Ex-Binance CEO Gets Four Months in Prison. He’ll Be Back—Better Than Ever?
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Ex-Binance CEO Gets Four Months in Prison. He’ll Be Back—Better Than Ever?
What a gut punch for Sam Bankman-Fried, at least in his delusional version of crypto Neverland.
Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the 47-year-old former CEO of Binance, was sentenced on April 30th to four months in federal prison after pleading guilty last year to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to meet U.S. anti-money laundering requirements for the crypto exchange. (He resigned and was fined $50 million; Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, agreed to pay $4.3 billion.) Prosecutors were seeking a prison sentence of three years for Zhao, well above the maximum term of 18 months recommended under federal guidelines.
While Zhao’s attorneys were asking for five months of probation, the four-month prison term seems like a gift given the intense focus on cracking down on the crypto industry, particularly those operating crypto exchanges. John Reed Stark, a former Securities and Exchange Commission official, told The New York Times that Zhao’s time in prison “is a small price to pay to be a billionaire for life. The industry just does not care about the extraordinary crypto crime wave ushered in by people like CZ.”
By crypto standards, Zhao’s case and sentencing—significant for what it means to the industry, on many levels—played out rather matter-of-factly, absent the drama and chaos that surrounded the indictment, trial and conviction of Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, who was given a 25-year prison sentence for defrauding customers of $8 billion. (He is appealing the conviction.)