Forbes found through forensic analysis of wallets that Zhao Changpeng controls more than half of the 80 million tokens he and the Binance founding team received after the exchange was founded.
During Binance’s 2017 initial coin offering (ICO), 100 million BNB tokens were allocated for crowdfunding. However, Forbes has now revealed that the ICO was undersubscribed, meaning that demand failed to meet the available supply. According to its analysis, less than 11 million tokens were actually sold during the ICO. The unsold tokens ended up in wallets controlled by Binance.
It is estimated that Zhao Changpeng's equity in Binance exchange is worth about $33 billion.
Forbes reports that the former Binance boss’s fortune is now over $61 billion, making him the 24th richest person in the world. By comparison, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is worth $11 billion.
It is worth noting that since Changpeng Zhao’s incarceration, his net worth has grown significantly.
Zhao Changpeng was sentenced to four months in prison in April this year after admitting to allowing the major exchange to launder money.
In early June, he was sent to California Lompoc Prison II, a low-security federal prison once known as the country club prison in the United States, where Richard Nixon's lawyers and other celebrities were imprisoned.
