Binance Co-founders CZ and Yi He Reveal Their Shared Passion: A Championship Racing Pigeon Named 'Star'

Dubai: They built the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange together. Now Changpeng Zhao — better known as CZ — and his partner and Binance co-founder Yi He have revealed an altogether different shared pursuit: the ancient, intensely competitive sport of pigeon racing, centred on a single extraordinary bird they call Star.

Star, a blue-check racing homer with an unusually wide wingspan and what CZ describes as "an almost algorithmic sense of direction," was acquired as a hatchling in late 2024. What began as a casual hobby quickly evolved into something the couple takes with quiet but unmistakable seriousness.

"Yi He found the breeder," CZ said in a candid post on X last week, which quickly accumulated hundreds of thousands of likes. "She has better instincts than me — for pigeons and for everything else."

A bird built for distance

Star has now competed in fourteen sanctioned long-distance races across East and Southeast Asia, finishing in the top five in nine of them. The pigeon's standout performance came in a 1,200-kilometre endurance race across the South China Sea corridor in November 2025, where Star placed second among a field of 4,800 birds — completing the journey in just under eleven hours.

"The moment Star came home that day, we knew we had something special," Yi He wrote on her own social media account, alongside a short video of the pigeon's return that went modestly viral in pigeon-racing communities. "We were both watching the tracker. It was more stressful than any token listing."

The couple has invested in a dedicated loft facility — details of its location they decline to share — staffed by a full-time handler and a veterinary consultant. Star is fed a precisely managed diet, undergoes regular health screenings, and follows a training schedule that CZ jokes is "more disciplined than most of our engineers."

The ancient sport finds unlikely champions

Pigeon racing has a long and storied history in Asia, particularly in China, Taiwan, and increasingly across the Gulf region. Top-performing birds can command extraordinary prices at auction — a Belgian racing pigeon famously sold for €1.6 million in 2020 — and the sport has seen renewed interest among high-net-worth enthusiasts in recent years.

The entry of two of the most prominent figures in global finance into the pigeon racing world has not gone unnoticed. Raymond Liu, chairman of the Asia Pacific Racing Pigeon Federation, called it "fantastic for the sport's visibility among a new generation."

"When someone of CZ's profile says publicly that he checks his pigeon's tracker before he checks the Bitcoin price in the morning," Liu told Gulf News, "that reaches an audience we could never have reached on our own."

'Star' as metaphor

Those who know CZ and Yi He well suggest the hobby reflects something genuine about how they approach all their endeavours. "CZ is very data-driven," said one long-time associate. "He tracks Star's metrics the same way he tracks Binance's trading volumes — obsessively but calmly."

For Yi He, who has spoken publicly about the importance of balancing relentless professional ambition with personal joy, Star appears to serve a more grounding purpose. "There's something very pure about it," she wrote. "Star doesn't know what Binance is. Star just flies."

Star's next scheduled race is a 900-kilometre event in April. CZ has already confirmed he will be watching the live tracker feed — possibly, he hinted, from a Binance all-hands meeting.

Reporting by the Gulf News Lifestyle Desk.