The BNB token, a cryptocurrency linked to Binance and its jailed co-founder Changpeng Zhao, rose to a record high in the first week of his four-month prison sentence in the United States.
Its rise confirms Chow's status as the richest person ever to serve time in a US federal prison. Ciao mentioned He was sent to a California prison on Tuesday to begin a four-month prison sentence for failing to properly protect the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange against money laundering.
The price of BNB rose to a peak of $717.48 on Thursday, pushing its market cap to $109 billion, according to Data From Queen Gekko. The price of the token has doubled since the beginning of the year.
BNB's trajectory also reflects the fortunes of Binance itself. The total value of assets on the exchange has swelled from about $80 billion in early January to $125 billion today, consolidating its dominance even after a fraught period last year that culminated in the company paying a historic $4.3 billion fine to settle a case with US authorities. .
BNB holders receive discounts on trading fees on Binance and the token is also used to settle fees on BNB Smart Chain, a blockchain network popular in cryptocurrency applications, including games and exchanges.
BNB's recent surge was predicted in derivatives market trading patterns from late May, as spot demand began to surge in June and buying consistently outpaced selling from June 2-5, according to Caico analyst Desislava Obert.
BNB is traded on more than a dozen centralized exchanges, “which is different from other exchange tokens that are traded almost exclusively on their respective platforms,” she said. She added that the Binance platform still represents 85% of the global volume of BNB.
Binance was accused of anti-money laundering and sanctions violations that included failing to prevent Hamas, Al Qaeda and other armed groups from accessing the exchange. Zhao also agreed to pay a personal fine of $50 million to settle the charges.
This represents a drop in the bucket of Zhao's net worth, which is estimated at $38.5 billion – although the exact composition of wealth is unknown. The majority of his net worth was denominated in BNB, Zhao said in a 2021 interview with The Associated Press, adding that he is a “good-sized Binance shareholder.”
The man known as “CZ” currently ranks as the 40th richest person in the world and has seen his net worth grow by $4.1 billion in 2024, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
While Zhao has never revealed the exact amount of BNB he owns, back in 2017 White papers The BNB Initial Coin Offering, or ICO, shows that 80 million tokens, worth about $56 billion today, have been allocated to the founding team. The funds raised through the ICO were used to launch the Binance platform.