Summary
- Explaining his prison sentence hasn’t been a business challenge for Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, he stated in a CoinDesk interview, because people seem to understand that the Trump-pardoned former CEO wasn’t involved in fraud.
- The billionaire stated he learned from his earlier ignorance about U.S. compliance, though he stated he has no plans to be a CEO at the moment and is instead focused on advising firms he’s investing in.
How does a high-profile crypto founder recover his reputation after serving prison time? Changpeng “CZ” Zhao’s answer: He doesn’t have to.
The founder of the Binance crypto exchange represents the rarest of statistics — a billionaire who has been imprisoned, and the only person to ever serve time solely for Bank Secrecy Act violations. But he stated that he’s never lost a prospective business partner because of his guilty plea.
“Once we can explain, ‘Look, this is the Bank Secrecy Act, this is the violation; there’s no fraud.’ Many people confuse that, right?” he told CoinDesk in an interview. “But once they understand … they actually trust you more.”
CZ, 49, is looking now toward his post-prison, post-CEO working life, and the millions of crypto fans he’d cultivated are keenly interested in his next steps. They might be disappointed in the short term, though, because he insists he doesn’t want to return to Binance at this stage and has no interest in running its separate U.S. operation. That leaves him as a pure investor and adviser, searching for startup adventures.
