Passe BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes has written a fresh essay sticking up for fellow convicted offshore crypto exchange operator Changpeng Zhao, the founder and CEO of Binance till his most trendy guilty plea in a prison case from the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Why the fire and brimstone for a firm no longer even a decade frail?” asks Hayes in a weblog submit published on Monday, evaluating the medication of Zhao — known within the crypto world as “CZ” — to that skilled by heads of prone financial companies tied to wrongdoing.

“Did Passe Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein web the same medicines as GS below his reign helped Passe Malaysian High Minister Najib Razak and financier Jho Loh take hold of larger than $10 billion and saddle a developing nation with more costly global debt?” Hayes asked in his submit. “No, Lloyd bought to retire with his inventory ideas intact, and GS modified into as soon as no longer deemed criminally in tag.”

A U.S. citizen and feeble Deutsche Bank and CitiBank trader, Hayes based crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX after being laid off from the latter tradfi firm.

BitMEX would in a roundabout procedure face bills of Bank Secrecy Act violations equivalent to these Zhao has pleaded guilty to. Love their tradfi counterpart referenced above, Hayes and his co-founders, Ben Delo and Sam Reed, did zero jail time. Following a guilty plea, Hayes obtained six months of house arrest and two years of probation in Could of ultimate year.

Love Hayes, Zhao has pleaded down severely the bills that the U.S. listed in its customary indictment. Zhao’s sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 23, the achieve he faces a most of 18 months within the abet of bars. A most trendy court docket loss will assist him within the U.S. for the following three months.

“The medicines of CZ and Binance is absurd, and handiest highlights the arbitrary nature of punishment by the hands of the negate,” Hayes wrote, calling the penalty assessed them “the most entertaining company exquisite in Pax Americana history.” (To be distinct, the $4.3 billion Binance exquisite is exact over a fifth of what BP paid in 2016 for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill).