After pleading guilty… Who is the resigned founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange?

07:20 PM

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Books – Alaa Hajjaj:

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, was forced to resign from his position on Tuesday after pleading guilty to criminal charges against him in the United States as part of a $4.3 billion settlement.

Before his resignation, Zhao led Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange that was founded in 2017. It provides its services in several markets and more than 360 cryptocurrencies are traded on its platform, through more than 150 million users.

Zhao also owns Binance.US, a related US exchange, which was valued at $4.7 billion in March 2022.

But after it was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2023, it announced that it would move to a cryptocurrency-only model and no longer support dollar transactions.

According to a statement from the US Department of Justice yesterday, the founder and CEO of Binance, a Canadian citizen, pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program, in violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, and that he resigned as CEO of the company.

According to the statement, the company agreed to pay more than $4 billion to resolve a Department of Justice investigation into violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), failure to register as a money transmission company, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, one of the largest corporate fines in US history.

Who is Changpeng Zhao, founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange?

Chow, who has Canadian citizenship, was born in China in Jiangsu Province in 1977, and received his university education at McGill University. Chow’s mother was a teacher and his father was an academic.

The family moved to Canada in the late 1980s after his father got a job at the University of British Columbia.

Chow started programming at around 16 years old and later completed a computer science degree in Montreal, Canada, at McGill University.

An internship in Japan was followed by a stint at Bloomberg’s Tradebook in New York starting in 2001.

Zhou moved to Shanghai, China, in 2005 to develop high-frequency trading software at Fusion Systems. Interest in cryptocurrencies began in 2013 after a discussion in a poker game.

After about a year working at Blockchain.info starting in late 2013, Zhao founded a startup that provides systems and software for exchanges before launching Binance in 2017.

By 2018, Binance was the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.

At the beginning of 2022, Zhao’s wealth jumped to about $97 billion, making him one of the richest billionaires in the world. After a few months, this wealth collapsed to approach $10 billion in June of the same year, before witnessing new fluctuations to reach $23 billion. According to the latest update to Bloomberg data.

Zhao, Binance and its US unit were sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2023 on charges of mishandling client funds, misleading investors and regulators, and violating securities rules.