Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has spent the past year rebuilding his influence after serving four months in prison for violating US anti-money laundering (AML) laws.

Binance paid $4.3 billion fine; Zhao himself paid a fine of $50 million. He was also banned from holding managerial positions on the stock exchange for life.

In the year following his release in September 2024, Zhao returned to government advisory positions. He moved memecoin with his X posts and refuted The Wall Street Journal’s claims that he was seeking influence through the Trump family and the World Liberty Foundation.

In mid-September 2025, Zhao updated his X profile introduction from “ex-@binance” to “@binance”. Then, on October 23, he received a pardon from US President Donald Trump.

These moves made it valid for a year before the pardon.

Binance Labs is rebranding and YZi Labs is expanding

Even without an executive role, Zhao continues to benefit from Binance’s performance. He reportedly still owns around 90% of the company.

In February, he posted a screenshot suggestion that 98% of his personal cryptocurrency investments are in BNB (BNB). Forbes pegs his net worth is approximately $87.2 billion, although Zhao insists“I don’t have that much.”

Zhao he said in November 2024, he stated that he had no intention of returning to the management of the stock exchange. However, after his pardon, the circumstances of his potential involvement in the exchange changed. Binance did not respond to Cointelegraph by press time.

Richard Teng currently heads the centralized exchange, while Zhao has focused on YZi Labs – the venture company formerly known as Binance Labs – where he took on a mentoring role following its January rebranding.

YZi Labs actively engages capital in cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. It led a seed round in November 2024 in Astherus, which later became derivatives platform Aster, and recently increased its exposure to Ethena, an issuer of the USDe synthetic dollar that has climbed into the top 25 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization with over $10 billion in circulation.

The company has also supported infrastructure-wide projects such as Digital Asset and its Canton Network, and US firm 10X Capital’s BNB Treasury and Aspecta initiative. Its latest major success is a $1 billion commitment to support construction companies on the BNB network.

A beloved pet becomes a memecoin cash cow

Solana was the undisputed leader in the memecoin market in 2024. However, in 2025, the BNB network gave Solana a chance to acquire SOL (SOL).

This change began on February 11, when BNB Chain’s roadmap confirmed its support for the meme ecosystem. Two days later, Zhao shared a long post on X about reuniting with his dog Broccoli after legal troubles in the US, adding at the end that he is not launching memecoin, but the BNB Foundation can reward the best tokens.

The post sparked a wave of BNB meme speculation and briefly caused PancakeSwap’s volume to surge against Solana’s main meme trading platforms.

Related: BNB Wins ‘Uptober’ After Analyzing Binance Market Crash

Through October, the momentum of BNB Chain memes had not abated. Network fees have outperformed the industry at some points, and the network has climbed to second place in several core business metrics. Its starter Four.meme even overtook Solana’s Pump.fun in creating novel tokens for several days.

Zhao’s quarrel with WSJ and the question about a pardon

One of the first public signs that Zhao was open to a pardon came in December 2024, when he published a post declaring that he “wouldn’t mind a pardon” from Trump.

In March 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that members of the Trump family were in talks with Binance about acquiring shares in its US branch and suggested a connection with Zhao’s pardon efforts. Zhao dismissed the report, saying he had not discussed the Binance.US deal with anyone. The dispute was widely discussed and increased scrutiny linked business interests and legal aid. So Zhao called article “motivated by an attack on the President and cryptocurrency.”

Tensions rose in May when The Wall Street Journal published another story claims that Zhao acted as a “fixer”, introducing activist Bilal Bin Saqib to World Liberty Financial, a crypto-venture with ties to the Trump family. Zhao called it “another hit,” saying he met Saqib for the first time on the same trip and did not attend any presentations.

Around this time, Democrats in the U.S. Senate he asked federal officials for information about reports that Zhao was seeking a pardon while Binance was engaging in high-profile political and business interactions.

In a podcast this month, Zhao admitted that his lawyers were preparing a formal clemency application, saying he continued the trial after media reports emerged.

Zhao becomes a crypto statesman

Despite a U.S. criminal conviction, Zhao continues to act as a global crypto-statesman. Several governments have invited him to join the discussion when designing their digital asset strategies.

Malaysia was among the first to seek his opinion in 2025. Following talks involving officials from Kuala Lumpur and the United Arab Emirates, Malaysian authorities said they were considering updating their approach to regulating cryptocurrencies, based in part on talks with Zhao and his team.

Pakistan went further. In April, the government formally appointed Zhao as a cryptocurrency adviser. Instead of relying solely on tight supervision, the country explored options for modernizing its financial sector and sought input from key industry players.

Related: Countries across Africa are approving novel cryptocurrency regulations as adoption increases

Shortly thereafter, Kyrgyzstan appointed him as a strategic advisor as it expands its involvement in state-backed digital assets. By October, the country launched a stablecoin on the BNB chain and confirmed that BNB would join Bitcoin in its national cryptocurrency reserves.

FTX and US law are two recurring problems for Zhao

In June 2025, Zhao asked the Delaware bankruptcy court to dismiss FTX’s lawsuit. The complaint seeks to recover nearly $1.8 billion from Binance’s 2021 share repurchase agreement. FTX Estate maintains that the transaction was a fraudulent transfer funded by client assets.

Zhao said the claims stretched U.S. law too much. He claimed that “every material part” of the transaction took place overseas. In his filing, he called FTX’s theory “nonsense” and accused the company of trying to blame him for Sam Bankman-Fried’s crimes.

FTX also cites X Zhao’s November 2022 posts regarding the sale of Binance’s FTX token (FTT) holdings as a factor in triggering the bank run that exposed its insolvency. Zhao responds that the posts only exposed a “fraudulent enterprise” that was already collapsing under its own weight.

Aster, a hyperfluid competitor, is booming

Aster burst onto the scene in September 2025, quickly challenging Hyperliquid’s dominance in the onchain derivatives market. The platform accumulated approximately $2 billion in total value locked (TVL) through September 18-19, immediately positioning itself as a Binance-affiliated rival to Hyperliquid.

But momentum came with controversy. DefiLlama publicly deleted Aster’s data in early October, citing data integrity concerns. The data platform quietly relisted the exchange but said the problems had not been resolved.

Tensions between Hyperliquid and Binance escalated during the recent $19 billion liquidation, when Hyperliquid’s Jeff Yan accused the exchanges of under-reporting the liquidation to mitigate how bad the situation was. His post specifically named Binance and suggested that centralized platforms were not truthful about risk.

Zhao fired a shot at X, saying“While others tried to ignore, hide, blame others or attack competitors, key players in the BNB Chain ecosystem (Binance, Venus and others) took hundreds of millions out of their own pockets to PROTECT USERS.”

With a presidential pardon in hand, Zhao is no longer defined by his conviction or sentence. His critics say the pardon does not erase the actions that led to it. His supporters say the case against him was a political exaggeration rather than a crime.

He has already returned to the ecosystem, supporting BNB Chain’s rapidly growing projects and advising governments on crypto strategy. Zhao’s newfound freedom will signal whether he and Binance deepen their presence in the U.S. or continue to focus on the broader BNB DeFi ecosystem.

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