Editor’s note: There is a leak in the villa that has never been properly fixed, leaving a differently colored water stain on the ceiling; boxes of Binance merchandise are piled in the entrance hall, and the host urges reporters to pick something to take with them; the Steinway piano at home is placed in the middle of the game room, and when the tuner comes, it turns out that no one has ever played it.
This is the daily life of Changpeng Zhao in Abu Dhabi as portrayed by The New York Times.
He drives a white Nissan SUV, mounts his iPhone on the windshield, and jokes that he looks like “the world’s richest Uber driver”; the president of Kyrgyzstan gave him a Taigan dog, while another dog he named “Broccoli” because it sounds a bit like “blockchain.” He also talks about his days in prison: chatting about business with bank robbers, answering cellmates’ questions about why Bitcoin is rising, and even organizing a study group that tracked stock prices.
These details assemble a rather contradictory Changpeng Zhao: on one hand, he keeps emphasizing that he is just an ordinary, even somewhat frugal “tech guy”; on the other hand, he is already situated within a network of power made up of royalty, sovereign funds, governments, and global capital. Even after pleading guilty, going to prison, and stepping back from Binance’s management, his influence in the crypto industry has not truly disappeared.
What makes this article interesting is precisely the juxtaposition of these two images. Changpeng Zhao tells his story as an outsider who stumbled into big events, while another thread in the piece shows that he has been quite shrewd at every step: choosing where to settle, choosing whom to ally with, and also choosing how to tell his own story. Binance’s early growth depended on surviving in the gaps of regulation; today’s Changpeng Zhao is already seated directly among governments, sovereign capital, and political families.
In this sense, his story is also a microcosm of the crypto industry over the past decade: from rough-and-tumble growth, to being brought into regulation, to becoming deeply tied to politics and state capital. Those small details in daily life may be the easiest entry point for understanding this story, but what is truly worth asking behind them is this: why does a person who has experienced a guilty plea and imprisonment still sit at the center of the table?
The full text follows:
I.
On a morning in June, cryptocurrency tycoon Changpeng Zhao drove a white Nissan SUV to the St. Regis Resort in Abu Dhabi. Changpeng Zhao is the richest man in cryptocurrency, with an estimated net worth of $114 billion, and he lives nearby in a villa: nine bedrooms, four bodyguards, a chef, and a yacht named “Da Moon.” But he also likes to play the kind of “ordinary person” he often uses to describe himself, and that day he offered to personally show me around the city. Outside the St. Regis, Changpeng Zhao sat in the driver’s seat of the Nissan, with his iPhone mounted on the windshield, looking exactly like the world’s richest Uber driver. “This is my Lamborghini,” he joked as I got in.
To be clear: Zhao Changpeng is not an ordinary person. Not long ago, U.S. authorities filed criminal charges against him over the way he ran Binance; in court documents, the cryptocurrency exchange was described as a haven for Russian money launderers, sanctions evaders, and Islamic State terrorists. Zhao pleaded guilty, yet his fortune remained intact. After serving a four-month sentence, he returned to Abu Dhabi, still a major shareholder of Binance and still one of the most powerful figures in the industry.
Now 49, Zhao moves through the world like a head of state: traveling across Asia by private jet, advising governments on cryptocurrency regulation; each time he stops in Islamabad or Manila, news of a new regulatory breakthrough for Binance often follows. At his home, one of his two dogs is a Taigan, an elegant Central Asian hound often compared to a gazelle. It was a gift from the president of Kyrgyzstan, a man with a keen interest in cryptocurrency who also went skiing with him in February. "He originally wanted to give me a tent, one of those large tents," Zhao said. "I said no tent, so he insisted on giving me a dog."
Zhao's most influential allies are two powerful ruling families. One is the family that governs the United Arab Emirates, which hopes to use him to build a technological powerhouse in the desert. The other is the Trump family. Last year, Binance established a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency startup founded by President Trump and his three sons. Last year, World Liberty generated $799 million for Trump, making it his most profitable single asset, bringing in more money than his real estate portfolio or his social media business. Last October, Trump pardoned Zhao, a move widely criticized as a quid pro quo.
Known in the industry as "CZ," Zhao usually avoids reporters, but this year he met with me several times, eager to put a friendlier gloss on his career at Binance, even though the exchange has yet to stop the flow of dirty money. Tall and thin, with short black hair and a Binance tattoo on his forearm, he lacks the fraternity-style flamboyance of many of his cryptocurrency peers. He comes across as polite and focused, though his interests are narrow to the point of being comical. This year, he self-published a memoir, "Freedom of Money," in which he writes about someone taking him to see the Louvre after closing. The experience left him cold. He wrote that the guide might as well have been "casting pearls before swine."
For years, his true calling has been what scholars call "jurisdictional arbitrage," moving from one country to another in search of a legal framework soft enough to accommodate his appetite for risk and growth. In Abu Dhabi, he may have found his ideal base. We drove into the city, Zhao chatting amiably, pausing midway to have his bodyguard help with directions. ("Yes boss, keep right.") We passed a stretch of grand mansions and headed toward the presidential palace, Qasr Al Watan, its striking white dome reminiscent of the Taj Mahal.
Zhao Changpeng grew more and more animated. "For the past few hundred years, democracy has been held up as the holy grail, but democracy is inefficient," he said as we neared the presidential palace. "If you get a benevolent dictator, it's actually extremely efficient. No arguments, no wasting time on those boring things."
Recently, this medieval yet ultramodern, top-down model of business and politics has been gaining traction in the United States. During a visit to Abu Dhabi last year, Trump called the country's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, "a very tough guy" and "a rare visionary." Zach Witkoff, the son of a senior Trump adviser and himself something of a MAGA princeling, put it more bluntly at a cryptocurrency conference in Dubai last May. "We really should learn from His Highness and the UAE's approach," Mr. Witkoff said. "They are a remarkable example of how to lead in innovation while preserving family values."
Zhao Changpeng already lives in the future these people yearn for, settled in an elite enclave where monarchs and billionaires coexist harmoniously. As we drove away from the presidential palace, he told me about a private meeting he had previously attended at the nearby Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental hotel, with attendees including hedge fund founder Ray Dalio and Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son. Sitting in the audience, Zhao Changpeng noticed someone leaning over to speak to him. It was Sheikh Mohammed. He wanted to know how Zhao Changpeng was doing and whether there was anything he could help with.
II.
One day earlier this year, Zhao Changpeng was working propped up in bed when the windows suddenly began to shake. He has long struggled with chronic pain and often handles business lying down. He told me he got up and walked onto the balcony, where he saw a trail of smoke in the sky. Zhao Changpeng lives on Saadiyat Island, an enclave in Abu Dhabi across the Persian Gulf from Iran; Iran had just fired a missile at the UAE.
It was the beginning of a geopolitical crisis that would shake the region, but Zhao Changpeng was not particularly concerned. He went back to bed and continued working. "More people die in traffic accidents than from missiles," he later said. "It's very safe here."
Before settling in the UAE, Zhao Changpeng was a man without a country. Born in China, he moved to Canada with his family at age 12. After studying at McGill University, he held several technical jobs, moving between New York, China, and Japan. In July 2013, at a poker game in Shanghai, a colleague suggested he look into "a new thing called Bitcoin."
For his borderless lifestyle, it was the perfect borderless technology. After studying it for a few months, Zhao Changpeng made a radical bet. He sold his family home: a three-bedroom apartment in Shanghai where he and his wife were raising two children. The entire $900,000 from the sale went into Bitcoin. It was a risky move, but Zhao Changpeng was not worried. He thought that even if Bitcoin crashed, he could always find another high-paying job in traditional finance.
After that, Zhao Changpeng held positions at several cryptocurrency startups in Asia. The industry expanded rapidly in the 2010s, with hundreds of new tokens emerging, but the platforms trading these coins were loosely managed and vulnerable to hackers. In July 2017, Zhao Changpeng founded Binance. Within a few months, it became the world's largest exchange, a title it has never relinquished since.
Binance's success was built on two key insights. First, cryptocurrency investors as a species are addicted to risk, and simply exchanging dollars or yen for an equivalent amount of cryptocurrency could never satisfy them. For years, Binance operated as a margin exchange: traders could borrow money and make high-risk, high-reward bets on the prices of Bitcoin and other popular tokens.
The second insight was simpler but had a greater impact. Many cryptocurrency investors were unwilling to reveal their identities, and Binance did not require them to. During its first four years, the company allowed customers to open accounts without providing even the most basic KYC information. Traditional companies require this "know your customer" information to prevent financial crime.
Binance was not the only exchange offering such high-risk services, but Zhao Changpeng executed better than any competitor. "There were many MySpaces in the exchange world, and he built Facebook," said Austin Campbell, founder of a cryptocurrency consulting firm. The result was an extremely profitable state of anarchy: a platform where uncensored investment products were open to uncensored traders. As the market boomed, Binance took a cut from every transaction; according to "Money Freedom," the company's profits quickly reached $1 billion.
Zhao Changpeng became a celebrity in the cryptocurrency world overnight. But even as he joined the ranks of a small group of super-rich executives with astonishing political influence, people outside the industry never quite understood him. In recounting his most controversial moments, Zhao Changpeng portrayed himself as a passenger: a cryptocurrency geek dazzled by success, an innocent outsider who somehow became a James Bond villain.
The performance was not always convincing. Sitting in his kitchen in late June, Mr. Zhao told me that during Binance's explosive early years, he had "never really wanted" to break the law, and that the company's loose controls at the time had allowed wave after wave of bad actors to launder money. "That was just my lack of experience in that area," he said. "I'm a tech guy, I always lived in China."
That image did not match the evidence that American prosecutors gathered while investigating Binance. In court, they quoted a warning Mr. Zhao gave a subordinate: "It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission." According to legal filings, Mr. Zhao privately discussed how to conceal the fact that Binance served U.S. users, even though the company was not licensed in the United States. "Don't leave anything in writing," he told a subordinate.
In Abu Dhabi, Mr. Zhao described himself as a "rule follower." But it is clear that at a pivotal moment he made a strategic choice: to test the boundaries of the law, when the habits of a new generation of investors were taking shape and the rules themselves were quite elastic.
I thought of that again when he led me into the entryway of his home. Boxes of Binance merchandise were piled there. He urged me to pick out a gift, like a Binance backpack or a yellow-and-black Binance sweater styled like a baseball jacket.
I told him that journalists have rules about this kind of thing and that I could not accept any gift worth more than $20. He laughed and said it was "probably 19."
III.
After years of moving around Asia, Mr. Zhao visited the United Arab Emirates in 2021. In 2017, when the Chinese government was preparing to announce a crackdown on cryptocurrency exchanges, he and his Binance colleagues had to flee China in the middle of the night. Their time in Japan did not work out either; neither did Singapore, where it was difficult to get a work visa. Then Mr. Zhao's friend Gabriel Abed made a suggestion. Mr. Abed is a businessman and also serves as Barbados's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. He told Mr. Zhao to take a look at Dubai.
Mr. Zhao immediately saw how the Emiratis treated the wealthy and powerful. He arrived in Dubai on a Saturday morning in October, and a few hours later, the government minister Omar Sultan Al Olama came to visit. He offered Mr. Zhao a so-called golden visa, which grants ten years of worry-free residency. A doctor was called in to conduct the blood test required of all visa holders. Such applications usually take weeks to complete, but Mr. Zhao was approved in less than 12 hours.
The warm reception left a deep impression on Zhao Changpeng. "On my fourth day in Dubai, I looked at two properties," he told me. "I bought the second one." By the end of that year, Binance had signed a memorandum of understanding with the local government to jointly develop rules for the cryptocurrency business; the company dispatched three employees to help draft the framework. The draft was completed in January 2022 and signed into law a few weeks later. "If you're the captain of a ship sailing due north, the UAE wants you to join their fleet," Mr. Abed said. "That's what they did with CZ. From day one, they were circling around him."
In the UAE, not everyone receives such generous treatment. For years, the country's leaders have implemented mass surveillance, criminalized even the mildest dissent, and overseen a labor market where foreign workers are routinely exploited and abused.
But for Zhao Changpeng, it was the beginning of a comfortable new life. Before founding Binance, he had separated from his wife, who moved to Tokyo with their children. He had gotten together with his colleague He Yi. He Yi worked in marketing and was known in China as a former host of the travel program "Beautiful Destinations." Zhao's older children were attending university in the United States, while he and He Yi were raising a young family in the emirate.
Zhao Changpeng was introduced into an unattainable social circle of billionaires. He got to know a group of UAE leaders interested in technology, whom he called the "crypto sheikhs." Eventually, he made the acquaintance of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of Sheikh Mohammed. Sheikh Tahnoon, obsessed with jiu-jitsu, often hosted powerful businessmen in his palace. In the circle of royal dinners, Zhao Changpeng was treated as an honored guest. "We were still wondering, how should the seating be arranged?" he said. "Sit wherever you like, it's all fine."
In these early encounters, the sheikhs would pitch the UAE to Zhao Changpeng and ask what they could do for him. Before long, Zhao Changpeng began extolling the country's virtues to a broader group of billionaires. He encouraged AI mogul Sam Altman to set up a company in the UAE and warned that other countries would be hostile to him. "You're going to face a lot of regulatory problems," Zhao Changpeng told him over coffee.
Zhao Changpeng was by no means casually acquainted with the perils of an emerging industry. When he arrived in the UAE, he was locked in a fierce battle with a young entrepreneur named Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the rival exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried, the son of two Stanford Law School professors, was in many ways the opposite of Zhao Changpeng: a true insider who used connections and closeness to American political elites to pave his way to the top of the industry. "He had doors I didn't," Zhao Changpeng wrote in his memoir. Bankman-Fried would poach Binance employees, offering three to five times their salaries. Zhao Changpeng also heard rumors that Bankman-Fried was badmouthing him in Washington.
In November 2022, a report by the cryptocurrency media outlet CoinDesk questioned the soundness of FTX's financial condition. At the time, Zhao Changpeng was in Dubai, about to go drinking with Gabriel Abed, and he decided to speak out on Twitter, posting a brief and cold announcement: he was going to sell his $500 million worth of FTT, a token representing FTX stock. The post triggered panic, and anxious investors rushed to withdraw funds from FTX.
The money was not there. Bankman-Fried had stolen $8 billion from customers. He had no choice but to seek a bailout, and only one person in the cryptocurrency world had the resources to save him. Two days after the tweet, Zhao Changpeng announced the acquisition of FTX; one day later, he withdrew from the deal, pushing FTX deeper into crisis. It all looked like a masterful corporate war, or in one observer's words, a "blood sport." Within six weeks, Bankman-Fried was arrested in his apartment in the Bahamas and extradited to the United States. He was ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud.
Zhao Changpeng told me he never intended to destroy FTX. Assuming again his usual posture of shrugging and feigning innocence, he explained that he had planned to slowly sell off his FTT over several months. "I didn't mean to collapse them," he said. "We lost $500 million."
The opponent he defeated saw it differently. "He played me," Bankman-Fried said at the time, "and played it beautifully."
IV.
Billionaires rush to the UAE for reasons that are also billionaire-like. The country levies no income tax and is considered extremely safe, especially at a time when cryptocurrency investors in Europe and the United States are frequently targeted by kidnappers. But for Zhao Changpeng, who had just watched his old rival be transported across borders, the UAE had another important advantage: it has no extradition treaty with the United States.
He recalled that in late 2022 or early 2023, a member of the UAE royal family asked him at dinner whether he wanted citizenship. Zhao Changpeng submitted some documents and then waited. A few months later, a government envoy came to his home with a box containing passports for him and his family. Emiratis "will never extradite their own citizens," Zhao Changpeng told me. "That is very powerful."
He had reason to be wary: the noose around Binance's neck was tightening. U.S. prosecutors were gathering evidence that the exchange's lax procedures allowed fraudsters, hackers, and sanctions evaders to move money. In private messages obtained by the government, Binance employees spoke with astonishing candor about the exchange's unsavory clients. "Is it too hard to launder drug money now," one employee wrote. "Come to Binance, we have cake prepared for you."
Changpeng Zhao hired a legal team to negotiate terms with the Department of Justice. The new passport gave him considerable leverage. After living in Dubai for two years, he moved an hour and a half south to Abu Dhabi, closer to the country's center of political power. During the negotiations, Changpeng Zhao seriously considered a life on the run: he would have to restrict his travel, but in the UAE he would at least in theory be safe.
In the end, his legal team reached a deal with the U.S. government. Changpeng Zhao would plead guilty to violating the anti-money-laundering Bank Secrecy Act and step down as chief executive. (The company would pay a $4.3 billion fine.) Despite the lenient terms, he was still dissatisfied with his lawyers and did not believe at all that he deserved prison. "I'm going to prison because our platform didn't do a good job with KYC," he told me. "In America, you can vote for president without an ID. I don't know how this system came about. Thinking about everything I've been through, I actually think someone should go to prison for this."
Still, for Binance this was an excellent outcome. At the sentencing hearing in the spring of 2024, Changpeng Zhao made a statement of remorse: "I deeply regret my failure to fulfill my duties, and I am sorry." The judge sentenced Changpeng Zhao to four months in prison, calling him "a devoted family member and a giving person." As the court read out the sentence, Changpeng Zhao's son, who was in college, quietly pumped his fist.
As one of the very few felons with almost unlimited resources, Changpeng Zhao was in an extremely favorable position to suffer as little as possible. He was assigned to Lompoc II, a minimum-security prison in California, where Bankman-Fried was later held in the same prison complex. Before reporting to prison, Changpeng Zhao assembled a team of advisers to teach him the subtleties of prison-yard politics. One adviser, Michael Santos, corresponded with other inmates, and one of them agreed to help Changpeng Zhao get familiar with the environment in prison. "CZ, you're a people person, you've managed thousands of employees," Mr. Santos told him. "You won't lose those skills when you walk in here."
Changpeng Zhao arrived at Lompoc on the morning of May 30, 2024. He quickly integrated into what is called a "car," an informal social group usually divided along ethnic lines. At meals, other Asian inmates sat with Changpeng Zhao, and during recreation they exercised with him on the yard. They were excited to be in the same place as a billionaire. "Everyone made way for him," said Jaton Aguon, a fellow inmate at Lompoc. "It was like a king walking down the aisle."
Changpeng Zhao grew close to a Vietnamese bank robber who had once been an engineer. They talked in detail about the robberies, and there was none of the elaborate Ocean's Eleven-style preparation people might imagine. Changpeng Zhao told me this man was "very gentle" and "a super calm person." "He just walked in, asked for the money, and left. And he got away with it 11 times."
This bank robber was one of the few inmates interested in the business world. He read Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, and asked Zhao Changpeng about Elon Musk's astronomical compensation package at Tesla. Other inmates also had business-related questions; one wanted to understand the mysteries of the cryptocurrency market. "He said, well, that, Bitcoin... why did it go up?" Zhao Changpeng recalled. "I said, wow, I'm actually not sure either." Zhao Changpeng organized a study group tracking stock prices; there was a television in the prison locked onto CNBC.
Not everything he said was accepted by everyone. At Lompoc, Zhao Changpeng found it hard to make people understand his deep belief that the Binance case essentially had no victims, "no fraud, nothing at all." When he explained the details, the response was dismissive. "They said, yeah, everyone says that," Zhao Changpeng recalled.
In August 2024, Zhao Changpeng left Lompoc and transferred to a halfway house. But a minor issue with his immigration status forced him to spend his final two weeks in a local jail, passing the time in his cell doing push-ups and sit-ups. On the day of his release, an officer escorted him out, where his mother, sister, and assistant were waiting. They drove to a nearby airport and put him on a private plane to Abu Dhabi.
From the moment Zhao Changpeng walked out of the detention facility to the takeoff of his private plane, only 26 minutes passed.
V.
After Zhao Changpeng returned, the world was shifting in his favor. A cryptocurrency-friendly government was about to take power in Washington. Shortly before the election, Trump co-founded World Liberty with the Witkoff family. Mr. Witkoff is a real estate tycoon preparing to serve as White House Middle East envoy. Soon, these newly empowered transactional diplomats from the United States began frequenting the UAE.
While driving me around the city, Zhao Changpeng stopped and pointed to the ADNEC Center, a convention hall that hosted a major gathering of cryptocurrency enthusiasts in December 2024. "That's where I met Eric Trump," he said. He recalled that at the venue, a Trump supporter named David Bailey introduced him to the president's second son, a person in charge at World Liberty. It was just a casual conversation, with no formal agenda. "He just said he was looking at a real estate project here," Zhao Changpeng told me.
Their interests were about to converge. The UAE has been pushing to transform from an oil state into an emerging technology power, an effort led by Sheikh Tahnoon, who oversees $1.5 trillion in Emirati sovereign wealth. Before his imprisonment, Zhao Changpeng had discussed selling Binance shares to the UAE with Peng Xiao, a senior deputy to the sheikh—a move that would have been the ultimate fusion of his company and a political patron.
Sheikh Tahnoon, rarely seen without sunglasses, is chairman of MGX, a venture fund focused on artificial intelligence. Early last year, MGX agreed to invest $2 billion in Binance; according to a person familiar with the matter, the deal valued Binance at $75 billion. MGX saw Binance as the perfect bridge between cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence: a high-tech money-transfer service that could one day let automated AI "agents" pay on behalf of real people.
Zhao told me he wanted to settle the deal in Bitcoin. The Emiratis worried that Bitcoin's price volatility could complicate the transaction. They preferred to pay with a stablecoin, a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a $1 price.
Accounts differ on what happened next. If Democrats win control of Congress in November, this is likely to become the subject of a congressional investigation. According to MGX, the fund evaluated multiple stablecoins and ultimately chose USD1, a token issued by World Liberty, on the grounds of "commercial fit." Given that USD1 is completely untested and has no track record, that was a shocking choice. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Binance explicitly asked MGX to pay with USD1; Zhao said the decision was MGX's. "I don't care much, as long as the stablecoin is reputable and won't disappear overnight," he told me. "There were no other considerations."
But all parties had incentives to bring World Liberty into the deal. In January 2025, days before Trump's inauguration, an investment firm with UAE ties took a 49% stake in the startup; Sheikh Tahnoon gained a seat on World Liberty's board. Around the same time, the UAE was negotiating with the White House for exports of valuable chips that power artificial intelligence. Binance also had something to ask of the Trump administration. As its legal troubles faded, the company wanted to escape some of the restrictions imposed under its 2023 settlement.
Steve Witkoff's son Zach announced the deal in May 2025, thanking Binance and MGX "for their trust in us." Congressional Democrats denounced it as "stablecoin corruption." Issuers like World Liberty make money by taking cash deposits from cryptocurrency traders, giving them stablecoins, and investing the deposits to earn returns. With the $2 billion from MGX and Binance, World Liberty became one of the world's largest stablecoin companies overnight—a windfall for both the Trump and Witkoff families. "This is nothing but an all-out effort to curry favor," said Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, who investigated Zhao and Binance. "The scope and scale of the corruption are unprecedented."
Changpeng Zhao insisted there was nothing improper. He said he no longer holds those USD1 tokens, having instead invested them in Bitcoin and other assets. "I think President Trump has very good lawyers, and this arrangement where the son does business and the father is president is completely compliant," he told me. He also suggested that some of the anger might stem from cultural differences. "In Kazakhstan, we can eat horse meat," he explained. "In some other countries, we'd think, 'That's crazy.'" Isn't it a good thing when the ruling families of two governments do business together? Changpeng Zhao brought up a medieval analogy. "Marry one country's daughter to another country's prince," he said, "and they can maintain 50 years of peace."
Two weeks after the $2 billion deal was completed, the White House agreed to share access to these chips, overriding concerns from some U.S. national security officials. Last spring, Steve Witkoff accompanied Trump on a visit to Abu Dhabi and celebrated the deal with the UAE side at the presidential palace.
According to a person familiar with the conversation, Mr. Witkoff also privately told an acquaintance that Changpeng Zhao should receive a pardon. Changpeng Zhao has submitted the relevant documents and is awaiting the president's decision. The outcome has huge implications for Binance. After Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty, the exchange's dormant U.S. business lost its state licenses. A pardon would help the company market itself to regulators. (A White House spokeswoman said Mr. Witkoff is not involved in the pardon process.)
Describing the process to me, Changpeng Zhao chose his words carefully, calling it a "black box" guarded by several lawyers who periodically send updates from Washington. "From time to time," he said, some unidentified intermediaries would approach him at social occasions, saying that for the right price, they could arrange a meeting with Trump. "It's a mini-industry of people trying to make money," Changpeng Zhao said.
Changpeng Zhao ignored them. He told me that in March 2025, after other crypto executives received pardons and The Wall Street Journal reported that he was also seeking a pardon, he began seriously considering one. "I thought, if the newspaper thinks I should seek a pardon, then maybe I really should," he said.
In fact, according to two people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The New York Times, as early as December 2024, Changpeng Zhao's legal team had already been working with prominent pardon lawyer Brett Tolman to explore the possibility of clemency. Public filings show that Binance ultimately paid $2.1 million to a lobbying firm run by Ches McDowell, with services including "executive clemency." Mr. McDowell is close to the president's eldest sons. (A spokesman for World Liberty told me the company "was not involved in any pardon decision at all.")
When the pardon was announced last October, Zhao Changpeng had just flown into Kyrgyzstan to meet with President Sadyr Japarov, who was interested in creating a digital currency pegged to the Kyrgyz national currency. In the capital, Bishkek, as his host welcomed him, Zhao Changpeng posted a brief thank-you on social media. That evening he and the president spent time together at a restaurant, talking about stablecoins.
VI.
On a scorching morning this summer, Zhao Changpeng drove his car into the driveway of his $5 million villa. He and He Yi take turns here hosting each other's parents and siblings. Two dogs greeted him at the door. Besides the Tibetan mastiff, Zhao Changpeng also has a Belgian Malinois named Broccoli, because he thought the word sounded a bit like "blockchain."
A photographer followed behind as Zhao Changpeng moved briskly between several rooms, pointing out photos of the family's young children. A stately off-white piano stood in the center of the children's playroom, surrounded by piled-up toys, and its neglected appearance greatly displeased the tuner who came to service it. It was a Steinway, "the very expensive kind," Zhao Changpeng told me, "but I can't play." In his home gym, he stopped to do a few sets of bench presses.
What Zhao Changpeng wanted to make clear was that he does not live like a typical billionaire. Forbes estimates his wealth at more than $100 billion, but Zhao Changpeng insists the actual figure is much lower, around $10 billion to $30 billion. He says he could live very comfortably on just a tiny fraction of that, a mere $10 million.
In cryptocurrency podcast circles, Zhao Changpeng is occasionally asked about his house, and he often mentions that there is a leak upstairs that has never been fixed. Sure enough, in the living room, he pointed to a water stain on the floor and then to the ceiling. "Right there," he said, "I don't know if you can tell the color is different."
By billionaire standards, Zhao Changpeng's villa is indeed modest; he told me that a nearby house is on sale for $150 million. But his displays of humility are hard to reconcile with the world of power and privilege in which he is embedded. At a group dinner once, Zhao Changpeng listened to Sam Altman describe an emerging field of biotechnology research. "They can take sperm and eggs from a person," Zhao Changpeng recalled, "basically, you can have children all by yourself." Zhao Changpeng himself also has ambitions to defy biological limits; he invested in a startup researching artificial wombs.
Since his release from prison, Zhao Changpeng's time has been divided among a series of matters, including his tech investments and travels as a kind of cryptocurrency diplomat, promoting the industry in countries that often treat him like royalty. "They always send someone with two cars, driving right up to the plane," he told me. "And a girl holding local specialties, as if you should take a bite."
Zhao downplayed his involvement with Binance; the company's plea agreement prohibits him from "operating or managing" the business. He made a point of expressing displeasure with Binance's recent decision to sue The Wall Street Journal. The paper had previously reported on staff departures in its compliance department, and he called the lawsuit "a complete waste of time." Even if Binance won, "they wouldn't get much," he told me. (The company dropped the suit last month.)
Clearly, Binance remains a significant part of his life. One of the two people who succeeded him as co-CEO is He Yi, the mother of his three young children. Two years ago, in a move toward traditional governance, Binance established a board of three ostensibly independent trustees. One of them also serves as chairman: Gabe Abed, the friend who originally recruited Zhao to the UAE. They had jet-skied together, and Mr. Abed had even given Zhao a pair of orange high-top sneakers printed with "TRUMP CRYPTO PRESIDENT."
Recently, Binance has faced new allegations of misconduct. Last year, four compliance officials were fired or suspended after reporting that nearly $2 billion in funds flowed from client accounts to a group of Iran-linked entities—possibly a repeat of the sanctions-evasion behavior that led to the U.S. criminal case in 2023. The company disputed the employees' conclusions and denied that anyone was disciplined for raising concerns. The Justice Department later said two Chinese companies used Binance to launder proceeds from Iranian oil sales, but it did not charge Binance.
Binance's relationship with the UAE has also shown some cracks. In December last year, the company obtained a license to operate in Abu Dhabi, a city that will soon face intense Iranian missile attacks; the exchange's new regulator praised Binance as a beacon of "regulatory progress." Yet by this summer, two Binance employees were briefly detained in the UAE. For local police, this was an unusually tough step, as they were investigating possible financial crimes on the platform.
These detentions unsettled Binance's local staff. Zhao told me he messaged a contact in the UAE police and also reached out to several subordinates of Sheikh Tahnoon. "I just said, 'Look, let's figure out a way to keep this from happening again,'" Zhao recalled. "It doesn't look good for the country, and it doesn't look good for us." He insisted the UAE remains a friendly home for Binance. "No one is in danger," he said.
Changpeng Zhao has the kind of confidence that comes from repeatedly escaping danger. In an era that often rewards those who blatantly break the rules, he is a thorough winner. In his memoir, he devotes a page and a half to his belief in "simulation theory," the idea that we may all be living in a reality imagined by someone else. He encountered this idea early in his cryptocurrency career and now believes it is mathematically certain. "In 20 years, we should be able to plug a tube into our heads like in The Matrix and enter a full simulation," he wrote. "Billions of people will do it. Then there will be billions of simulations."
This belief gives Zhao some detachment from the pressures of daily life. We may be some version of Super Mario, he wrote, running around in an artificially constructed scene. He tries to live by a simple motto: "It's just a game."
Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:
Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia
