The Guy Who Did 4 Months in Prison for No-KYC Just Called a No-KYC DEX 'Awesome'

Changpeng Zhao served four months in federal prison for running an exchange without a proper anti-money laundering program. He was pardoned by President Trump in October 2025. Less than a year later, he went on a podcast and called a no-KYC perpetual futures exchange “actually awesome.”

Then the OKX founder accused him of secretly backing one himself.

What CZ Actually Said

On June 16, 2026, a preview clip from CZ’s upcoming conversation with Galaxy Research’s Alex Thorn hit X and immediately went viral. The subject: Hyperliquid — the decentralized perps exchange that now controls over 70% of the on-chain perpetuals market.

CZ’s exact words:

“I think the Hyperliquid invention is actually awesome. They occupy a niche that Binance cannot compete.”

He went further, acknowledging the obvious tension: “I would never do what they do given what I’ve experienced in my life” — a nod to Binance’s $4.3 billion settlement with the DOJ in 2023 and his own guilty plea for failing to maintain AML controls. He added, diplomatically: “I assume they have good lawyers.”

It reads as a compliment. A cautious, compliance-aware compliment — from a man who now has very personal reasons to care about compliance. Nothing to see here.

Except that’s not the full picture.

Enter Star Xu

OKX founder Star Xu saw the clip and had a different reaction. Within hours, he went public with a pointed accusation: CZ is praising a no-KYC model while quietly backing Aster DEX — a platform that copies Hyperliquid’s model “almost exactly.”

Aster launched in March 2025, born from a merger of APX Finance and Astherus. It operates as a decentralized perpetual exchange with no KYC requirements. Within months of launch, it hit $2 billion in total value locked and positioned itself as Hyperliquid’s primary on-chain challenger.

The connections to Binance’s orbit are hard to miss:

• YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs) holds a minority investment in Aster
• Former Binance team members are involved in the project
• CZ promoted Aster on X multiple times
• The ASTER token ran from $0.08 to over $1 at launch

Xu’s argument, in plain terms: You’re praising a no-KYC exchange. You’re backing a no-KYC exchange. But you claim you’d “never” run one.

The Aster Defense

The counterargument — and it’s a real one — is that Aster is legally separated from Binance. CZ isn’t running it, doesn’t control it, and YZi Labs is a minority investor, not an operator. In crypto’s compliance universe, structural distance matters. That’s how Binance can simultaneously claim compliance while adjacent projects operate in the gray zone.

But that’s precisely Star Xu’s point. If you’re going to publicly distance yourself from the no-KYC model — and invoke your prison sentence to do it — then quietly promoting and financing a no-KYC clone looks, at best, inconsistent.

Xu also revealed that OKX’s Web3 division had been building a Hyperliquid-style DEX since 2023 — but chose not to launch mainnet due to regulatory concerns. In other words: OKX saw the same opportunity, decided the compliance risk was too high, and held back. CZ, post-pardon, apparently calculated differently.

The Galaxy Brains Full Interview

The full CZ/Alex Thorn conversation hasn’t dropped yet. The viral clip was a teaser. When the full interview releases, expect the Aster DEX question to dominate the follow-up conversation online. CZ is going to need a cleaner answer than “I assume they have good lawyers.”

The timing is awkward. Binance is simultaneously fighting to maintain its MiCA license in the EU — with regulators signaling deep unhappiness over compliance gaps — while its founder is publicly lionizing a platform that EU regulators would almost certainly view as non-compliant.

Why This Matters for Crypto Jobs

The CZ/Hyperliquid/Aster triangle is a microcosm of the biggest tension in crypto hiring right now: compliance-native versus compliance-optional.

Two very different types of companies are hiring, and they want very different people:

The Hyperliquid/Aster playbook — Ship fast, skip KYC, operate in the gray zone, scale to billions in TVL before regulators catch up. These teams want protocol engineers, market makers, and product builders who can move at the speed of DeFi. Compliance is not the priority.

The Binance/Coinbase/Kraken playbook — CCOs, AML analysts, legal counsel, and compliance engineers. The enforcement era means every major CeFi player is racing to hire the talent that keeps them out of DOJ crosshairs. These roles are commanding $250K–$400K+ at the top exchanges.

The regulatory landscape is hardening. The EU MiCA framework is forcing exchanges to choose a lane. The U.S. Clarity Act gave digital assets a legal framework for the first time. The gray zone is shrinking — which means the people who understand both DeFi mechanics and compliance law are the most valuable players in the industry.

CZ’s situation — brilliant builder, compliance failure, prison, pardon, and now praising the very thing that got him in trouble — is essentially a living illustration of why that gap matters.

---

Ready to work at a crypto company that actually has its compliance house in order? Browse crypto and Web3 jobs at Cryptogrind.com — from DeFi protocol engineers to chief compliance officers, the industry is hiring across every lane.