Binance Faces $4.3B Settlement Amid U.S. Regulation and AML Scrutiny

Zhao recounts Binance’s clash with U.S. regulators, the $4.3B AML settlement, and a California prison term in his memoir. The book frames the case as about what Binance became.

Rich by Coin

2026-04-12

Zhao also recounts Binance’s long battle with U.S. regulators, the company’s record $4.3 billion settlement for fostering unscrupulous money launderers, his four-month prison sentence in California, where he says he began writing the book, and his recent pardon by President Trump. The book, Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance, runs 364 pages, self-published in English and Chinese. In Zhao’s telling, the case brought by multiple U.S. agencies was less about what Binance had done than about what it had become.

The U.S. government alleged that Binance failed to implement programs to prevent or report suspicious transactions — including those tied to Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, Al Qaeda, and ISIS — while also processing trades between U.S. users and those in sanctioned jurisdictions like Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Regulators alleged the exchange willfully failed to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions, including those involving terrorist organizations, ransomware attackers, child sexual exploitation material, frauds and scams. The final settlement amount, $4.3 billion, was split across the Department of Justice, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the CFTC, and was the largest corporate penalty in the history of nearly each agency involved.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at the time of the announcement: “Binance became the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange in part because of the crimes it committed.” The prison passages are among the most vivid in the book. Zhao says he was worried about extortion because the media had reported he was the richest person in U.S. prison history, but then realized no one read the WSJ or Bloomberg or recognized him. Binance at one point held a roughly 20% stake in Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and about $580 million in FTT tokens.

As FTX neared collapse in late 2022, Zhao writes, Sam Bankman-Fried called to ask for a couple of billion dollars “nonchalantly, as if he was asking for a bologna sandwich.” Some believe that Binance’s brief show of interest in acquiring FTX, followed by its abrupt withdrawal from the deal, hastened FTX’s spiral into bankruptcy.