On Thursday, Donald Trump announced a presidential pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Zhao, better known as CZ, pleaded guilty to money laundering charges in November 2023, then spent most of the summer of 2024 in a U.S. prison before his September 2024 release. Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by a wide margin, and as one might expect from the hub for unaccountable fake money specifically designed to elude any regulatory oversight, the exchange has long been—as Binance executives themselves are quoted saying in various legal filings—a transit center for money laundering. While CZ received a relatively short sentence for his crimes, Binance was subject to $4.3 billion in fines, the largest such penalty in Justice Department history, in addition to a five-year period of monitorship intended to, in the government’s words, “ensure Binance’s complete exit from the United States.”
Two years later, Binance is back in good with the U.S. government, and the guy overseeing the operation is home free. How did it all happen so quickly? The way the Trump admin is framing it, this represents a rollback of their predecessor’s adversarial approach with the industry. “The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over,” a Trump spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. That is true, if extremely disingenuous, as the end of said war is less a cessation of hostilities than it is a restoration of big-time crypto’s status and ability to continue shuffling fake money, simply with the Trump family at the center, raking in staggering sums. CZ got pardoned not because the Trump administration wants to step back and let crypto rock, but because he was and is paying off the president and helping the first family establish its stunningly fraudulent crypto empire and corruption machine.
