Do we like them?Do we like Changpeng Zhao?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A guilty plea, serious but unproven lawsuits and a pardon row sit against a free school project and no harmful words of his own turning up.
Zhao is the founder of Binance, the crypto exchange he built after an earlier stint as chief technology officer at OKCoin. He left OKCoin in 2015 after a fight over his 10% stake, a story he retells in his 457-page memoir, Freedom of Money, which came out in April 2026.
The big stain is the legal one. Zhao pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering violations tied to Binance's 2023 plea, served four months in prison and was pardoned by Donald Trump on 23 October 2025. Senator Elizabeth Warren attacked the pardon as corruption, and his lawyer demanded she retract her remarks, calling the claim that a Binance deal enriched the Trumps “factually and economically unsound”.
The pardon story has a lobbying layer too. The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2025 that he had pushed the administration for a pardon, and he replied that the article “got the facts wrong”. In his memoir he says rival exchanges spent heavily to block it, while Politico reported that Binance spent several hundred thousand dollars lobbying for it.
Then there are the lawsuits. A November 2025 suit by October 7 victims and their families alleges Binance and Zhao let Hamas and other US-designated groups move more than $1 billion through the platform. Binance says it complies fully with sanctions laws, and none of it has been decided in court. In February 2026 the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported allegations about Iran-linked flows. Binance disputes those reports, and Zhao dismissed one as “self-contradicting”.
On the harm test, we found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or climate, and that is an absence of evidence rather than a clean bill. His company's dealings are the live question. Senate Democrats have questioned its ties to Trump-family crypto ventures, while Zhao says he and Binance have no business deals with World Liberty Financial.
The latest mess is the October hack, in which at least $6.4 billion was taken from wallets linked to Binance, with analysts pointing to a North Korea-linked group. Zhao told Musk it was a bad time to troll, and flagged Binance's SpaceX shares as “worth more than a billion”, before saying he never suggested selling them. The memoir also reopened a decade-old feud: OKX founder Star Xu denied its claims and called Zhao “a habitual liar” on X.