He enjoyed a home-cooked dinner in Montana with a former U.S. senator. He visited Telluride, Colo., and Moab, Utah, a vacation spot known for its national parks. And he chatted about start-ups with Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI.
After pleading guilty to a money-laundering violation in November, Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, did not sit still. A federal judge denied his request to return home to Dubai, but Mr. Zhao, 47, was free to roam the United States. So he spent the past five months traveling the country, networking with other entrepreneurs and laying the groundwork for his next act.
When he pleaded guilty, Mr. Zhao, once the most powerful figure in the global crypto industry, resigned as Binance’s chief executive and agreed to pay a $50 million fine. On Tuesday, he is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court in Seattle, with prosecutors seeking a three-year prison term, while defense lawyers have asked for probation and no time behind bars.
But Mr. Zhao, who goes by the initials CZ, is already looking to the future. He has a $33 billion fortune, according to Forbes, and he announced last month that he was starting a new web platform to promote online education.
Mr. Zhao has also expressed interest in investing in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, and has corresponded with other executives. Late last year, he and Mr. Altman exchanged text messages, two people familiar with the matter said, and discussed the challenges of expanding a start-up worldwide.
Many powerful crypto executives have faced federal lawsuits and criminal charges since the multitrillion-dollar industry imploded in 2022. Some have gone to prison, while others have enjoyed the high life before being arrested. Mr. Zhao’s fate is likely to be kinder than most.
His frenetic activity since November contrasts with the consequences faced by Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX. Once Mr. Zhao’s greatest rival, Mr. Bankman-Fried was largely ostracized after FTX imploded in 2022 and prosecutors charged him with stealing $8 billion in customer funds. A jury found him guilty of fraud last year, and he was sentenced in March to 25 years in prison.
Mr. Zhao, who pleaded guilty three weeks after Mr. Bankman-Fried was convicted at trial, still enjoys widespread support in the crypto industry. Dozens of current and former Binance employees have submitted letters to Judge Richard A. Jones, the federal judge overseeing Mr. Zhao’s case, asking him to impose a lenient sentence. And many crypto entrepreneurs, investors and dignitaries have continued supporting Mr. Zhao, court records show.
A short prison stint “is a small price to pay to be a billionaire for life,” said John Reed Stark, a former Securities and Exchange Commission official and a critic of the crypto industry. “The industry just does not care about the extraordinary crypto crime wave ushered in by people like CZ.”
Representatives for Mr. Zhao and OpenAI declined to comment.
For much of Binance’s existence, Mr. Zhao was dogged by accusations that he had broken the law to build a crypto empire. Binance was the world’s largest crypto exchange, processing as much as two-thirds of all transactions. And Mr. Zhao became a crypto celebrity, with nearly nine million followers on X. His posts helped set off a chain of events that led to FTX’s demise in 2022.
Last year, Binance faced its own reckoning. The company agreed to pay $4.3 billion to the U.S. government to settle charges that it allowed criminal activity to flourish on the exchange.
U.S. officials said Binance violated economic sanctions, allowing access to its platform to people in countries like Cuba, Syria and Iran. Mr. Zhao failed to set up proper anti-money-laundering controls, prosecutors said, and let customers sign up for accounts without providing the basic personal details that financial services firms usually require.
“Zhao violated U.S. law on an unprecedented scale,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing on Wednesday. “Zhao’s sentence should reflect the gravity of his crimes.”
Mr. Zhao started talking about his next act the moment the charge against him was announced. In a post on X the day of his plea hearing in November, for which he appeared in person in federal court in Seattle, he said he was interested in investing in areas like crypto, biotechnology and A.I.
“I may be open to being a coach/mentor to a small number of upcoming entrepreneurs,” he wrote. “If for nothing else, I can at least tell them what not to do.”
In a filing last week, prosecutors said Mr. Zhao had traveled throughout the United States, visiting New York, Los Angeles, Telluride and Moab. Mr. Zhao, who grew up partly in Canada, has spent some of…
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