It's difficult to defend CZ/Binance from a guilty verdict. I'll go purely on exact quotes that the US investigation dug up from Binance internal comms:
> As one compliance employee wrote, “we need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days - come to binance we got cake for you.’”
“our stance is [n]ot to openly do business with Iran due to sanctions. … I understand that we still support [I]ranian customers but that has to be done non-openly.”
“we are servicing [them] but non-public. … [the CEO of Binance] knows also. And allows it.”
Message from the CCO to the CEO: “we currently have users from sanction[ed] countries … if fincen or ofac has concrete evidence we have sanction[ed] users, they might try to investigate or blow it up big on worldstage.”
HOWEVER, if I had to steelman the "unfairly persecuted" argument, I'd say that the $4B fine + prison sentence was much harsher than what the DOJ did to traditional banks engaging in the same thing. HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan, and others have all been found guilty of similar AML violations, possibly for more serious offences, and NOBODY went to prison, and the fines were much smaller.
So while the fines/jail were much harsher on Binance than other tradfi offenders, I think most would have rather seen someone from HSBC go to jail for laundering cartel money, vs CZ getting pardoned.
But if the 'ol "slap on the wrist" treated crypto similarly to tradfi, CZ would not have gone to jail - i.e. Binance was unfairly targeted by the previous administration.
CZ pleaded guilty to violating US law by failing to run an appropriate anti-money laundering program.
The administration says CZ wasn't guilty and was persecuted by the previous administration. https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1981457002921677059
What really happened here?
It's difficult to defend CZ/Binance from a guilty verdict. I'll go purely on exact quotes that the US investigation dug up from Binance internal comms:
> As one compliance employee wrote, “we need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days - come to binance we got cake for you.’”
“our stance is [n]ot to openly do business with Iran due to sanctions. … I understand that we still support [I]ranian customers but that has to be done non-openly.”
“we are servicing [them] but non-public. … [the CEO of Binance] knows also. And allows it.”
Message from the CCO to the CEO: “we currently have users from sanction[ed] countries … if fincen or ofac has concrete evidence we have sanction[ed] users, they might try to investigate or blow it up big on worldstage.”
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/binance-and-ceo-plea...
HOWEVER, if I had to steelman the "unfairly persecuted" argument, I'd say that the $4B fine + prison sentence was much harsher than what the DOJ did to traditional banks engaging in the same thing. HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan, and others have all been found guilty of similar AML violations, possibly for more serious offences, and NOBODY went to prison, and the fines were much smaller.
So while the fines/jail were much harsher on Binance than other tradfi offenders, I think most would have rather seen someone from HSBC go to jail for laundering cartel money, vs CZ getting pardoned.
But if the 'ol "slap on the wrist" treated crypto similarly to tradfi, CZ would not have gone to jail - i.e. Binance was unfairly targeted by the previous administration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay-to-play
Here's a video that goes through the sequence of events
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
People got what they voted for.
On a related note, heard Barron is going to head up the US TikTok? Amazing how the concept of corrupt conduct has changed.
https://archive.is/q3XcS
wonder when they are going to publish the white house fee structure and instructions on how to(deniably) approach the approved mediators
Related:
Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45683152