Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder whose crypto fortune places him among the wealthiest people with Canadian citizenship on Forbes’ rich lists, said Sept. 2 that speculative capital is starting to rotate out of artificial-intelligence trades and back into cryptocurrency, according to a report by Yahoo Finance, via BeInCrypto.
Zhao, widely known by his initials CZ, made the comments in a post on X, arguing that money that had chased AI-related trades through 2026 is now moving back toward crypto. He characterized the incoming capital as fast-moving “hot money” that chases the loudest narrative and rarely commits for a full allocation cycle, rather than a sign of durable, structural demand, the report said.
The comments landed the same day research firm River published a model arguing bitcoin could reach US$250,000 to US$840,000 within three to five years if institutional investors gradually move toward the one per cent to seven per cent portfolio allocations Wall Street has recommended. River’s report, cited by Yahoo Finance and BeInCrypto, found that investment advisors as a group hold just 0.008 per cent of assets in bitcoin, even though 29 of the top 30 registered investment advisors already hold some.
Bitcoin traded near US$77,278 on Sept. 2, according to the report, up from lows below US$65,000 in mid-August, with data firm Glassnode placing near-term overhead supply between US$83,000 and US$86,000 and an accumulation floor around US$62,000 to US$65,000. U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded roughly US$3.52 billion in net inflows in August, their strongest monthly haul of 2026, separate reporting on the ETF flows has shown.
Forbes’ Billionaires List valued Zhao’s net worth at US$111.1 billion in its April 2026 update, ranking him among the world’s richest people. Zhao has publicly disputed that figure as too high, calling it a guess, and the rival Bloomberg Billionaires Index valued him closer to US$85 billion around the same period — a gap that reflects how differently the two trackers weigh Zhao’s roughly 90 per cent ownership stake in Binance, which remains a private company.
