Today, it is a sense of responsibility that led him to choose to face the trial, but he absolutely should not be regarded as being of the same kind as those evil murderers, robbers, and fraudsters.

Note: On April 24th, the U.S. Department of Justice stated that Zhao Changpeng, the founder and former CEO of Binance, should serve a three-year (36-month) prison sentence. According to the reasons given, lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice believe that Zhao Changpeng helped Binance violate federal sanctions and anti-money laundering laws, and stated that he must pay a greater price, so the sentence should be increased.

Just before the trial, CZ wrote a letter to Judge Richard A. Jones, who is responsible for this case, apologizing for his "wrong decision" and admitting that he needs to take full responsibility for his actions.

In addition to CZ's apology letter, there are 161 letters of support from his family, friends, and others, which, from different perspectives, reveal the true CZ Zhao Changpeng. CZ's sister, former Morgan Stanley managing director Jessica Zhao, stated that although her brother made a mistake, he strives to help others in his life. She also mentioned the FTX incident, emphasizing that CZ ensured that Binance never misused any customer funds. Zhao Changpeng's children, Rachel and Ryan, who are studying at universities in the United States, hope that the judge should not define Zhao Changpeng's character based solely on this incident.

The most special letter comes from the co-founder of Binance and the mother of three children, He Yi. In the letter, she wrote:

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

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

Finally, He Yi stated, "Today, it is a sense of responsibility that led him to choose to face the trial, but he absolutely should not be regarded as being of the same kind as those evil murderers, robbers, and fraudsters. Sincerely hope that Judge Jones can open the eyes of God, be all-knowing, and after seeing the more complete CZ, make a fair judgment."

The following is the full text of He Yi's letter: Dear Judge Jones:

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

In the spring of 2014, I met Zhao Changpeng at a blockchain public event at a school. Everyone called him CZ, which is different from the pseudonyms used by many people. It is the abbreviation of his real name. On that day, CZ was immediately invited to share impromptu on stage because the organizers found that he was working for the most popular Bitcoin wallet at the time, 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, but due to the price drop of Bitcoin, his assets shrank significantly. However, this did not dampen his enthusiasm for blockchain technology. His speech was full of 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. Of course, he hoped the company would be successful, but he was not someone whose ultimate goal was to make money. He sincerely hoped to use technology to promote progress in the world.

In the summer of 2014, CZ's years of accumulated matching and trading technology background could not be fully utilized at Blockchain. After my repeated invitations, he joined the cryptocurrency trading platform OKCoin where I worked. At that time, the cryptocurrency industry had entered a downturn, and a community member unfortunately suffered from leukemia and could not afford his medical expenses, so he publicly launched a fundraising campaign. Despite his personal assets shrinking significantly, CZ actively participated in the donation. Unfortunately, the community member still passed away. Inspired by this incident, CZ and I jointly launched the "LoveBTC" charity project. He set up a website and a public Bitcoin wallet address. We raised donations through social media by auctioning clothing, etc., and then directly converted the BTC into items for the beneficiaries. For this, CZ also wrote a paper introducing how blockchain technology can achieve 100% transparent charity work, ensuring that the ultimate beneficiaries receive 100% of the proceeds and that no donations are eroded by management fees. This paper can be found on Github, timestamped April 2014 (https://github.com/cpzhao/bitcoin_charity/blob/master/Bitcoin_Charity.md), and this was the precursor to Binance's charity work.

This was three years before Binance was established, and CZ was not wealthy at that time. Many people believe that charity is just for fame, a means of offsetting taxes, or say they will do charity work when they achieve financial freedom. But for CZ, whether poor or rich, he takes charity and social responsibility seriously because he is kind and has a humanitarian spirit.

In August 2017, my first month at Binance, a young user approached me, saying that he had sent thousands of dollars to a Binance wallet address, but Binance did not support that token, so Binance could not receive the token. This was a common mistake in the early days of the industry. According to the industry's practice at the 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 have been his family's annual income, or his entire year's university tuition, and his future hope. After a brief discussion with CZ, he mobilized our already stretched development resources to quickly help the user recover the assets. This was the first case in the industry of helping a user recover assets sent to the wrong address. This was followed by numerous similar cases. Under CZ's guidance, Binance has helped over 180,000 users recover assets totaling over $441 million. This was a project that consumed a lot of resources and did not seem worth it in terms of ROI, but we could ignite hope for our users in despair. Even today, public listing trading platforms like Coinbase still do not offer this service. In this emerging Wild West, many practitioners play the role of predators, but CZ has always insisted that we should do the right thing: protect the users.

In early 2018, with the price of Bitcoin rising to over $20,000, investor enthusiasm gave rise to a lot of fraud. One day, a group of Chinese users approached me, pointing out that they had been lured into investing in a project by an account on social media. After sending the money, the person disappeared. However, based on publicly available on-chain information, the money had just been transferred to Binance. According to the prevailing process in most platforms at the time, users had to report to the police first, and the police had to provide a letter of request for cooperation before freezing the assets. At that time, cryptocurrency trading was banned in China, and the Chinese police did not handle such cases. CZ said to us, "Do the right thing." We temporarily froze the stolen funds, and then organized multiple phone calls between the victims and the fraudster. In the end, the fraudster returned the money to the users, and the fraudster's account was closed. This was just one of the numerous examples of CZ's insistence on combating evildoers. In the past year alone, Binance has cooperated with law enforcement agencies in over 58,000 investigations, many of which were initiated by Binance to prompt law enforcement investigations. This is why, despite mainstream media attempting to portray CZ as an evil person, millions of community users and ordinary people regard him as a hero in the industry, because CZ has always had his own persistence for justice. If the cryptocurrency industry is compared 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, as well as college dropouts from Europe, active NGO female fighters from Africa, and young men from rural Southeast Asia who did not want to be fishermen. It can be said that CZ truly treats everyone equally regardless of race, faith, gender, education, or family background. Whether it was a junior employee in Southeast Asia whose house was destroyed in a fire, or employees facing a shortage of epidemic prevention materials due to Covid sweeping the globe, or the war in Russia and Ukraine putting employees in danger, CZ spared no cost to help the employees. For a company's boss, spending millions of dollars to help scarce talents in distress lead their families out of unstable living environments, continuously providing allowances, is not uncommon. When CZ made these decisions, he did not consider their backgrounds or positions, which also covered a large number of junior employees. The decision was made for one reason: they needed support.

CZ's leadership style may not conform to the 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 an elite corporate environment. This has led to some employees leaving the company with resentment and making unfounded accusations to the media. Although these reports sometimes make me feel frustrated, CZ has always borne this burden, continuing to support justice and equality, because he understands that true fairness is sometimes unfair to a few privileged individuals.

In November 2022, over a weekend, FTX faced a crisis, and Sam (SBF) made a final plea call to CZ. Without receiving any valid reports or documents from SBF, CZ convened a management meeting to decide whether to rescue FTX. He said, "We don't need FTX as a company, we are rescuing FTX to save this industry, we should save FTX." Although ultimately forced to give up the deal, subsequent public information revealed that multiple companies associated with FTX were misappropriating user assets, leaving CZ speechless. CZ believes that transparency is a better solution, so he publicly disclosed Binance's trading platform wallet addresses and launched products that allow users to independently verify their account funds and online wallet address linkage to demonstrate Binance's transparency, further promoting industry self-regulation.

So far, CZ and I have experienced ten years of ups and downs in this industry. These ten years have been a decade of dramatic changes in the industry. During these ten years, the price of Bitcoin has risen from a low of a few hundred dollars to over $40,000. We have seen countless former celebrities fall from grace, as well as numerous well-known institutions collapsing in an instant. Most of the time, these people were self-proclaimed geniuses, talented but disregarding the law, believing they could deceive the public or escape legal sanctions by luck. But CZ is not like that: he is honest, kind, sincere, intelligent, and very, very hardworking. Due to work reasons, CZ underwent two spinal surgeries in 2020 alone. Even during 18 months of repeated bed rest, he did not stop working for a single day. As CEO and the largest shareholder for the past six years, he has led the company with a salary lower than that of several executives subsequently hired by the company, without taking any bonuses or cashing out. In order to keep Binance operational, he chose to fly to the United States to plead guilty. Between his personal interests and the public interest, CZ always chooses to sacrifice himself, achieve Binance, and when it comes to Binance and the users, he chooses the users.

As CZ's partner, I know clearly how CZ has earned the respect of the community. Perhaps it was when other project teams took advantage of the ban on Bitcoin trading platforms by the Chinese government to make a profit, but CZ chose to refund users at a higher price. It could also be when Binance was hacked, and CZ immediately disclosed the information and took full responsibility. More likely, it was when numerous project teams issued tokens just to become wealthy, and CZ helped users track down scammers and hackers in the industry. Some of these cases were not even related to Binance, but it was because of his sense of mission and responsibility to the industry.

As CZ's life partner, I have known CZ for nearly ten years, so I understand another side of him that is not known to the public. He is completely unaware of the jewelry, luxury goods, luxury cars, and art auctions that the rich are enthusiastic about. He lives a simple life, buying affordable clothes on Amazon, riding a balance bike to meetings, and enthusiastically showing journalists his Toyota 6-seater van, which was later publicly ridiculed by journalists. He buys things for efficiency and interest, without a fanatical 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 as much as possible, regardless of their profession and social status. He also makes every effort to maintain high-quality interactions with his three young children amidst his busy work schedule. The children are very close to him, and now they always ask: "Dad, why aren't you 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 company without a glamorous background, the founding team members had no legal background, and even most of the early management team members, except for CZ, could not even read English, including myself. In the absence of experience and legal knowledge, CZ won over users with fairness, integrity, and a sense of responsibility to the industry, but also made mistakes. In any case, 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 be at the forefront to shield arrows. Heroes are just in that position, having to protect their families, communities, ethnic groups, and homeland, to do the right thing, and in the process, having to become heroes."

I humbly hope that Judge Jones can take into account the fact that in such an early and chaotic stage of the cryptocurrency industry, there is no consensus on how this industry should be regulated or how the United States should define it. As the founder of a company of this scale, there are bound to be blind spots. If CZ had known the severity of the situation, he would have been vigilant from day one and blocked any U.S. users. He does not want to be a hero, and of course, he has no intention of being a criminal. All his actions follow universal humanitarian principles and he does his best.

Today, it is a sense of responsibility that led him to choose to face the trial, but he absolutely should not be regarded as being of the same kind as those evil murderers, robbers, and fraudsters. Sincerely hope that Judge Jones can open the eyes of God, be all-knowing, and after seeing the more complete CZ, make a fair judgment. If necessary, you can contact me at any time to get more details.

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