In a market where crypto cycles rise and fall as AI seems inevitable and biotechnology is decades in the making, YZi Labs is deliberately positioning itself across several technological frontiers.
The unifying thesis is “to focus on the things that haven’t happened yet and to focus on the people who are there to imagine and make them happen,” Ella Zhang, director of YZi Labs, said at Consensus Hong Kong 2026 on Thursday.
YZi, formerly Binance Labs, invests in AI, biotech and Web3, balancing time horizons, especially as crypto “seems very cyclical right now” while AI adoption accelerates, Zhang said.
“Focus on user demand. Is there real demand or imaginary demand?” she said. Instead of chasing stories, the company pushes for the fundamentals of the product: what problem is solved, how distribution works, and whether there are early signals that the problem is really important.
This philosophy also shapes the deployment of capital. “We are not obligated to deploy all the capital we have,” Zhang said, emphasizing that controls follow sentencing, not the other way around. YZi aims to be an early backer, but continues to support businesses through multiple rounds, providing mentoring and strategic resources alongside funding.
Regarding infrastructure, Zhang highlighted the scale of BNB Chain as a natural distribution layer, with “thousands of protocols” and “hundreds of millions of users” forming an ecosystem ripe for new applications. At the same time, YZi is “very, very open to founders’ failure and inviting them back,” she said, viewing failure as part of founders’ long-term development.
When it comes to product trends, Zhang called stablecoins the first true mass market application beyond commerce. “Stablecoins are currently a very good application for crypto to see mass adoption,” she said, citing improving compliance frameworks globally. However, she anticipates that additional work will be done on custody, exchange infrastructure and on-chain exchange before stablecoins mature.
