SEC Dismisses Its Civil Case Against Binance and Changpeng Zhao
The SEC dismissed with prejudice its civil enforcement action against Binance entities and founder Changpeng Zhao, closing one of the largest U.S. crypto-exchange cases of the prior enforcement era.
On May 29, 2025, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a joint stipulation dismissing with prejudice its civil enforcement action against Binance entities and founder Changpeng Zhao. The SEC said the decision was an exercise of agency discretion and a policy matter and cautioned that the dismissal did not necessarily state its position on other cases.
The litigation had been broader than Bitcoin. It involved allegations concerning exchange registration, securities-law violations, customer assets, market surveillance, and other parts of Binance’s digital-asset business. Bitcoin nevertheless had a material connection because Binance was one of the world’s largest Bitcoin trading venues, so U.S. enforcement policy toward the exchange affected important market infrastructure through which Bitcoin was bought and sold.
The dismissal was one piece of a wider 2025 change in the U.S. regulatory environment for digital assets. Its historical significance lies less in any finding about Bitcoin itself—the case ended without such a merits ruling—than in the reversal of a major enforcement posture toward a central global exchange. The procedural stage should therefore be described precisely as a dismissal with prejudice, not as a judicial ruling that Binance had prevailed on the underlying allegations.