Crypto Billionaire Memoir Surges
'Freedom of Money', a memoir by a crypto billionaire published after a prison term, climbed to No. 4 on Kindle charts just three days after launch, according to a social promotion (x.com). The promotional post attracted over 1,000 likes as readers noted the quick chart move and debated the book's background (x.com).
Changpeng Zhao’s new memoir hit Amazon’s Kindle charts days after release, putting Binance’s founder back at the center of the crypto story. (amazon.com) Amazon lists *Freedom of Money* as a Kindle edition published on April 8, 2026, under the full subtitle *A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance*. The same listing describes Zhao’s account of building Binance from its 2017 launch into a platform with 300 million users. (amazon.com) The book’s sales push lands after Zhao served a four-month U.S. prison sentence tied to Binance’s compliance failures. The U.S. Department of Justice said on November 21, 2023 that Zhao pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by causing Binance to fail to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. (justice.gov) In the same 2023 case, Binance pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations, money-transmitting violations and sanctions-related violations, and agreed to pay $4.3 billion in penalties. The Justice Department called it the largest corporate guilty plea that also involved the guilty plea of a chief executive officer. (justice.gov) Zhao was sentenced on April 30, 2024 to four months in prison after pleading guilty months earlier, and he stepped down as Binance chief executive as part of the settlement. Richard Teng took over and said in April 2024 that Binance had moved toward “much more compliance” after what he described as the company’s earlier-stage failures. (cnbc.com 1) (cnbc.com 2) The memoir’s release also comes after President Donald Trump pardoned Zhao on October 23, 2025, according to the White House confirmation reported by Politico. That pardon removed the criminal conviction from the public story around Zhao just months before the book launch. (politico.com) Amazon’s description presents the book as both memoir and manifesto, with chapters on Binance’s rise, the collapse of FTX, regulatory scrutiny and Zhao’s prison term. It also says Zhao wrote most of the book while incarcerated and frames his case as one without fraud charges. (amazon.com) That framing does not match the government’s account in tone. Federal prosecutors said Binance “prioritized growth, market share, and profits over compliance with U.S. law,” and said the exchange failed to implement controls required under U.S. law while serving the U.S. market. (justice.gov) For readers, the book doubles as a first-person version of one of crypto’s biggest enforcement cases. For Binance, it extends a rehabilitation campaign that has already included a leadership change, compliance promises and a public effort to move past the 2023 settlement. (amazon.com) (cnbc.com) The chart climb gives Zhao something the courtroom never did: a retail audience choosing to hear his version first. (amazon.com)
