Richard Teng, chief executive officer of Binance Holdings Ltd., at an event hosted by the Foreign Correspondents Association in Singapore, on Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024.
Ore Huiying | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Binance CEO Richard Teng says the Trump administration has been a “fantastic” reset for the cryptocurrency industry.
“It’s an extremely different environment that we’re operating in,” Teng told CNBC on Tuesday.
In the span of 16 months, Binance has gone from a political outcast to a possible power broker in Washington. Once the poster child for regulatory defiance – Binance was slapped with a record $4.3 billion settlement with regulators and forced to oust billionaire founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao – the crypto exchange is now navigating a dramatically friendlier political landscape under President Donald Trump’s second administration, Teng said.
“We’ve benefited from this shift,” said Teng, who was appointed Binance’s CEO in November 2023.
Teng’s comments come as the crypto exchange is in talks to have the Trump family take a financial stake in the company, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. That same day, Bloomberg reported that World Liberty Financial, a Trump-linked crypto bank that has not yet launched, is engaged in talks with Binance to launch a dollar-pegged stablecoin.
If such deals were reached, it would mark a staggering reversal for a company that was once a pariah in Washington.
Teng, a soft-spoken former regulator, was careful with his words when addressing the reports.
“I believe both World Liberty Financial as well as CZ himself have tweeted and denied the reports,” said Teng, who runs the exchange’s operations outside the U.S.
As for the rumors about a Trump stake in Binance.US, Teng demurred.
“.US and .com are quite different animals, right?” he said. “They have different sets of shareholders, different boards of directors, and different CEOs running the show.”
Binance structured the two exchanges as independent entities in response to regulatory scrutiny, aiming to ring-fence its U.S. operations from the broader international business.
Still, Teng is bullish on what the new political environment means for crypto.
“We went from four years of Operation Choke Point 2.0 to now – you have a very pro-crypto, pro-AI president,” he said. While Binance.com doesn’t operate in the U.S., he said, “We have benefited from all these pro-crypto policies.”
Choke Point 2.0 is how industry insiders refer to an alleged crackdown by legacy banks on digital asset firms during the Biden administration.
Teng described a rapid global expansion that brought Binance from 170 million to 265 million users in just one year.
“We have received a lot of approaches from different governments around the world,” Teng said, citing regulatory progress in Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Brazil, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates.
Binance is now licensed in 21 jurisdictions, and its influence extends well beyond the reach of any one country. That includes sovereign wealth funds, some of which are starting to quietly allocate to crypto, Teng said.
In the background of all this optimism is the reality of Binance’s checkered past.
Zhao, the company’s founder and former CEO, was criminally charged, forced to step down and served a short prison sentence. Binance paid the multibilllion-dollar settlement – finalized in late 2023 – to resolve a raft of violations with U.S. regulators, including the Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
One major front remains open: The Securities and Exchange Commission’s civil case against Binance and Zhao.
The SEC and Binance in February agreed to a 60-day pause in proceedings as both sides consider a potential resolution. The stay comes amid a broader pullback by the SEC from several high-profile crypto lawsuits—signaling a potential regulatory reset under the new administration.
“We under-invested in compliance in those very early days,” Teng said. “But what’s important as a responsible institution is to acknowledge those early mistakes, make amends for it and invest greatly into compliance, which we are doing now.”
Binance now employs more than 1,300 professionals in compliance, roughly a quarter of its total workforce, Teng said. “The direction of travel is very clear. It’s one of compliance.”
The Nigerian government might disagree.
One of Binance’s top compliance officers, Tigran Gambaryan, was recently imprisoned under harsh conditions. In Nigeria, Binance faced charges of alleged non-payment of value-added tax and company income tax, failure to submit tax returns and complicity in aiding customers to evade taxes through its platform.
Alongside Gambaryan, who is a U.S. citizen and a former employee of the Internal Revenue Service, Nigeria has also imprisoned fellow executive Nadeem Anjarwalla, who is British-Kenyan. Both were charged and remanded in custody by Nigerian authorities. Anjarwalla escaped custody in March 2024, and Gambaryan was released several months later.
“The treatment he went through in Nigeria is not warranted,” said Teng about Anjarwalla. “We have always tried to liaise and work cooperatively with governments around the world.”
Since taking over as CEO, Teng has shifted the company from a founder-led startup to a board-governed organization.
“Now I report to the board of directors,” Teng said. “We have a board of seven members, including three independent directors and an independent chairman.”
For all the scrutiny Binance faces, Teng insists the platform remains dominant.
“At any point in time, we have more than 40% of global market share,” he said.
He dismissed concerns about Coinbase’s growing political clout and the momentum behind crypto exchange-traded funds, arguing that ETFs are a gateway into crypto trading.
“A lot of users that start trading through ETFs subsequently advance to cryptocurrency platforms,” Teng said, noting that while crypto trades nonstop, ETFs are limited to business hours.
Binance took on its first institutional investment earlier this month in a $2 billion deal with Emirati state-owned investment firm MGX, which is an AI and advanced tech fund that counts BlackRock and Microsoft as partners. It’s the largest investment ever made into a crypto company and the biggest to be fully paid in stablecoins.
Teng said he sees the investment as a way to bridge crypto and AI.
“We are utilizing AI on an extensive basis,” said Teng, noting that Binance uses artificial intelligence for customer service, security and compliance monitoring. “This is the blockchain sector. We have to continue to utilize technology to achieve efficiency.”
Asked what keeps him up at night, Teng rattled off a list: Security, compliance, product innovation and opportunities for mergers and acquisitions.
“We want to make sure we run a very robust, operational, best-in-class platform,” he said.
