1:35 PM EDT on October 24, 2025
On Thursday, Donald Trump announced a presidential pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Zhao, better known as CZ, pleaded guilty to money laundering charges in November 2023, then spent most of the summer of 2024 in a U.S. prison before his September 2024 release. Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by a wide margin, and as one might expect from the hub for unaccountable fake money specifically designed to elude any regulatory oversight, the exchange has long been—as Binance executives themselves are quoted saying in various legal filings—a transit center for money laundering. While CZ received a relatively short sentence for his crimes, Binance was subject to $4.3 billion in fines, the largest such penalty in Justice Department history, in addition to a five-year period of monitorship intended to, in the government's words, "ensure Binance's complete exit from the United States."
Two years later, Binance is back in good with the U.S. government, and the guy overseeing the operation is home free. How did it all happen so quickly? The way the Trump admin is framing it, this represents a rollback of their predecessor's adversarial approach with the industry. "The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over," a Trump spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. That is true, if extremely disingenuous, as the end of said war is less a cessation of hostilities than it is a restoration of big-time crypto's status and ability to continue shuffling fake money, simply with the Trump family at the center, raking in staggering sums. CZ got pardoned not because the Trump administration wants to step back and let crypto rock, but because he was and is paying off the president and helping the first family establish its stunningly fraudulent crypto empire and corruption machine.
We have not checked in on the cryptocurrency world in a few months, not since the Trump boys and their sweaty hangers-on threw a big party for themselves at the Bitcoin Conference in May. That moment inaugurated a new era for the crypto industry, one in which it could relax into the welcome embrace of the Trump administration. Though the larger-scale project of cryptocurrency is theoretically opposed to any sort of relationship with the government, this alliance made sense for both sides: Crypto's sharks got the freedom to operate and pollute the environment and break whatever laws they wanted, as long as they paid both lip-service and actual money to the administration letting them do it.
The vehicle is Trump's World Liberty Financial (WLF), a cryptocurrency company offering a memecoin and the USD1 stablecoin token. If you would like to curry favor with the Trumps, you no longer need invest in a fake real-estate project or hire some peripheral nephew to a no-show job; you can just pump money into the president's crypto company. Plenty of shady figures have done exactly that, including Justin Sun, founder of Tron and longtime fugitive from U.S. justice. Sun, who would not have set foot on U.S. soil if anyone else were president because Tron was being prosecuted for extensive wash trading, bought at least $200 million worth of Trumpcoin. The SEC quickly dropped charges.
In March, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates completed a $2 billion investment in Binance using USD1 coins. This was a big break for WLF, CZ, and Trump, as it put CZ in the good graces of the Trump family and helped establish USD1's credibility as a stablecoin. That deal was one part of a parallel arrangement, wherein the U.S. facilitated the sale of scarce and powerful computer chips that the U.A.E. would put to use at a huge artificial-intelligence campus.
Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and his crypto and AI czar David Sacks facilitated both deals and, according to reporting from the New York Times, the two are connected. For the Emiratis to get their chips, they simply had to pay the Trump family. In June, WLF announced a partnership with PancakeSwap, a "decentralized exchange," to promote the further adoption of USD1. It turns out that PancakeSwap was started by Binance employees and, according to the Wall Street Journal, is a Binance cutout. Everyone gets rich, and CZ gets his pardon.
It is worth spelling out exactly what USD1 is, as its very structure shows how brazen this all is. Think of a stablecoin as a casino chip, a digital token whose value is pegged to a stable value which is backed up by fiat currency in reserve. In other words, the Trumps are basically printing a direct competitor to the U.S. dollar, and requiring that anyone who wants their attention simply buy their fake dollars (as always, I recommend you read Jacob Silverman's work) with real dollars. The scale of corruption enabled by WLF is sort of hard to comprehend. An August story in the WSJ estimated that the Trumps had made a whopping $4.5 billion on their crypto grift, which will only grow as USD1 is more widely adopted. At the time of Donald Trump's inauguration, it was obvious that the Trumps were going to use WLF to enrich themselves and open up a channel for anyone who wanted to purchase influence, but the scale of the brazen corruption in practice is something to behold.
This is not to say that the Trumps aren't engaging in more traditional thuggery and pay-to-play–style schemes as well. This week alone, Trump all but shook down his own Justice Department for $230 million and bulldozed a section of the White House to clear the way for a new ballroom. The new addition will be paid for a bunch of big tech companies, as well as several titans of the crypto industry, like Ripple and Tether. Maybe CZ will get to dance there someday. He knows how to get a ticket.
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Staff Writer
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