Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has been pardoned by President Donald Trump.
Zhao—known as “CZ”—was sentenced to four months in prison in 2024 after pleading guilty to breaching US money laundering laws. Binance itself was fined $4.3bn after investigators found it had helped users bypass sanctions.
That would be a remarkable story on its own.
But it sits inside something much larger.
The Trump crypto machine
In March 2025, a stablecoin called USD1 was launched by World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency venture closely tied to the Trump family.
A Trump business entity owns 60% of the company and is entitled to 75% of revenue from coin sales. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are actively involved. The family and its affiliates were allocated billions of tokens.
This is not a passive investment. It is a business.
And a highly lucrative one.
According to the Financial Times, Trump’s crypto ventures have already generated more than $1bn in pre-tax profits over the past year, boosted by a broader crypto boom and an administration that has taken a markedly friendly approach to the industry.
That figure only includes realised gains. On paper, the value of Trump-linked crypto and media assets runs into the billions.
Binance’s role
Binance sits at the centre of this ecosystem.
It holds roughly $4.7bn of USD1—around 85% of the total supply. That is an extraordinary concentration. For comparison, Binance holds only a small fraction of Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin.
In other words, a Trump-linked cryptocurrency is heavily concentrated on a platform whose founder was recently convicted of money laundering offences—and has now been pardoned by the same administration.
You don’t need to stretch very far to see the alignment of interests.
Money flowing in
The investor base is equally revealing.
- An Abu Dhabi investment firm committed $2bn using the Trump-backed stablecoin
- A UAE-linked fund invested $100m in World Liberty Financial
- A Chinese-listed company raised $300m to invest in Bitcoin and Trump-linked tokens
And then there is Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire who has faced fraud and market manipulation allegations from US regulators.
Sun invested $75m in the venture shortly after the election. Three months later, the SEC paused its case against him to explore a resolution. He later dined with Trump and publicly backed the $TRUMP memecoin.
None of this proves wrongdoing.
But it does show how closely political power, regulatory decisions, and private financial interests are now intertwined.
A business built on the presidency
The Trump crypto operation extends well beyond stablecoins.
It includes:
- memecoins linked to Trump and his wife
- digital trading cards
- a decentralised finance platform
- a range of tokens with little obvious purpose beyond speculation
The memecoins alone generated hundreds of millions in fees.
These ventures operate in a largely unregulated space, and they trade heavily on their connection to the president.
That connection is the product.
The line that has moved
All of this blurs the boundary between public office and private wealth in a way that has no real precedent in modern US politics.
Presidents have always had business interests. But the scale, visibility, and direct monetisation of political power here is something else.
Trump is not just a politician with business interests.
He is running a set of businesses whose value is directly tied to his political position.
A shift on the right
There is also a broader ideological shift here.
Conservatives once prided themselves on “sound money”—stable currencies, fiscal discipline, and scepticism towards financial speculation.
Cryptocurrency represents the opposite of that tradition:
- volatile
- lightly regulated
- detached from state backing
Yet it is now being championed by parts of the political right, both in the US and, increasingly, in the UK.
That is not an accident.
Why crypto?
The attraction is not hard to see.
Cryptocurrency allows money to move:
- quickly
- across borders
- with limited transparency
That makes it appealing not just to investors, but to anyone who wants to move capital outside traditional financial controls.
In a world of sanctions, capital controls, and regulatory scrutiny, that has obvious uses.
The line that is being crossed
Taken together, this is not just a story about crypto.
It is a story about how political power, private wealth, and global capital are becoming entangled in new ways.
The pardon of Changpeng Zhao is one piece of that.
The Trump family’s crypto empire is another.
What connects them is a system in which the boundaries between governance, business, and finance are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish.
And once those boundaries blur, it becomes much harder to tell where public interest ends and private gain begins.
Cryptocurrency also facilitated an entirely new type of criminal activity, namely ransomware.
The international financial system has been designed to that payments within that system can be reversed if they are fraudulent or made under duress: this means that it (intentionally) isn’t suitable for paying ransoms.
This wasn’t an issue for traditional kidnappers, who had to meet the ransom-payers in person anyway (to return the hostage), allowing them to take a payment in physical cash. For ransomware extortionists (who effectively “kidnap” data over the internet, and who are often thousands of miles from those whose data they seize) this obviously wasn’t possible: and this class of crime thus only really became viable when an alternative payment means that couldn’t be reversed was in place — cryptocurrency fulfilled this need.
It’s not the only form of criminality on line that is facilitated by crypto. This is why it is popular with people who are adjacent to criminality. Kleptocrats
There is also a rise kidnappings related to this. People being tortured for their passwords.