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The Trump administration excels at sowing uncertainty. But it is sending an unambiguous message to crypto entrepreneurs who may be operating on the fringes of the law, or outside of it: Don’t worry about a thing.
ICYMI: President Donald Trump on Thursday issued yet another reprieve for a crypto mogul who happens to have greatly enriched the Trump family’s net worth.
Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former CEO of crypto exchange Binance, served a four-month prison sentence after pleading guilty in 2023 to charges related to anti-money-laundering violations. Zhao, widely known as “CZ,” was released in September 2024. After months of lobbying the Trump administration, he received a pardon, with the White House saying Thursday it believes his case was “overly prosecuted” by the Biden administration.
The pardon is expected to help Binance return to the United States after a yearslong investigation found that the company had allowed criminals to freely transact on its platform, enabling actions including child sex abuse, narcotics trafficking and terrorist financing. (The company and Zhao pleaded guilty in one of the largest corporate settlements with federal authorities in US history.)
Zhao’s case was a major victory for the Biden administration, coming just weeks after a jury found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy in connection with the collapse of his company, FTX, a onetime rival to Binance. (Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in a federal prison, is also angling for a pardon, according to the New York Times.)
At that time, prosecutors and financial regulators had an icy stance toward crypto that the industry has long painted as hostile — a fact that helped galvanize crypto advocates to support Trump, who embraced them (and their very wealthy donors) during his re-election campaign.
Trump, once a skeptic of digital assets, is now a full-fledged crypto mogul. Having amassed more than $5 billion in paper gains through his own and his family’s various crypto projects, Trump’s digital asset portfolio now eclipses his real estate holdings.
But Trump’s success in crypto is thanks in no small part to connections he and his eldest sons have forged with industry bigwigs, including Zhao, whose own net worth is estimated at more than $85 billion.
The Trump family’s crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, is hosted by Binance, and the exchange has been a key driver in the growth of World Liberty’s dollar-pegged token, USD1. Earlier this year, as Zhao was activelyh seeking a pardon, Binance accepted a $2 billion investment from an Emirati-backed investment firm using USD1 — a boon for World Liberty Financial, which effectively received a $2 billion bank deposit.
Democrats and even some Republicans on Thursday called the Zhao pardon inappropriate, given the close connections between Binance, Zhao and the Trump family business.
“It’s just the latest example of Trump’s Pay-to-Pardon Scheme,” former Labor Secretary and prominent Trump critic Robert Reich wrote on X.
Of course, Zhao isn’t the only crypto mogul to discover that plowing money into Trump’s crypto ventures tends to make nettlesome charges disappear.
Justin Sun, the Chinese crypto billionaire who poured tens of millions of dollars into World Liberty Financial soon after it launched, had been facing civil fraud charges in the United States under the Biden administration. The Securities and Exchange Commission dropped the case against Sun in February.
Sun, who’d reportedly avoided setting foot on US soil for fear of being arrested, was a VIP guest at Trump’s private crypto dinner in May — an event for which guests competed for invitations by buying the president’s memecoin.
Other white-collar defendants Trump has blessed with pardons include Ross Ulbricht, a cause célèbre of the Libertarian crypto world, who had been serving a life sentence for creating the Silk Road marketplace, which the Justice Department once described as “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet.”
Trump also pardoned Trevor Milton, founder of bankrupt electric vehicle startup Nikola, who was sentenced to four years in prison for exaggerating the potential of his technology. Milton and his wife notably donated more than $1.8 million to a Trump re-election campaign fund, according to public records.
Trump’s full-throated embrace of crypto has been a welcome shift for investors who’ve been trying to usher digital assets into the financial mainstream. At the same time, many advocates have been uneasy with some of his decisions – including Ulbricht’s pardon – that reinforce crypto’s long association with fraud.
“I love President Trump; this is possibly the greatest admin of my lifetime - except for these pardons,” wrote tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale on X. “POTUS has been terribly advised on this; it makes it look like massive fraud is happening around him in this area.”
While news of CZ’s pardon sent a Binance-linked token higher, the broader crypto market was relatively muted.
The White House has consistently bristled at any suggestion of impropriety or unethical behavior around Trump’s apparent pay-to-play strategies.
And Trump — no stranger to being the target of a white-collar criminal prosecution — defended his decision to pardon Zhao.
“Let me just tell you that he was somebody that, as I was told, I don’t know him, I don’t believe I’ve ever met him … he had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime,” Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins during a roundtable in the White House State Dining Room on Thursday. “It wasn’t a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration, and so, I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.”