U.S. President Donald Trump has granted Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao a pardon, months after the former exchange CEO confirmed he’d asked for a presidential pardon.
Zhao served four months in prison in 2024 after pleading guilty in November 2023 to charges of violating the Bank Secrecy Act. As part of his plea deal, he stepped down from running Binance, the exchange he’d founded and helmed since 2017, and agreed to a $50 million fine. Binance also pleaded guilty to charges and agreed to a court-appointed monitor, as well as a record-breaking $4.3 billion fine paid to the U.S. Department of Justice, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Treasury Department.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the news on Thursday.
In a post on X, Zhao said he was “deeply grateful” for the pardon.
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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Zhao had been “prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.”
“In their desire to punish the cryptocurrency industry, the Biden Administration pursued Mr. Zhao despite no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims,” she said. “The Biden Administration sought to imprison Mr. Zhao for three years, a sentence so outside Sentencing Guidelines that the even the Judge said he had never heard of this in his 30-year career. These actions by the Biden Administration severely damaged the United States’ reputation as a global leader in technology and innovation. The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over.”
At the time, federal prosecutors alleged that Binance employees knew they were violating the Bank Secrecy Act, citing chat logs between different staffers. The exchange was serving users in sanctioned countries, as well as “facilitating transactions between U.S. users and users in sanctioned countries,” then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
Court filings from 2023 said Binance employees told Zhao they were calling VIP customers in the U.S. rather than communicating in any way that would leave a paper trail, while also moving these users into accounts on Binance’s offshore platform and encouraging “them to provide non-U.S. KYC information.”
“Zhao authorized and directed this strategy, explaining on the call, ‘[W]e cannot say they are U.S. users and we want to help them. We say we mis-categorized them as U.S. users, but actually they are not,'” the filing said.
An unidentified individual said Zhao suggested an “international circumvention of KYC.”
The same filing also said Binance was a go-to platform for illicit actors, tying $106 million in proceeds from darknet marketplace Hydra, $275 million in deposits from mixing service BestMixer and others to the exchange. Binance executives were aware that illicit actors were on their platform, the filing said.
With a pardon, Zhao can conduct more business operations in the U.S. If Binance also receives a pardon, as BitMEX did earlier this year, it may find it easier to grow operations in the U.S.
Zhao said he had asked for a pardon in May 2025, after reports from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal indicated his team had sought a pardon for him.
Binance previously received a $2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi firm MGX, which used the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin to make the investment.
BNB BNB$1,133.01, originally created as the native token of CZ’s Binance exchange and now the native currency for BNB Chain, added about 3% in the minutes following the news.
In a statement, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the leading Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said, “First, Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to a criminal money laundering charge. Then he boosted one of Donald Trump’s crypto ventures and lobbied for a pardon. Today, Donald Trump did his part and pardoned him. If Congress does not stop this kind of corruption in pending market structure legislation, it owns this lawlessness.”
A Binance spokesperson said in a statement, “Incredible news of CZ’s pardon today. We thank President Trump for his leadership and for his commitment to make the US the crypto capital of the world. CZ’s vision not only made Binance the world’s largest crypto exchange but shaped the broader crypto movement. Binance remains focused on building a secure, transparent, and user-first platform that reduces fees and increases access to the financial system for all.”
UPDATE (Oct. 23, 2025, 15:58 UTC): Adds additional detail.
UPDATE (Oct. 23, 2025, 16:20 UTC): Adds Warren statement.
UPDATE (Oct. 23, 2025, 17:07 UTC): Adds Zhao tweet.
UPDATE (Oct. 23, 2025, 17:41 UTC): Adds Binance statement.
UPDATE (Oct. 23, 2025, 17:55 UTC): Adds White House statement and additional context.