“You won,” Sam Bankman-Fried wrote to Changpeng Zhao, then the CEO of Binance, on the website then known as Twitter, early last December, following the collapse of Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX. And for a little while, at least, it seemed that Zhao (commonly known as CZ), the founder of the largest crypto exchange in the world, had successfully assumed the mantle of crypto’s reigning king.
But on Tuesday, just weeks after Bankman-Fried was convicted for fraud, CZ and Binance pleaded guilty to criminal violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, admitting to failures in preventing money laundering. Both now face jail time; Bankman-Fried may be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, while CZ could get 18 months or less.
While criminal charges against Binance — which was founded in China but later claimed to have no official headquarters — have been anticipated for more than a year, CZ’s position as the most powerful, and wealthiest, person in crypto still seemed assured. Yet as part of the plea agreement, CZ relinquished his CEO role, making him yet another casualty of an international regulatory effort that has now dethroned — and often incarcerated — virtually all of the leading figures in crypto’s brief history.
The graveyard of crypto CEOs is crowded. In 2014, Charlie Shrem, the CEO of an early Bitcoin exchange, pleaded guilty to his role in facilitating the operations of illicit drug marketplace Silk Road and served a year in prison. The following year, Mark Karpeles, the CEO of Japanese crypto exchange Mt Gox (the world’s largest before its demise), was arrested in Tokyo and confined to a jail cell after his company suffered a debilitating hack. Last fall, Jesse Powell, the CEO of U.S.-based exchange Kraken, stepped down amid investigations of his company.
And this year, Arthur Hayes, the co-founder and former CEO of BitMEX, wrapped up a six-month term of house arrest in Miami after pleading guilty to similar charges as CZ. In June, Do Kwon, the CEO of Terraform Labs who turned fugitive after his Luna cryptocurrency crashed to zero, was sentenced to jail in Montenegro. And in September, Su Zhu, the co-founder of collapsed hedge-fund Three Arrows Capital, was arrested and sentenced to four months in prison in Singapore. November, of course, saw the conviction of Bankman-Fried and CZ’s guilty plea, but also the announcement by large crypto exchange Bittrex that it would shut down completely (following an August settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission), and a lawsuit by the SEC against Kraken, accusing it of operating unlawfully.
“Admittedly, it was not easy to let go emotionally,” CZ wrote on X following news of his plea and departure. “But I know it is the right thing to do. I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility.”
The penalties Binance agreed to pay, totaling more than $4.3 billion, are not just the largest for a crypto company but one of the biggest fines ever paid by a corporation, amounting to more than the $3.9 billion Goldman Sachs paid several years ago for its role in a Malaysian corruption scandal. To highlight Binance’s malfeasance, prosecutors pointed to a comment, caught in writing, by a compliance employee suggesting an unorthodox marketing strategy: “We need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days — come to binance we got cake for you.’”
Prosecutors were quick to link their victories over Bankman-Fried and CZ to their ability to crack down on bad actors who tried the hardest to evade them, offshore crypto exchanges that outwardly claimed not to do business with Americans. “The message here should be clear: Using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor, it makes you a criminal,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
But the list of fallen crypto companies and CEOs actually paints an even grimmer picture. Since the demise of FTX a little over a year ago, there’s been an unshakeable feeling that crypto is a ghost town — one full of companies that are either bankrupt, secretly insolvent, downsizing as their market potential has shrunk, or losing talent to more traditional industries. The price of Bitcoin may have more than doubled, to more than $37,000, since a year ago, but it still trades at just about half its value at its peak. And even if Bitcoin may be here to stay, for companies that remain in business, their continued survival seems to face even bleaker odds — at least in their current form.
One of the few major CEOs still standing is Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, which was sued in June by the SEC. Still, he struck an optimistic tone following Binance’s criminal plea: “Today’s news reinforces that doing it the hard way was the right decision,” Armstrong wrote on X. “We now have an opportunity to start a new chapter for this industry.”
