It's official CZ pleaded guilty to a felony charge of violating money laundering laws. CZ's on bail at $175M. He's replaced by Richard Teng after he resigned as CEO of Binance. The exchange's got to pay $4.3B to settle the case.
Did we consider Sam Bankman Fried & Changpeng Zhao would've been convicted criminals in 2023? They're going to be sentenced next year.
Great, they finally got the way out with the attorneys by paying them money under the table.
You have strange ideas regarding "under the table," and it is no minor thing to agree to allowing the USA government (through some auditing and invasive procedures) to monitor and help fix you for the next 5-ish years. that is hardly under the table, either.
It was just about the value that is under consideration for which we were waiting, that's 4.3B. I am not sure how they came to this conclusion but something must have triggered in the minds of CZ. They must have plans otherwise they wouldn't go this far to pay such a high amount to bail out of the country where they had halted their business.
It is a strange agreement, but Binance makes a lot of money, and they (under CZ's direction, and likely advice of counsel) likely considered it worth it to pay that amount - including the other terms of the plea agreement.
Overseas they are anyway doing great business. However, they might be seeing another future within the USA that can trigger even bigger business soon. The best way to tackle this is to get bail, file for guilty operations, and restart the business USA-wide. This can again bring them the huge number of investors onboard with newer investments. Plus, we are closing towards the Halving, I am seeing some patterns here with the timeline they are going.
I doubt that matters move as rapidly as you imagine to be possible. there is a fairly long row to hoe with the extent of the monitoring that Binance is going to go through - in a very much growing industry.. and there are going to be look back provisions in which the govt is verifying past compliance and even perhaps catching new criminals.. while at the same time, making sure that there are abilities for future compliance, and the SEC was not included in the global settlement agreement... which surely could add some additional complications if the SEC is wanting to prosecute Binance.. and whether there would be any success in that direction.. and how should we define success?