Binance CEO says Trump has been ‘fantastic’ for cryptocurrency

Binance CEO Richard Teng says the Trump administration has been a “fantastic” reset for the cryptocurrency industry.

“It’s an extremely different environment that we’re operating in,” Teng told CNBC on Tuesday.

In the span of 16 months, Binance has gone from a political outcast to a possible power broker in Washington. Once the poster child for regulatory defiance – Binance was slapped with a record $4.3 billion settlement with regulators and forced to oust billionaire founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao – the crypto exchange is now navigating a dramatically friendlier political landscape under President Donald Trump’s second administration, Teng said.

“We’ve benefited from this shift,” said Teng, who was appointed Binance’s CEO in November 2023. 

Teng’s comments come as the crypto exchange is in talks to have the Trump family take a financial stake in the company, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. That same day, Bloomberg reported that World Liberty Financial, a Trump-linked crypto bank that has not yet launched, is engaged in talks with Binance to launch a dollar-pegged stablecoin. 

If such deals were reached, it would mark a staggering reversal for a company that was once a pariah in Washington. 

Teng, a soft-spoken former regulator, was careful with his words when addressing the reports.

“I believe both World Liberty Financial as well as CZ himself have tweeted and denied the reports,” said Teng, who runs the exchange’s operations outside the U.S. 

As for the rumors about a Trump stake in Binance.US, Teng demurred. 

“.US and .com are quite different animals, right?” he said. “They have different sets of shareholders, different boards of directors, and different CEOs running the show.”

Binance structured the two exchanges as independent entities in response to regulatory scrutiny, aiming to ring-fence its U.S. operations from the broader international business.

Still, Teng is bullish on what the new political environment means for crypto.

“We went from four years of Operation Choke Point 2.0 to now – you have a very pro-crypto, pro-AI president,” he said. While Binance.com doesn’t operate in the U.S., he said, “We have benefited from all these pro-crypto policies.”

Choke Point 2.0 is how industry insiders refer to an alleged crackdown by legacy banks on digital asset firms during the Biden administration.

Teng described a rapid global expansion that brought Binance from 170 million to 265 million users in just one year.

“We have received a lot of approaches from different governments around the world,” Teng said, citing regulatory progress in Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Brazil, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates.

Binance is now licensed in 21 jurisdictions, and its influence extends well beyond the reach of any one country. That includes sovereign wealth funds, some of which are starting to quietly allocate to crypto, Teng said.