CZ bets the bottom is in: YZi Labs’ winter portfolio may become its best
Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said on Sept. 4 that YZi Labs’ recent investments could become some of the firm’s best performers precisely because the capital was deployed during a broad crypto market downturn. “I strongly believe the YZi Labs investments over the last few months will be some of the best performing because those investments were done during the depth of the crypto winter,” Zhao wrote on social media.
The statement is an opinion, not a verified performance result. Neither Zhao nor YZi Labs published acquisition prices, current valuations or investment returns supporting the prediction. But the portfolio behind the claim is now substantial and unusually diverse for a crypto-native investor.
From Binance Labs to a 10 billion USD multi-sector fund
YZi Labs describes itself as an investment vehicle focused on Web3, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. The organization emerged from the rebranding of Binance Labs and says it manages more than 10 billion USD in assets. It operates independently from Binance and manages capital associated with Zhao and Binance co-founder Yi He, investing across multiple stages and running the EASY Residency incubation program for early-stage founders.
Zhao previously said Web3 still represented roughly 70 to 80 percent of the portfolio, but the firm has increased its exposure to technologies connecting blockchain systems with artificial intelligence, robotics and institutional finance. In May, Zhao said YZi Labs preferred investing in infrastructure that supports AI rather than competing directly with heavily funded AI model developers. Publicly verified 2026 investments include robotics company RoboForce, custodian BitGo, prediction market Predict.fun, AI payments protocol AEON and fixed-rate lending platform TermMax, with several deal values undisclosed.
RoboForce: the largest disclosed bet
YZi Labs led RoboForce’s 52 million USD financing round in March, an oversubscribed transaction that lifted the robotics company’s total funding to 67 million USD. RoboForce develops physical AI systems for industrial work in solar power, data centers, manufacturing, mining and logistics, building robots designed to perform labor-intensive tasks in challenging environments.
The 52 million USD figure represents the entire round rather than YZi Labs’ individual contribution, and neither company disclosed the valuation or the equity stake received. RoboForce has also claimed letters of intent covering more than 11,000 robots — prospective demand, not completed deliveries or recognized revenue. The investment sits outside YZi Labs’ traditional blockchain portfolio but matches Zhao’s stated interest in supplying infrastructure for AI, and its ultimate performance depends on converting prospective orders into commercial deployments.
Custody and prediction markets
YZi Labs also invested in BitGo around the digital asset custodian’s January listing on the New York Stock Exchange, with the amount and terms undisclosed. The firm argued that regulated custody infrastructure would become increasingly important as institutional capital entered digital assets, and BitGo’s public listing gave the fund exposure to a regulated US financial infrastructure provider rather than an early-stage token project — along with a clearer route to price discovery than privately held positions, since public shares are valued continuously.
In April, YZi Labs announced a follow-on investment in Predict.fun alongside Susquehanna Crypto. The platform, a self-custodial prediction market on BNB Chain where users trade contracts on politics, sports, crypto prices and economic events, had processed more than four million orders and surpassed 1.8 billion USD in cumulative volume at the time of the investment. It introduced a self-service developer dashboard in September for generating API keys, monitoring usage and managing trading limits. Volume growth, however, does not establish profitability or the current value of the investor’s position.
Payments and lending fill out the portfolio
YZi Labs led an 8 million USD pre-seed round for AEON in May, with IDG Capital, HashKey Capital and the Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund participating. AEON is building payment infrastructure meant to let artificial intelligence agents execute and settle transactions, describing its product as a settlement layer connecting autonomous software with blockchain-based and real-world payment systems.
TermMax received a separate strategic investment in August. The fixed-rate lending protocol, previously part of EASY Residency Season 3, has raised more than 8 million USD across its rounds and operates fixed-rate lending markets across several Ethereum-compatible chains, offering pools, strategy vaults and products designed to give borrowers and lenders more predictable rates than variable-rate DeFi. The amount supplied by YZi Labs was not disclosed.
A forecast no one can test yet
Zhao’s argument rests on a familiar idea: lower valuations create better entry prices, and investments made near a market bottom outperform once conditions turn. Bitcoin was trading near 79,945 USD on Sept. 6, recovering from lower levels earlier in 2026 but still below its prior record — a recovery that says nothing about whether private positions have appreciated.
Private investment performance cannot be measured from token prices alone. YZi Labs may hold equity, warrants, tokens or other contractual rights depending on each transaction, and most of those terms are not public. The five publicly identified investments cover substantially different markets — industrial robotics, custody, prediction markets, AI payments and fixed-rate lending — with no common benchmark able to measure all five. Before Zhao’s view can be tested, the firm would need to disclose entry valuations, subsequent financing prices, exits or realized distributions. It has not said when it will. The next measurable evidence will come from financing rounds, public filings, product adoption figures and possible liquidity events involving individual portfolio companies.
Market snapshot at press time: Bitcoin trades near 79,734 USD, down 0.4 percent over 24 hours, while Ethereum changes hands around 2,491 USD and Solana near 106 USD, per CoinGecko data.
deploying at the depth of winter is the oldest alpha there is. the catch is you need cz level capital to average into a drawdown without flinching once
10 billion under management and cz is out here calling the bottom publicly. guy has been right enough times that i read every post even when my bags disagree
right enough times and people forget the luna era calls. still, a 10bn fund averaging into a bear market is a real signal regardless of who runs it
^ based. winter deployments hit different. every fund that bought sub 20k btc said the same thing and they were right
best performers because we invested in the winter is easy to say when you never publish entry prices or marks
entry prices exist, they are just in quarterly lp letters. retail just never sees them and cz likes it that way
lp letters are exactly it. the marks exist, retail just was never the audience for this particular post
this. 10bn under management and zero performance data. classic cz confidence post, been the same since 2019
same since 2019 is a bit unfair tbh, he flagged ftx publicly before most people would say it out loud. confidence earned, numbers private, those can coexist
No acquisition prices, no valuations, no returns published. So the whole claim rests on vibes. Remarkable how much weight a tweet carries.
vibes plus a 52m robostorce round lol. the 11k letters of intent are the part nobody audits, prospective demand gets counted like revenue in every pitch deck ever
roboforce is the biggest disclosed check and its robots for solar farms and mining sites. bold for a fund born out of binance labs, tho 11k LOIs aint deployments
robots, custody and ai payments is actually a sane thesis for once. still not buying the no numbers part tho
same read. bitgo and aeon are real revenue businesses at least, termmax way less proven. the thesis holds, the missing marks are the other half of the story
the 70-80% web3 allocation is the actual news here. all the robots and biotech headlines and the core book is still pure crypto
70-80 percent web3 and the robots headlines still dominate the coverage. pr team earning their fees on the futurism angle i guess