In a market where crypto cycles rise and fall while AI feels inevitable and biotech plays out over decades, YZi Labs is deliberately positioning itself across multiple technological frontiers.
The unifying thesis is “to focus on the things haven’t happened yet, and to focus on the people who are there to dream them up and to make it happen,” head of YZi Labs Ella Zhang said at Consensus Hong Kong 2026 on Thursday.
YZi, formerly Binance Labs, invests across AI, biotech and Web3, balancing time horizons, particularly as crypto “feels very cyclical at the moment,” while AI adoption accelerates, Zhang said.
“Focus on user demand. Is there real demand happen or the demand is imagined?” she said. Instead of chasing narratives, the firm pressures founders on product fundamentals: what pain point is being solved, how distribution works, and whether there are early signals that the problem truly matters.
That philosophy also shapes capital deployment. “We’re not obligated to deploy all the capital we have,” Zhang said, emphasizing that checks follow conviction, not the other way around. YZi aims to be an early backer but continues supporting companies across multiple rounds, offering mentorship and strategic resources alongside funding.
On infrastructure, Zhang pointed to BNB Chain’s scale as a natural distribution layer, with “thousands of protocols” and “hundreds of millions of users” forming a ready ecosystem for new applications. At the same time, YZi is “very, very open for the founders to fail and welcome them to come back,” she said, framing failure as part of long-term founder development.
As for product trends, Zhang called stablecoins the first true mass-market application beyond trading. “Stablecoins are currently a very good application for crypto to go to mass adoption,” she said, citing improving compliance frameworks globally. Still, she sees further work ahead in custody, exchange infrastructure and on-chain FX before stablecoins fully mature.
