Bye Bye Binance?

On November 21, 2023, Changpeng Zhao (better known as “CZ”), the founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, resigned as a result of settling United States charges against him and Binance (X, 2023). At its height, the company was estimated to be worth as much as $300 billion and CZ is its largest shareholder (Kowsmann, and Ostroff, 2021). After CZ’s resignation and the admissions of guilt, Binance lost 30% of its market share, and faced withdrawals of nearly $1 billion of deposits from its nearly $79 billion in assets (Ledesman, 2023; Malwa, 2023), but as of January 2024, Binance remained the highest-volume crypto exchange. Binance had 5 times the daily trading volume of Coinbase, its only publicly traded competitor which has a market capitalization of $31 billion (CryptoCompare, 2024). Students are asked to focus on the areas of business, ethics, finance, and accounting to evaluate Binance’s November 2023 legal settlements in light of its success as the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange.