President Donald Trump reportedly has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder/ex-CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance.
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That’s according to a report Thursday (Oct. 23) by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which noted that the pardon follows months of efforts by Zhao to bolster the Trump family’s crypto venture.
Trump signed the pardon Wednesday (Oct. 22), sources familiar with the matter told WSJ. One source said the president had recently indicated to advisers that he was sympathetic to arguments of political persecution connected to Zhao and others.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had “exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden administration in their war on cryptocurrency,” a war that Leavitt added “is over.”
The Biden administration’s regulators had initiated several prosecutions, lawsuits and enforcement actions against the digital asset sector, many of which have been rolled back under the new administration.
“Deeply grateful for today’s pardon and to President Trump for upholding America’s commitment to fairness, innovation and justice,” Zhao wrote in a post on X. “Will do everything we can to help make America the Capital of Crypto.”
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According to WSJ, the pardon will likely help Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world, to reenter the U.S. market two years after its criminal prosecution. The company pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating federal anti-money-laundering requirements and was blocked from doing business in the U.S.
Binance, the report added, has spent almost a year campaigning for a pardon for its founder, who exited prison last September following a four-month sentence on related charges.
Since Trump’s election, Binance has also been a major supporter of his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, a business that has fueled a significant leap in the president’s personal wealth. That company, WSJ added, has produced substantially more income for the Trump family in the last year than their real estate holdings ever have on an annual basis.
In other digital asset news, PYMNTS wrote Thursday about the increasing confidence among incumbent crypto firms that the next wave of crypto adoption won’t come from day traders or DeFi evangelists, but from payroll departments, procurement teams, and accountants reconciling cross-border invoices.
“Businesses are looking for a better type of money,” Sid Coelho-Prabhu, senior director of product at Coinbase, who’s leading the charge on Coinbase Business, told PYMNTS.
Companies that “want to accept crypto” are drawn by two main use cases, he added. “Investment and payments.”
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