Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, founder and former CEO of Binance, confirmed on a podcast that he had officially asked for a presidential forgiveness of Donald Trump – less than a year after having a four -month sentence in an American federal prison.
Zhao shared the update on an episode of the Radio Farohk podcast, declaring that his legal team had submitted the request two weeks earlier.
“I applied lawyers. We only submitted to ourselves after the Bloomberg article and the article of the Wall Street Journal was released,” he said, referring to the coverage of Mars which pointed out that he was looking for a forgiveness while engaging in cryptographic trade agreements involving allies of the Trump family. “And I said to myself, well, if they write this article, we could also officially apply.”
At the time, Zhao publicly rejected certain parts of these stories, calling them inaccurate and denied any active commercial negotiation involving an American binance
Zhao was sentenced in April 2024 after pleading guilty the previous year so as not to have maintained an effective program to fight money laundering in Binance, at the time the greatest exchange of cryptocurrency in the world in terms of commercial volume.
In addition to his prison sentence, Zhao paid a fine of $ 50 million. Binance herself paid $ 4.3 billion in what has become one of the largest corporate regulations in American history. He was released in September of last year.
Trump has already forgiven other high -level characters in cryptographic space. These include the founder of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht and the co-founders of Bitmex, because his administration caused a more user-friendly regulatory environment.
During the podcast, CZ also revealed that he was not invested in Donald Trump’s same Trump.
