CZ Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering, Pays $4.3B in Fines, and Steps Down as CEO of Binance

TL;DR

• Regulatory our bodies just like the U.S. Division of Justice, have apparently been conducting an investigation into Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao (aka CZ), for yeeears.

• We discovered, just some hours in the past that CZ plans to plead responsible to violating legal U.S. anti-money-laundering necessities, when he seems in court docket subsequent Tuesday.

• …however the markets appear to be dealing with nicely (for now).

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Wow. Okay.

That headline ain’t nice!

But someway, as of this writing, the market hasn’t actually reacted. Which begs the query…

Did we simply dodge a Black Swan occasion?

For these of you taking part in at dwelling, this is what you’ve got missed:

Over the previous 12 months or so, there’s been a knot of concern sitting within the crypto house’s proverbial abdomen – a concern that one thing dangerous may occur to Binance (the world’s largest crypto trade).

One thing very ‘FTX-y’…

However as increasingly more time handed with none incident, the concern of inside threats to Binance’s enterprise slowly started to subside…at which level, everybody turned their worries to potential exterior threats.

(Particularly from regulatory our bodies).

Regulatory our bodies just like the U.S. Division of Justice, which had apparently been conducting an investigation into Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao (aka CZ), for yeeears.

Here is what we discovered, just some hours in the past:

1. CZ plans to plead responsible to violating legal U.S. anti-money-laundering necessities, when he seems in court docket subsequent Tuesday.

2. He has apparently agreed to step down as CEO of Binance

3. Binance pays $4.3 billion in fines

4. This could probably enable the trade to maintain working within the US

As we mentioned on the prime: this ain’t nice information!

…however the markets appear to be dealing with nicely (for now).

We’re undecided why, but when we needed to make guess – it’d go like this:

The headlines are studying ‘settlement,’ not ‘loss at trial.’

And the markets are fairly nicely attuned to crypto firms settling with US regulatory our bodies at this level.

Let’s hope issues keep that approach!