Binance founder to serve 4 months in prison

The Binance founder Changpeng Zao has been sentenced to four months of prison time by a Seattle court on March 30. The court ruling was a result of a multi-year effort on the part of the US Department of Justice (DOJ), the Commodity Futures Trading Commision (CFTC) and the Treasury Department to put a dampener on Binance's business model that apparently was engineered to achieve growth at all costs.

Zhao had to resign as the CEO of Binance late last year; in addition to fines imposed on him and the company that he reportedly still controls, totalling over $4.4 billion, he now has to spend four months in prison.

While the judge accepted the fact that Zhao's wrongdoings had mostly involved neglecting laws rather than breaking them intentionally, Binance was in fact found guilty of facilitating various kinds of illicit activities around the world that included funding terrorists, helping cybercriminals extort money and violating sanctions among other things. Binance representatives say that the company already has much stricter policies in place to achieve a tighter control over suspicious transactions than ever before.

This is certainly not the first conviction in the crypto industry. In 2022, Faruk Fatih Özer, the founder of the Thodex cryptocurrency exchange platform, was handed 11,196 years of prison time for stealing about $2 billion from Thodex users. More recently, Sam Bankman-Fried received a 25-year sentence for his FTX/crypto-related fraud.

Changpeng Zhao founded Binance in 2017 in China. Prior to betting big on Binance, the Chinese Canadian businessman had invested in several other companies but none was destined to become as successful as Binance.