In the United States, former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison. Last year, he agreed to plead guilty to money laundering as part of a government investigation. This was reported by Engadget.
The announced sentence was significantly less than what prosecutors had insisted on – they had called for a three-year sentence, describing Changpeng Zhao’s crimes as “unprecedented in scale.”
The sentence is also less than the standard federal sentence of 12 to 18 months.
As you know, in the fall of 2023, Changpeng Zhao agreed to resign and plead guilty to the charges. At that time, the former Binance CEO and the cryptocurrency exchange entered into a plea agreement with the government. It included a fine of $4.3 billion from Binance and $50 million from Zhao personally.
Interestingly, this sentence is less than the one recently announced in the case of former FTX cryptocurrency exchange CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in late March, although he later filed an appeal to challenge the verdict.
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