Trump has pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, whose crypto exchange has boosted the Trump family's own crypto scam

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The Wall Street Journal @WSJ
Breaking: President Trump has pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, whose crypto exchange has been boosting the Trump family's own crypto venture

He has deep ties to World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture that the Republican president and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. launched in September.

Trump’s most recent financial disclosure report reveals he made more than $57 million last year from World Liberty Financial, which has launched USD1, a stablecoin pegged at a 1-to-1 ratio to the U.S. dollar.

World Liberty Financial also recently announced that an investment fund in the United Arab Emirates would be using $2 billion worth of USD1 to purchase a stake in Binance. Zhao also has publicly said that he had asked Trump for a pardon that could nullify his conviction.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Thursday that the Biden administration prosecuted Zhao out of a “desire to punish the cryptocurrency industry.” She said there were “no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims,” though Zhao had pleaded guilty in November to one count of failing to maintain an anti-money-laundering program.

“I failed here,” Zhao told the court last year. “I deeply regret my failure, and I am sorry.”

https://apnews.com/article/trump-pardon-binance-changpeng-zhao-crypto-exchange-e1cb3fe516bc42b4c7ce5c107a280dc7


The pardon is the latest example of how high-profile business partners of Mr. Trump and his family have benefited from his rollback of the wide-ranging crypto crackdown orchestrated by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. To seek the pardon, Mr. Zhao hired lawyers and lobbyists with ties to the Trump administration, while Binance struck a business deal with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto start-up.

That deal alone is poised to generate tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trumps and the family of Steve Witkoff, the president’s top Middle East adviser.

Mr. Trump has granted clemency to several other prominent crypto executives, including Ross Ulbricht, who ran the Bitcoin-fueled drug marketplace Silk Road. And since Mr. Trump took office, regulators have dropped lawsuits against Coinbase and several other large crypto firms.

Long considered the crypto industry’s richest man, Mr. Zhao — a Chinese-born executive who now lives in the United Arab Emirates — admitted that he had violated the law by failing to install rigorous compliance systems at Binance. That allowed people in sanctioned countries and terrorist groups like Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State to move money on his platform.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/technology/trump-pardons-cz-binance.html


Zhao, one of the most powerful people in the crypto world, had to step down as chief of Binance when the company agreed to a $4.3 billion settlement with the U.S. government to end a years-long probe into misconduct at the world's largest crypto exchange.

Trump's pardon of Zhao paves the way for the crypto mogul to return to the business he helped found in 2017. He has already served his time in prison after a judge sentenced him to four months.

Zhao's pardon is the latest in a series Trump has doled out to executives convicted of white collar crimes.

Earlier this year, he pardoned the founders of crypto exchange BitMEX in connection with similar anti-money laundering violations and the founder of electric truck company Nikola convicted of fraud. He has also commuted the sentence of the executive of now-defunct start-up Ozy Media.

https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2025-10-23/trump-pardons-convicted-binance-founder-zhao-white-house-says


The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Binance and its founder for operating unregistered exchanges and selling unregistered securities in June 2023.

Next, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged them with anti-money-laundering (AML) violations in November 2023. The authorities accused the world's largest exchange of failing to block illicit transactions linked to sanctioned countries like Iran and Russia.

As per a March report by WSJ, representatives of the Trump family had held talks to acquire a financial stake in the U.S. arm of Binance. Binance executives also considered investing in Trump's crypto venture World Liberty Financial to secure a pardon for CZ.

As reported earlier, Trump's son Eric said in an event in May that USD1, the stablecoin launched by World Liberty Financial, will be used to settle the $2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi state’s MGX firm into Binance.

https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/policy/trump-pardon-binance-changpeng-zhao


President Donald Trump and his family’s crypto entanglements keep growing. The latest example came last week when Trump’s son Eric announced that the Emirati venture firm MGX will use stablecoins issued by World Liberty Financial—the family’s blockchain company—to pay for its recent $2 billion investment into the crypto exchange Binance.

Stablecoins, one of the newest arms of Trump’s growing crypto empire, have been a fixture of the crypto industry for years. Firms like Tether and Circle—and more recently PayPal and Ripple—have made billions from these tokens, or a type of cryptocurrency pegged to underlying assets such as the U.S. dollar.

Tether reported revenue of $5.6 billion last quarter, while Circle reported $1.7 billion in its topline in 2024. It’s big business, so it’s no wonder World Liberty Financial launched its own stablecoin, USD1, in late March. Stablecoins tied to the U.S. dollar are backed by short-term treasuries and other dollar-like equivalents. They typically earn yields around 4%—interest that most times is pocketed entirely by the issuer.

If Binance holds on to the USD1, World Liberty Financial would collect the yield off the underlying reserves, which could net as much as $80 million over a year.

That estimate, though, could change based on a variety of variables. For one, if World Liberty collects the entire yield, Binance does not stand to benefit from holding the balance in USD1 and could convert the stablecoin into another asset, such as its own cryptocurrency BNB or another product that passes on interest to the holder.

Also, the reserves backing the Trump family’s stablecoin include treasuries as well as a variety of other “cash equivalents,” according to a spokesperson. Unlike other issuers, World Liberty Financial has not published the makeup of its reserves, so it may hold a significant portion of its assets in non-yield-bearing cash.

https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/05/07/world-liberty-financial-wlfi-trump-binance-mgx-stablecoin-deal/