Binance founder Changpeng Zhao added $9.76 billion to his personal fortune within a single 24-hour window, pushing his net worth to $91.2 billion, Forbes’ real-time billionaire tracker has shown, with his Binance stake remaining the primary driver of his wealth.
The jump, logged on September 20, 2026, translates to a one-day gain of roughly 12 per cent. Since the start of the year, Zhao’s fortune has expanded by $41.5 billion, an 83.6 per cent rise, figures from the Bloomberg billionaire index show.
Aged 49, Zhao founded Binance, which ranks as the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume. The platform supports trading in more than 350 cryptocurrencies and had upward of 320 million registered accounts as of June 2026.
His net worth is largely a reflection of his Binance ownership. Forbes attributes about a 90 per cent stake in the company to Zhao, drawing on his public statements and filings made in jurisdictions where such ownership details are disclosed.
Rather than deriving from a regular salary or cash earnings, most of Zhao’s wealth stems from the estimated value of his stake in the privately held exchange. Forbes arrives at Binance’s transaction-fee revenue by using its trailing 12-month spot and derivatives trading volumes, tracked through CoinGecko, combined with estimates of the average fees applied to those transactions.
Bloomberg puts Binance’s transaction-fee revenue at approximately $5.4 billion. This figure is then adjusted against the average ratio of transaction-fee revenue to total revenue among publicly traded firms, resulting in an estimated total revenue of $10.7 billion.
From there, the exchange is valued using enterprise-value-to-sales multiples benchmarked against a group of publicly traded companies, among them Coinbase Global, Riot Platforms, Gemini Space Station, Circle Internet Group and Cboe Global Markets.
A shift in this valuation approach has also significantly contributed to the rise in Zhao’s estimated wealth over the course of the year.
On June 3, Bloomberg cut the discount applied to Binance’s valuation from 50 per cent to 15 per cent, pointing to easing regulatory and legal concerns around the company. That single adjustment added about $36 billion to Zhao’s estimated net worth.
This latest boost to Zhao’s fortune follows a string of major developments tied to the Binance founder and his exchange. In October 2025, United States President Donald Trump granted Zhao a presidential pardon, following a four-month prison term Zhao had served after pleading guilty to failing to maintain adequate anti-money-laundering controls at Binance.
Zhao had been sentenced in April 2024, after U.S. authorities determined that Binance lacked an effective anti-money-laundering programme. He was handed a four-month prison term, making him one of the most prominent cryptocurrency executives to face a custodial sentence over compliance lapses at a major digital-asset platform.
His pardon came after his release, at a time when Binance remained one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. The development also signalled a marked departure from the regulatory scrutiny that had trailed the company and its founder in prior years.
Back in January 2022, Nairametrics reported that Zhao’s net worth had surpassed $96 billion, a figure that made him Asia’s richest person at the time and ranked him among the world’s 15 wealthiest individuals.
That valuation rested mainly on Zhao’s Binance stake and excluded his personal cryptocurrency holdings, such as Bitcoin and Binance Coin. Binance was said to have posted about $20 billion in revenue over the preceding year at that point.
Even after stepping down as Binance’s CEO around that period, Zhao remained a billionaire, holding a net worth of $26.8 billion, according to Bloomberg’s figures.
Meanwhile, the co-founder of CryptoQuant has appealed for some measure of respect and sympathy toward CZ despite his jail sentence, contending that CZ took one for the crypto industry, which he described as still young and far from perfect.
