God forbid a man have some friends in high places…

Changpeng “CZ” Zhao would like everyone to calm down, put the twitter fingers down, and stop turning a boring crypto payment to the most powerful man on the planet (other than George Soros) into more than what it is.

(Source: Times of India)

Because according to the freshly pardoned Binance founder, the idea that he’s secretly in business with the Trump family is (how did he put it) “misconstrued.”

Translation: please stop connecting dots that don’t exist.

This all flared up after the man who publicly pantsed SBF back in 2022 popped up at Davos and addressed the internet’s favorite conspiracy theory of the month… that his October pardon somehow ties back to a $2 billion Binance investment paid in USD1, a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture.

Cue the X-Files theme. Cue the red string. Cue Twitter detectives.

CZ’s response, naturally, was straight out of the Aaron Rodgers playbook: R-E-L-A-X. There’s “no business relationship whatsoever” with the Trump family. MGX (a state-owned firm from Abu Dhabi) was the investor. They chose the payment method. End of story. Don’t you dare ask another question or go looking for evidence that suggests anything else.

Or as CZ framed it: I asked for crypto, they sent crypto, and now everyone’s acting like I married Trump's favorite daughter (Ivanka).

While the payment happened in USD1… that doesn’t mean CZ invested in the issuer. And it also doesn’t mean there was some crypto-for-clemency swap meet behind the scenes.

“Stablecoin is just a currency for payment,” Zhao said, sounding like a man who has explained this a million times already.

And if you’re wondering whether he at least had a secret handshake with Donald Trump… nope. According to CZ, the closest he’s been was sitting 30-40 feet away during a session at the World Economic Forum.

In other words: I was not a backroom deal, and don’t you ever say it was…

Of course, the skepticism didn’t come out of nowhere. CZ did plead guilty in 2023 to enabling money laundering violations, stepped down as Binance CEO, and watched the company write a $4.3 billion check to the DOJ. He served four months in prison. That part’s real. Very real.

(Source: Bloomberg)

So when Trump issued a pardon in October 2025, people started asking questions. Especially after reports surfaced that Binance helped build some of the tech behind USD1 and hired a well-connected lobbying firm with ties to Trump Jr.

Mix crypto with politics and sprinkle in a presidential pardon and you've baked a media souffle that was always going to rise.

Trump, for his part, treated the situation just like he treated another man known for a disturbing tropical island. He said he didn’t know CZ, said others told him Zhao was a “victim,” and framed the pardon as correcting a Biden-era injustice. Very on brand. Also, very unspecific. 

“I don’t know him. I really don’t. But people came to me (tremendous people) and they said it was very unfair. And nobody knows unfairness better than me. Believe me.”

World Liberty Financial also jumped in to say (loudly) that it had zero role in the pardon process and that implying otherwise is “dangerous and false.” Which is PR code for: please stop saying our stablecoin is a Get Out of Jail Free card.

CZ insists the whole thing is a misunderstanding sparked by people who don’t understand how crypto payments work. And honestly? That tracks. Especially when you consider half the internet still thinks a blockchain is a Minecraft server.

At least for now, the official story stands that there was absolutely no secret deal, crypto quid pro quo… and absolutely no Trump-Binance power couple.

Still, something tells me this file isn’t getting closed anytime soon.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum as mentioned in the article.