the claim stays untested until the portfolio marks itself to market.

his September 4 post on Xhttps://x.com/cz_binance/status/2095933513258393923?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

YZi Labs' $10 Billion Deal Sheet

YZi Labs runs more than $10 billion on behalf of Zhao and Binance co-founder Yi He. The firm grew out of Binance Labs, the exchange's former venture arm, and now invests independently, with a 2026 deal sheet that stretches well past crypto into robotics, AI payments and custody. The largest disclosed check went to robotics: YZi Labs led a $52 million round in RoboForce in March, a company building physical AI systems. It also bought into digital asset custodian BitGo ahead of the custodian's January listing on the NYSE. Smaller positions followed through the year. In April, the firm added to its stake in prediction market Predict.fun alongside trading house Susquehanna Crypto. In May, it led an $8 million pre-seed round for payments protocol AEON, a team building settlement infrastructure for what it terms the agentic economy. In August, it backed TermMax, a fixed-rate on-chain lender developing bond-market infrastructure. Notably, none of the disclosed positions touch the most speculative retail corners of the market — memecoin platforms or NFT collections — a pattern consistent with Zhao's long-stated preference for infrastructure over hype. The firm also spent much of the year fighting for control of BNB treasury firm CEA Industries: a director resigned in March, and the two sides reached a settlement in June, closing that dispute. Read as a whole, the deal sheet doubles as a signal of where Zhao believes the next cycle's value accrues — the plumbing that lets AI agents pay, hedge and store assets, rather than token launches. Each round was also struck while sector valuations sat compressed, which is precisely the window his public commentary now highlights. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bybit.

$1 Million Bitcoin Call Still a Long Way Off

COINOTAG's reading is that Zhao's timing thesis is, in effect, a leveraged call on Bitcoin's next leg. Every infrastructure bet in the YZi Labs book — payments, prediction markets, custody — implicitly prices in liquidity returning to digital assets, and if BTC stalls, the winter-entry edge erodes. Daily momentum gauges such as the MACD have yet to confirm the decisive trend shift that bulls describe. Zhao has separately argued that a $1 million bitcoin could arrive sooner than most expect — a level that would imply a market cap running at multiples of today's, and far beyond conventional comparisons with gold. On current prices, that mark remains distant, and so does confirmation that the $10 billion bet was well placed.