finance
Trump Pardons Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao After He Served Four Months for BSA Violations
Changpeng Zhao received a full unconditional pardon from President Trump on October 21, 2025, clearing his record after serving four months in prison for a Banking Secrecy Act violation. Zhao, who founded Binance and stepped down as part of a plea deal, said the pardon restores his ability to serve as a shareholder and obtain financial licenses.
May 12, 3:28 PM·2m read1 source
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President Trump granted Changpeng Zhao a full unconditional pardon on October 21, 2025. The pardon clears Zhao’s criminal record and restores his ability to obtain financial licenses globally. Zhao, the founder of Binance, remains the largest shareholder of the exchange but no longer runs the company as part of his plea deal.
He self-surrendered on May 30, 2024, served four months in federal prison and was released on September 27, 2024. 3 billion in fines while Zhao paid $50 million. The Department of Justice had alleged Binance facilitated $8 billion in illicit transactions.
That figure represented only a fraction of the $125 trillion in total lifetime trading volume on the platform, Benzinga reported. Zhao told the PBD Podcast that the timing of the government’s actions was coincidental.
“We got a lot more scrutiny from the US SEC and other US agencies. Of course, you just took away one of their biggest donors. He was the biggest guy giving money to them. ” FTX collapsed at the end of 2022 after Zhao announced that Binance would sell its FTT tokens.
By early 2023, Zhao’s legal team said the DOJ had a case and wanted to get to a deal. Sam Bankman-Fried gave over $100 million in stolen FTX customer funds to political donations ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, according to federal prosecutors. Zhao said he never received any requests for political donations.
He is a Canadian citizen living outside the US. Zhao’s legal team said they had never seen a case where the government took a Banking Secrecy Act violation this aggressively. “They were extremely aggressive,” Zhao said.
