HODL-ing Time: CZ's Prison Memoir Explains How to Lose $43 Billion and Keep Most of Your Freedom

Changpeng "CZ" Zhao spent years building Binance into the world's largest crypto exchange, a throne assembled with code and a dash of regulatory denial. Now he's serving four months in a US federal prison — because apparently even the most airtight whitepaper can't save you from actual paperwork — and he's decided that doing time is the perfect opportunity to finally write that autobiography everyone's been waiting for.

His new book, "Freedom of Money," stretches across 364 pages of first-person testimony covering Binance's meteoric rise and its subsequent regulatory implosion. Yi He, a Binance co-founder who's been working alongside Zhao since 2014, wrote the foreword — because nothing says "I vouch for this person" like writing the introduction to their prison memoir.

Zhao frames the whole thing as context-building, a counterweight to the soundbite-driven coverage shaped by media narratives and court filings. He's essentially arguing that the human dimension behind Binance's ascent — and his spectacular personal downfall — got lost somewhere between the DOJ press releases and the Twitter pile-ons. Fair point, honestly.

The memoir walks through his early career in finance and tech, the founding of Binance in 2017, and the company's blitzscaling into a global crypto powerhouse. Think of it as the origin story, minus the capes but with plenty of regulatory kryptonite waiting in later chapters.

The fall

In 2024, Zhao pleaded guilty to US Anti-Money-Laundering violations and landed a four-month prison sentence — which, in crypto time, is basically a long weekend. The guilty plea came as part of a broader settlement that also required his resignation as Binance CEO, because apparently you can't run a $43 billion empire from a federal prison, even with a good Wi-Fi signal.

The DOJ initially pushed for a longer sentence to reflect the severity of the violations, because prosecutors apparently don't appreciate the