Zhao became a billionaire after Binance, which was innovated in 2017, rose to become the biggest cryptocurrency exchange encyclopedically by volume.
After the establishment's conditions were delved , Zhao entered a guilty plea to breaking US anti-money-laundering rules in late 2023 and was doomed to four months in jail in 2024.
About two years after Binance agreed to halt its operations in the United States as part of an agreement to stop the Department of Justice's criminal investigation, Zhao's pardon clears his criminal record and may help clear the path for the company to return to the United States.
"In their desire to punish the cryptocurrency industry, the Biden Administration pursued Mr. Zhao despite no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims," the White House said in a statement shared with AFP.
The Biden administration's decision to prosecute Zhao and seek a three-year prison sentence for him, according to the White House, "severely damaged the United States' reputation as a global leader in technology and innovation," and the "war on crypto" was now ended.
The Wall Street Journal said Thursday that Binance has been a "key supporter" of the Trump family's cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial, and that it has been working for nearly a year to get Zhao pardoned.
Zhao is still Binance's largest shareholder even if he resigned as CEO in 2023.
Trump's decision to pardon Zhao drew immediate criticism from Democrats.
"CZ pleaded guilty to a criminal money laundering charge and was sentenced to prison. But then he financed President Trump's stablecoin and lobbied for a pardon. Today, he got it," Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in a post on X.
"If Congress does not stop this kind of corruption, it owns it," added Warren, a high-profile figure on the left of the party who sits on the US Senate's finance committee.
He has loosened the regulations placed on the bitcoin sector, which gave his reelection campaign over $100 million.
According to a recent Financial Times investigation, the Trump family has made a pre-tax profit of almost $1 billion from their numerous cryptocurrency ventures over the last 12 months.
Zhao's amnesty comes after a series of other largely contentious conduct by Trump, including his decision to pardon all those set up guilty acts of violence in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
George Santos, a disgraced former Democratic legislator condemned for identity theft and line fraud, also had his judgment changed by Trump.
What legal effects does the pardon have on Zhao's convictions and penalties?
The amnesty relieves Zhao of all corrections, penalties, and disabilities directly flowing from the civil conviction. This means he's no longer subject to the penalties assessed by the conviction, effectively clearing his record in the eyes of the law.
The amnesty fairly rehabilitates Zhao’s status, making him eligible formally again for non-supervisory approvals, visas, and places within the US financial and cryptocurrency requests that were preliminarily confined due to the conviction.
Still, Zhao can not recover those finances, If any court- ordered reparation was formally paid previous to the amnesty. The pardon remits penalties but doesn't affect rights or reparation formerly entered by victims.