Daven Tamayo

Boardroom Tea: Did Binance's CZ just announce the launch of fiat services in the Philippines?

Article (news)

Salve Ibaňez

ABS-CBN News

Changpeng &quot;CZ&quot; Zhao is definitely not a ghost, but a headliner. Pardoned by President Trump after his prison sentence, the Binance founder took the stage at the ASEAN Tech Summit for the first time in the Philippines since his release—and did what CZ does best: talked about reshaping the region&#x27;s financial plumbing, one stablecoin at a time.What struck me, though, wasn&#x27;t his pitch. It was the gap between what he announced and what he&#x27;s actually allowed to do here.At the FintechAlliance fireside chat, CZ announced that Binance was launching fiat services in the Philippines that day. Or soon. I checked with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.The answer was still no. In plain language: Binance has sandbox approval for two years under the SEC&#x27;s Crypto Asset Service Provider Rules framework, but they haven&#x27;t yet partnered with a licensed VASP to handle on-ramps and oﬀ-ramps in Philippine pesos. No peso rails means no retail access. I heard they&#x27;ve been trying to find a partner for the last five years.Did CZ know about the VASP gap, or was it an innocent misunderstanding? Whatever the case, the investing public has a right to know. Walking the ASEAN Tech Summit, Binance and BlockShoals were everywhere—panels, booths front and center, the kind of presence that makes you feel the money. Their PR was executing at scale, turning what could have been a regional conference into &quot;the place to be if you&#x27;re in fintech.&quot; That&#x27;s not cheap. But here&#x27;s the thing about staging that well: it tells you they&#x27;re not betting on the Philippines as a sandbox. They&#x27;re betting on it as a market. The fireside chat with Lito Villanueva also cut to something real. CZ framed the wholePhilippine play around remittances.The math is compelling: The Philippines received $35.6 billion in remittances in 2025, and Filipinos are hemorrhaging money to intermediaries—current fees run 5-10% per transaction, which is, as CZ put it, &quot;just insane.&quot; A blockchain-based rails could theoretically collapse those costs to near-zero. His actual quote on the strategy: &quot;Paying 5-10 billion dollars in remittance fees, Binance can bring that to zero.&quot; Now, let’s zoom out to the bigger picture. Luis Buenaventura, who&#x27;s been watching crypto adoption in the Philippines longer than almost anyone, cut to the point: Binance&#x27;s reentry will determine how other international players view the market. If the sandbox works, the floodgates open. The Philippines stays a backwater otherwise.Luis put the scale problem plainly: &quot;Binance volume of transactions globally in a single day is bigger than the PSE volume in a year.&quot; Which means the local VASPs may get pummeled. That’s sad, because there is a real market here. The Philippines is one of the last significant growth markets for retail crypto trading. Binance knows it. Everyone in that room knew it. This isn&#x27;t about optimizing an existing market—it&#x27;s about capturing one before the window closes. CZ&#x27;s take on patience and regulation was generous. He acknowledged that regulators have a genuinely hard job, caught between protecting consumers and allowing innovation. The old Binance would have fought the sandbox framework. This one is working within it.

Pardoned by President Trump after his prison sentence, the Binance founder took the stage at the ASEAN Tech Summit for the first time in the Philippines since his release.

Pardoned by President Trump after his prison sentence, the Binance founder took the stage at the ASEAN Tech Summit for the first time in the Philippines since his release.