Full text of the letter from the U.S. judge: What is the more authentic Zhao Changpeng like?

Author: He Yi

Note: On April 24, the U.S. Department of Justice stated that Binance founder and former CEO Zhao Changpeng should serve three years (36 months) in prison. The reasoning provided indicated that DOJ lawyers believe Zhao Changpeng helped Binance violate federal sanctions and money laundering laws, and stated that he must pay a greater price, thus the sentence should be increased.

Just before the trial, CZ apologized for his "wrong decisions" in a letter to Judge Richard A. Jones, who is responsible for the case, and acknowledged that he must take full responsibility for his actions.

In addition to CZ's apology letter, there were 161 letters of support from his family, friends, and others, which restored the true Zhao Changpeng from different perspectives. CZ's sister, former Morgan Stanley Managing Director Jessica Zhao, stated that although her brother made mistakes, he has worked hard to help others in his life. She also mentioned the FTX incident, emphasizing that CZ ensured Binance never misused any customer funds. Zhao Changpeng's children, Ryan and Rachel, who are studying at a university in the U.S., hope that the judge will not define Zhao Changpeng's character solely based on this incident.

Among them, the most special letter came from Binance co-founder and mother of three, He Yi, who wrote in her letter:

"If the cryptocurrency industry is likened to the Wild West, then CZ is the guardian of this wilderness."

"For CZ, whether poor or rich, he takes charity seriously and assumes social responsibility because he is kind and has a humanitarian spirit."

Finally, He Yi stated, "Today, it is a sense of responsibility that makes him choose to face the trial, but he absolutely should not be seen as one of those evil murderers, robbers, and fraudsters. I sincerely hope Judge Jones can open the eye of God, omniscient and omnipotent, and after seeing a more complete CZ, make a fair judgment."

Here is the full text of He Yi's letter:

Dear Judge Jones,

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. I am Zhao Changpeng (abbreviated as CZ)'s partner at work, and I am also the mother of his three children. I hope this letter can help you understand a more authentic Zhao Changpeng.

In the spring of 2014, I met Zhao Changpeng at a public blockchain event at a school. Everyone called him CZ, which is different from the pseudonyms many people use; it is the abbreviation of his real name. When CZ arrived that day, he was immediately invited to the stage to share impromptu because the organizers discovered he was working for the then most popular Bitcoin wallet (blockchain.info). He enthusiastically explained blockchain technology and the principles of Bitcoin to everyone. At that time, he had just sold his house to buy Bitcoin, and due to the drop in Bitcoin's price, his assets had significantly shrunk, but this did not dampen his obsession with blockchain technology. His speech was filled with idealism about how blockchain technology could bring positive changes to the world, which greatly influenced and inspired me. Later, CZ chose to enter the cryptocurrency field and founded Binance. He certainly hoped the company would succeed, but he was not someone who viewed making money as the ultimate goal; he sincerely hoped to use technology to drive progress in the world.

In the summer of 2014, CZ's years of accumulated background in matching and trading technology could not be fully utilized at Blockchain. After multiple invitations, he joined the cryptocurrency trading platform OKCoin where I was working. At that time, the cryptocurrency market had entered a downward cycle, and amidst the cries of despair in the industry, a community member unfortunately fell ill with leukemia and could not afford his medical expenses, so he publicly initiated a fundraising campaign. Despite his personal assets having significantly shrunk, CZ actively participated in donations, but unfortunately, this community member still passed away. Inspired by this event, CZ and I jointly initiated the "Love BTC" charity project. He built a website and a public Bitcoin wallet address, and we raised funds by auctioning clothes and other items through social media, then directly converted BTC into goods for the beneficiaries. For this, CZ even wrote a paper explaining how blockchain technology can achieve 100% transparency in charity, ensuring that the final beneficiaries receive 100% of the benefits and that no donations are eroded by intermediary management fees. This paper can be found on GitHub, timestamped April 2014 (https://github.com/cpzhao/bitcoincharity/blob/master/BitcoinCharity.md), and this is the precursor to Binance Charity.

This was three years before Binance was established, and at that time, CZ was not wealthy. Many people think charity is just a way to gain a reputation; some use it as a means to offset taxes, while others say they will do charity once they achieve financial freedom. But for CZ, whether poor or rich, he takes charity seriously and assumes social responsibility because he is kind and has a humanitarian spirit.

In August 2017, that was my first month at Binance. A young user approached me, saying he had sent thousands of dollars to a Binance wallet address, but Binance did not support that token, so Binance could not receive it; this was a common mistake in the early days of the industry.

According to the industry practices at that time, one had to bear the consequences of their own mistakes. However, for this young man in his early twenties, those thousands of dollars might be his family's annual income, his entire year's tuition, and his future hope. After a brief discussion with CZ, he mobilized our limited development resources to quickly help the user recover the asset. This was the first case in the industry of helping a user recover assets sent to the wrong address. With the first case, there have been countless others since; under CZ's guidance, Binance has helped over 180,000 users recover assets totaling over $441 million. This is a project that consumes a lot of resources and is not worth doing from an ROI perspective, but we can ignite hope for our users in despair. To this day, platforms like Coinbase still do not support this service. In this emerging Wild West, countless practitioners play the role of predators, while CZ has always insisted that we should do the right thing: protect users.

In early 2018, Bitcoin's price surged over $20,000, and the enthusiasm of investors also bred a lot of fraud. One day, a group of Chinese users approached me, pointing out that they had been lured by an account on social media to invest in a project, and after sending the money, the person disappeared. However, by tracking the public on-chain information, the money had just been transferred to Binance. According to the enforcement processes of most platforms today, users need to first find the police to report the case, and the police must provide a cooperation letter before freezing the funds. At that time, China had banned cryptocurrency trading, and Chinese police did not handle such cases. CZ told us, "Do the right thing." We temporarily froze the stolen funds and organized multiple calls between the victims and the scammer. In the end, the scammer returned the money to the user, and the scammer also closed the account. This is just one of countless examples of CZ's insistence on combating wrongdoers. In the recently passed 2023, Binance cooperated with law enforcement agencies on over 58,000 case investigations, many of which were initiated by Binance itself. This is why, despite mainstream media attempting to portray CZ as an evil villain, millions of community users and ordinary people see him as a hero of the industry, because CZ has always had his own insistence on justice. If the cryptocurrency industry is likened to the Wild West, then CZ is the guardian of this wilderness.

Starting in 2019, the company's personnel began to grow rapidly, and the team composition became very globalized and diverse. During this period, there were Ivy League graduates from Wall Street, dropouts from Europe, active female NGO fighters from Africa, and young men from rural Southeast Asia who did not want to be fishermen. It can be said that CZ truly achieved equality regardless of race, belief, gender, education, or family background. Whether it was a junior employee in Southeast Asia whose house was destroyed in a fire, or employees lacking epidemic prevention supplies due to Covid sweeping the globe, or even the dangers faced by employees due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, CZ spared no expense to help employees. For a business owner, spending millions of dollars to help those facing difficulties lead their families out of unstable living conditions and continuously providing allowances is not unusual. However, when CZ made these decisions, he did not consider their backgrounds or ranks, which also covered many junior employees who were just starting out. These employees are generally easy to replace, but CZ's decision had only one reason: they needed support.

CZ's leadership style may not conform to traditional expectations of an excellent CEO. His commitment to transparency and fairness at Binance often conflicts with the power expectations of a small group of employees accustomed to elite hierarchical corporate environments. This has led some employees to leave the company resentfully and make false accusations to the media. Although these reports sometimes frustrate me, CZ has always borne this burden and continued to support fairness and equality because he understands that true fairness can sometimes be unfair to a few privileged individuals.

In November 2022, one weekend, FTX faced a crisis, and Sam (SBF)'s last distress call was made to CZ. Without receiving any effective reports or documents from SBF, CZ convened a management meeting to decide whether to rescue FTX. He said, "We do not need FTX as a company; we are saving FTX to save this industry; we should save FTX." Although he ultimately had to abandon this deal, subsequent public information revealed that multiple companies associated with FTX were misappropriating user assets, which left CZ astonished. CZ believed that transparency was a better solution, so he publicly disclosed Binance's trading platform wallet address and launched a product that allowed users to independently verify their account funds and the linkage to online wallet addresses, demonstrating Binance's transparency, which further promoted self-discipline in the industry.

To date, CZ and I have jointly experienced ten years of ups and downs in this industry. These ten years have been a decade of dramatic changes in the industry, with Bitcoin rising from a low of a few hundred dollars to over $40,000 today. We have seen countless former celebrities fall from grace and witnessed the instant collapse of many well-known institutions. Most of the time, these individuals consider themselves smart and talented but disregard the law, believing they can deceive the public or escape legal sanctions by luck. But CZ is not like that: he is upright, kind, sincere, smart, and incredibly hardworking. Due to work reasons, he underwent two spinal surgeries in 2020 alone, and even during the 18 months he repeatedly lay in a hospital bed, he did not stop working for a single day. For the past six years, as CEO and the largest shareholder, he has taken a salary lower than that of several executives brought in later by the company and has not taken a single dividend or cash-out for himself. This time, to ensure Binance could continue operating, he chose to fly to the U.S. to plead guilty; he always chooses to sacrifice himself for the public interest and the success of Binance, and when it comes to Binance and users, he will choose the users.

As CZ's partner, I clearly know how CZ has earned the respect of the community; perhaps when the Chinese government banned Bitcoin trading platforms, while other projects took the opportunity to profit, CZ chose to refund users at a higher price; or perhaps when Binance experienced a theft incident, CZ publicly disclosed information and took full responsibility; or more likely, when countless projects issued tokens merely to become wealthy, CZ helped users track down industry scammers and hackers, some cases even had no connection to Binance, simply because of his sense of mission and responsibility to this industry.

As CZ's life partner, I have known him for nearly ten years, so I understand another side of him that is not known to the public. He knows nothing about the jewelry, luxury goods, sports cars, and art auctions that wealthy people are obsessed with; he lives a simple life, buys affordable clothes on Amazon, rides a balance bike to meetings, and enthusiastically shows reporters his six-seat Toyota van, which was later publicly mocked by reporters. He buys things out of efficiency and interest; he has no fervent desire for money, fame, or enjoyment; he hopes to live a meaningful life.

At the same time, he always tries to take care of his friends' feelings, regardless of their profession and social status: he also makes an effort to carve out time from his busy work to maintain high-quality interactions with his three young children, who are very close to him. Now they always ask: Why is Dad not home? When can Dad come back?

Of course, I am not saying that CZ has not made mistakes, but his biggest mistake is ignorance. As a startup without a glamorous background, the founding team members had no legal background, and most early management team members, except for CZ, could not even read English, including myself. In the absence of experience and legal knowledge, CZ won users over with fairness, integrity, and a sense of responsibility for the industry, while also making mistakes. Regardless, the mistakes have been made, and both Binance and CZ have paid a huge price.

CZ has said before: "No one wants to be a hero because no one is born wanting to stand in front and block arrows. A hero is someone who has to protect their family, community, tribe, and homeland by doing the right thing, and in the process, they inevitably become a hero."

I humbly hope that Judge Jones can comprehensively consider that in the early and chaotic cryptocurrency industry, there is still no conclusion on how to regulate this industry or define it in the U.S. As a founder who has never managed a company of this scale, he must have encountered blind spots. If CZ had known the severity of the situation, he would have taken strict precautions from day one, blocking any U.S. users. He does not want to be a hero, and certainly does not intend to be a criminal. His entire logic of action follows universal humanitarian principles, and he has done his best.

Today, it is a sense of responsibility that makes him choose to face the trial, but he absolutely should not be seen as one of those evil murderers, robbers, and fraudsters. I sincerely hope Judge Jones can open the eye of God, omniscient and omnipotent, and after seeing a more complete CZ, make a fair judgment. If needed, you can contact me at any time for more details.