In a recent X post, the cofounder and chief executive of Binance exchange, the largest crypto trading platform by volume, addressed how the logo of Binance was created.
After the logo was created, CZ and his friends Luke and Gareth — among which is, allegedly, one of Binance's cofounders — got together in Singapore to get tattoos of the Binance logo on their arms. That happened back in 2018.
According to CZ, the logo was created 16 months before that, in the summer of 2017, the year when the platform was kickstarted with the help of an ICO — a popular method for raising funds in the crypto industry back then.
You may not know the origin of the #Binance logo.https://t.co/uSNK14zvGq pic.twitter.com/Gn5WGHIti7
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) September 17, 2023
Here's how Binance logo came to be
CZ admitted that he and the other founders tried a lot of different variations to create a logo for their crypto exchange. The idea was to represent the bids and asks on Binance using two squares. As for the title Binance itself, it stands for "Binary Finance."
CZ wrote that they put a square on top of another square to make it look pretty much like a "digital eight." Even though this is a lucky digit in Chinese culture, they did not like the result. Binance's designer Tang suggested a couple of other variations, CZ says, and he noticed the two diagonal squares on top of each other, with a slight overlap on figure two. This appealed to CZ more than just the two squares on top of each other, since the overlap already symbolized the bids and asks.
The next idea they used was making these small squares overlap each other on a bigger square, like two game pieces on a game board; this would symbolize a crypto exchange operating like a "playground" for trading. However, even then the logo looked "weak" to CZ. Then, Binance designers simply thickened the lines of all the squares. That was it, CZ proudly wrote.
Binance and CoinMarketCap history
Once they agreed on the idea for the logo, Luke stated that he was up to getting a Binance logo tattoo on his arm. CZ and Gareth joined him. Luke, who was in fact Luke Wagman, founder of CoinMarketCap, then also got a tattoo of his platform on his arm. Curiously, a few years later, Binance bought CoinMarketCap.