Binance and Changpeng Zhao after the biggest crypto guilty plea of the era

The Binance story was so large that many readers remember only the first headline: the world's biggest crypto exchange agreed to a massive settlement and its founder, Changpeng Zhao, stepped down. But the sequel is unusually revealing. Binance's November 2023 guilty plea came with a criminal penalty of roughly $4.32 billion and Zhao's own admission that he had failed to maintain an adequate anti-money-laundering program. In April 2024, he was sentenced to four months in prison and later released in September 2024. Then the regulatory climate changed. In May 2025, the SEC voluntarily dismissed its civil lawsuit against Binance and Zhao with prejudice, meaning it could not bring the same case again. A few months later, in October 2025, Reuters reported that Trump had pardoned Zhao. That sequence makes Binance a perfect retrospective story because the public memory usually stops at the gigantic settlement, while the later developments made the final shape of the case look very different.