Story of America’s Richest Prisoner Who Owns $38 Billion
Meglow24 newspaper presents to you today the story of the richest prisoner in America, whose wealth exceeded $ 38 billion.
In detail, the cryptocurrency "BNB", the digital currency associated with the largest crypto exchange "Binance" and its imprisoned co-founder Changpeng Zhao, rose to a record high in the first week of his 4-month prison sentence in the United States.
The rise confirms Zhao's status as the richest person ever to serve time in a US federal prison. Bloomberg reported that Zhao will begin serving his prison sentence in a California prison for 4 months for failing to properly protect the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange against money laundering.
The richest prisoner in America
The price of BNB rose to a peak of $ 717.48 on Thursday, raising its market value to $ 109 billion, according to data from CoinGecko. The token's price has doubled since the beginning of the year.
BNB’s trajectory also mirrors Binance’s own fortunes. The exchange’s total asset value has ballooned from around $80 billion in early January to $125 billion today, cementing its dominance even after a tumultuous period last year that culminated in the company paying a historic $4.3 billion fine to settle a lawsuit with U.S. authorities.
BNB holders receive discounts on trading fees on Binance, and the token is also used to settle fees on the “BNB Smart Chain,” a blockchain network popular in cryptocurrency applications, including games and exchanges.
Cryptocurrency Market Rebound
BNB’s recent surge in derivatives market trading patterns was predicted in late May, with spot demand starting to surge in June and buying consistently outpacing selling from June 2 to 5, according to Kaiko analyst Desislava Obert.
BNB is traded on more than a dozen centralized exchanges, she said, “which is different from other exchange tokens that are traded almost exclusively on their own platforms.” Binance still accounts for 85% of the world’s BNB volume, she added.
Zhao agreed to pay a personal fine of $50 million to settle the charges.
America’s richest prisoner fined
That’s a drop in the bucket for Zhao’s estimated net worth of $38.5 billion — though the exact makeup of that wealth is unknown. Zhao told The Associated Press in a 2021 interview that the majority of his net worth was denominated in BNB, adding that he was a “good-sized shareholder in Binance.”
The man known as “CZ” currently ranks among the world’s 40 richest people and has seen his net worth grow by $4.1 billion in 2024, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
While Zhao has never revealed exactly how much BNB he owns, the 2017 whitepaper from the BNB initial coin offering, or ICO, shows that 80 million tokens, worth around $56 billion today, were allocated to the founding team. The funds raised through the ICO were used to launch the Binance platform.
