Bitcoin
How Crypto’s Richest Billionaire Doubled His Net Worth Behind Bars
The founder of Binance, known to crypto followers as CZ, is spending the summer at the minimum-security Lompoc prison in Santa Barbara. As crypto markets soar, Forbes reveals the secret source of its growing billions.
Per Javier PazForbes team and Steven ErlichForbes Team
Prison has been good for Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Already the richest person to go behind bars and often the richest person in crypto, Zhao’s net worth has skyrocketed since he became a criminal.
Forbes now estimates he’s worth $61 billion, making him 24thh richest person in the world, right after Julia Koch and family. The next richest person in crypto is Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong with $11 billion.
CZ’s upward review has two components. First, his 90% equity stake in Binance, the major cryptocurrency exchange, is valued at $33 billion, despite CZ stepping down as CEO in November 2023 as part of a settlement with the US Department of Justice. in which he pleaded guilty to combating money laundering. and sanctions violations. His company also paid a $4.3 billion fine to the government. However, the impact on Zhao’s personal wealth was less severe, as he only had to pay a $50 million fine. In the six months since its appeal, Binance has actually increased its dominance among cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide in terms of trading volume (although it has been excluded from the Forbes List of Most Trusted Cryptocurrency Exchanges.) According to data compiled from The Block, his share of the total spot market on exchanges has increased to 42% in the six months since he left the company, from an average of 38% in the two months before its liquidation.
BNB VERSUS BITCOIN AND ETHEREUM
Accumulated performance in the year 2024
The big change in CZ’s net worth comes from Forbes’ discovery of his personal holdings in his exchange-issued BNB token, which we estimate to be 94 million tokens or 64% of the total 147.5 million BNB tokens in circulation. Forbes estimates that Binance holds 71% of the BNB supply.
Despite the exchange’s legal troubles, BNB is on the rise in 2024, rising 100%, far outpacing other major cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin (up 54%), ether (up 53%), and solana (up 49%) . BNB recently reached an all-time high of $714, giving it a market capitalization of $110 billion.
What is BNB? Binance coin or BNB was initially launched in 2017 as a fundraising tool for CZ to launch its new exchange. Tokens like BNB are created by the developers running the crypto projects and are similar to airline mile loyalty points than actual shares in a company, although they are traded on crypto exchanges like stocks and are sought after by investors. Tokens like BNB do not offer ownership, but rather reward holders, who are often customers, with discounts for trading or as an incentive to recruit new account holders. They are often used, in the words of a former FTX insider whose company’s FTT exchange token led to its dramatic fall, as a “form of equity because there is no public capital.” The Securities and Exchange Commission appears to agree, as it is currently suing Binance for selling BNB to US customers as an unregistered security.
Changpeng Zhao, 47, accumulated his BNB stash in two ways. Binance was created in 2017, and he and the founding team received 80 million tokens out of a total supply of 200 million BNB. Forbes’ forensic analysis of the wallets that received these tokens, carried out in conjunction with Gray Wolf Analytics, indicates that the company holds 46.2 million of the original 80 million tokens. CZ is credited with 41.6 million BNB of this value due to his 90% ownership in Binance.
The second component of CZ’s wealth is more obscure. The results of an investigation published by Forbes and conducted with Gray Wolf in October 2023 revealed that the Binance ICO was initially undersubscribed, which led CZ and his company to funnel unsold shares into wallets he controlled. In 2017, Binance said it sold 100 million BNB for $0.15 each, raising a total of $15 million. Our analysis last fall showed that no more than 10.8 million BNB were sold, netting less than $5 million.
OWNERSHIP OF BNB BY BINANCE
Current BNB supply: 147.5 million
In its official white paper, which functions in the cryptocurrency world as a pseudo prospectus for ICO investors, Binance did not disclose what would happen to any unsold tokens. Ultimately, forensics shows that they were placed in wallets owned by Binance. Today, we estimate that these wallets hold 58 million BNB, worth $35 billion at the current price of $602. CZ’s 90% ownership of Binance would give him just over 52 million additional BNB. In total, we believe he holds almost 94 million BNB tokens. Lawyers for Binance and CZ did not respond to our requests for comment on CZ’s holdings.
The value of the Binance founder’s holdings would be $56.6 billion today, but given that there is little chance Zhao would get anywhere near that value if he tried to sell, Forbes applied a 50% liquidity discount to his holding. Currently, BNB trading volume is around $1.6 billion worth of tokens per day.
Despite claiming to have 200 million customers worldwide, very little is known about the inner workings of Binance – it has never been audited – and over 53% of all BNB trades take place on the Binance exchange itself. Over the last month, BNB has gained about 5%, which on paper equates to about $3 billion in gains for the Binance founder. So as Zhao serves his four-month sentence, soaking up the California sunshine in the courtyard of the Lompoc II federal correctional center, he watches his billions of BNB grow.
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