Trump Pardons Binance Founder: Crypto Industry Impact

Donald Trump, as President, has just given Changpeng Zhao of Binance (the biggest cryptocurrency trading exchange in the world) a pardon. Zhao had already spent four months in jail for breaking money laundering laws. The White House says the previous government was unfairly prosecuting Zhao and that this shows they’re going to be changing how they deal with cryptocurrency. What Zhao is accused of is not stopping bad things happening on Binance, including money laundering that was connected to awful crimes such as the exploitation of children, selling drugs, and funding terrorists. Late in tackling it, in 2023 Zhao said he was sorry for not having good enough systems to prevent money laundering and he accepted being guilty of this. Things are complicated further by his relationship with World Liberty Financial – a cryptocurrency project Trump and his sons were involved with. World Liberty Financial started USD1, a cryptocurrency whose value is tied to the US dollar, and this made Trump a lot of money, it’s said. Recently, this project teamed up with an investment company in the UAE, using USD1 to buy a part of Binance, which strongly links Zhao’s exchange and Trump’s money dealings. Zhao himself had said to Trump he should be forgiven for his conviction, saying it wasn’t wasn’t fair and was politically motivated. Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary, said after the pardon that the Biden administration had been trying to punish the cryptocurrency industry by going after Zhao. She pointed out that nobody had said Zhao had been involved in fraud or that specific people had been harmed by him, so the prosecution hadn’t been necessary.