KEY POINTS
- CZ’s autobiography ‘Freedom of Money’ reveals he almost rescued FTX — until SBF’s team couldn’t produce a balance sheet in 24 hours. He walked.
- Binance invested $3 million in Terra in 2018. It grew to $1.6 billion. CZ says they didn’t sell because offloading it would have deepened the retail panic — and he didn’t want the world to think Binance ‘left first.’
- Huobi founder Li Lin claims OKX founder Star Xu was the whistleblower who got him arrested. Star denies it, calls himself a ‘tainted witness’ in the Justin Sun investigation, and is currently going through CZ’s old 2015 forgery accusations.
On April 8, 2026, Changpeng CZ Zhao — CZ to everyone in crypto — released his autobiography, Freedom of Money. It did not take long for the excerpts to detonate. Four separate revelations landed within hours, each one a story on its own. Taken together, they amount to the most candid insider account the crypto industry has produced in years — a portrait of an ecosystem where alliances are temporary, competitors are enemies, and the line between market competition and regulatory warfare is basically nonexistent.
CZ was sentenced to four months in prison in 2024 after Binance pleaded guilty to federal anti-money laundering violations. He was pardoned by President Trump in January 2025 as part of a broader clemency action that also covered other crypto figures. He is not a neutral observer. He is a principal who wrote the book from a position of regained power — which makes every disclosure more deliberate, not less. When CZ decides to tell a story about how corrupt your adversaries were, he is not just narrating. He is settling scores.
That context is worth keeping in mind as you read each revelation. Our stablecoin explainer covers how interconnected this industry is — the same people appear across every major collapse, every regulatory proceeding, every political relationship. CZ’s book is a map of those connections, drawn by someone who has survived them.
The FTX Rescue That Never Happened: ‘They Couldn’t Produce a Balance Sheet’
In November 2022, with FTX visibly imploding and SBF scrambling for a white knight, CZ considered stepping in. The conventional narrative has always been that CZ pulled the plug out of competitive self-interest — that he saw an opportunity to wound his most dangerous rival and took it. CZ’s account in Freedom of Money reframes it as a due diligence failure. He asked SBF’s team for a complete balance sheet. They could not produce one within 24 hours. He walked.
The logic is straightforward: if the team running a crypto exchange cannot show you their liabilities on demand, you are not looking at a rescue opportunity. You are looking at an undisclosed hole that will become your problem. Reuters reported at the time that the balance sheet FTX eventually sent to investors showed only $900 million in liquid assets against far larger obligations — a figure that spooked everyone who saw it, not just CZ. Reuters reported that SBF “begged” Binance for a rescue even as he revealed the scale of the gaps in FTX’s books. CZ chose not to be the solution, and the story became what it became.
More cutting is CZ’s diagnosis of SBF’s actual business model, which he describes as built not on product competition but on “skillfully using political lobbying and regulatory maneuvering to undermine competitors.” That is a direct attack on the premise that SBF was ever building anything real — and it comes from someone who spent years competing against him. Whether you read it as score-settling or genuine analysis depends on what you think about CZ. Either way, it is the sharpest autopsy line written about FTX by someone who was actually in the room.
The $3 Million That Became $1.6 Billion — and Why He Didn’t Sell
In 2018, Binance made a $3 million investment in Terra, the blockchain project behind the LUNA token. By 2021, that position was worth $1.6 billion. When Terra collapsed catastrophically in May 2022 — the UST stablecoin broke its peg, LUNA went to essentially zero, and the contagion rippled across the entire crypto market — Binance still held the tokens. The position went from $1.6 billion to effectively nothing within days. CZ tweeted at the time that he was “poor again” — a joke that landed differently when it was attached to a nine-figure loss.
What the autobiography adds is the reasoning behind not selling. The Binance team discussed reducing their position. They decided against it for three reasons: a concentrated sell-off would deepen market panic, a large exit would take time in an already fast-moving downturn, and — most revealingly — CZ did not want the outside world to perceive Binance as having “left before retail investors.” He was worried about the optics of the exchange’s own investment desk getting out while customers were still trapped.
That reasoning cuts both ways. On one hand, it is a plausible concern about market confidence. On the other, it is an implicit admission that Binance’s investment team was large enough and sophisticated enough to get out if they chose to, and the only thing preventing them was reputational calculation. The $1.6 billion figure is so large that it is genuinely difficult to reason about — $3 million that became $1.6 billion is the kind of return that warps every subsequent decision a fund makes. Whether CZ’s explanation is credible or a retroactive justification for holding through a collapse is a question the book does not fully resolve.
The Whistleblower Feud: Li Lin, Star Xu, and the Justin Sun Investigation
The most politically loaded disclosure involves Huobi founder Li Lin, OKX founder Star Xu, and the investigations surrounding Justin Sun. According to CZ’s account, Li Lin told him in 2025 — while Li was in custody — that he had been arrested because Star Xu filed a whistleblower report against him. Li’s implication: Star was the one who triggered the legal process that put him in that position.
Star Xu denied it. He also posted evidence on X specifically to rebut the accusation, calling himself a “tainted witness” in the context of the Justin Sun investigation. The phrase matters. A tainted witness is someone whose credibility is compromised or whose motivations are suspect — someone who was used by investigators rather than someone who came forward on their own initiative. Star is saying: I got called in, I was used to build a case, and Li Lin’s side is now weaponizing that to make me the villain.
The underlying investigation involves Justin Sun, the Tron founder who was indicted by the Department of Justice and is currently a central figure in a federal case. The connections between Huobi, OKX, Tron, and the Chinese regulatory environment are dense enough that a whistleblower accusation in that context could involve a dozen different motivations — competitive, political, regulatory arbitrage, genuine wrongdoing.
The 2015 Forgery Accusation: Star Xu’s Old Ammunition
The fourth revelation is the oldest — and Star Xu is apparently not done with it. In May 2015, before Binance existed in its current form, Star Xu publicly accused CZ of forging signatures in contracts. The accusation was a serious one at the time: forgery in a legal document is a criminal matter in most jurisdictions. CZ denies it completely in the autobiography. Star, on April 8, 2026, posted evidence on X specifically to rebut CZ’s denial and attack his credibility directly.
Star is not simply defending himself from a 2015 allegation — he is re-litigating it in real time, using CZ’s own book as the trigger. The logic works like this: if CZ is willing to lie in a 2026 autobiography about a 2015 forgery accusation, why should anyone believe his account of the Li Lin whistleblower situation? The attack on CZ’s credibility in 2015 becomes a template for undermining his account of 2025. This is a long-running dispute that has just entered a new phase.
For the broader crypto industry, these four disclosures tell you something structural: the same cast of characters keeps appearing in each other’s stories as antagonists, and the relationships between them are older and more hostile than any public-facing narrative suggests. CZ has written his version. Star Xu, Li Lin, and everyone else referenced will have theirs.
The autobiography is not the end of this story. It is the opening round of the next argument. Or maybe the next gossip in the crypto industry.