The Unpublished Manuscript
So the New York Times got their hands on a draft of Changpeng Zhao’s memoir. It’s nearly 300 pages, apparently. They published this big exposé about it on February 27th, detailing all sorts of things that were supposed to be private.
The manuscript covers CZ’s secret negotiations with the Department of Justice, which I think is pretty interesting. According to what the Times reported, prosecutors initially wanted $6.8 billion from Binance. The exchange countered with just $500 million. They eventually settled on that $4.3 billion penalty we all heard about. CZ pleaded guilty to one count of violating anti-money-laundering laws.
There’s also this bit about his time in prison and what happened after. Apparently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement placed a detainer on him while he was incarcerated, claiming he overstayed his visa. His lawyers had to intervene, but he still spent his final two weeks under police custody. When he was released in September 2024, he left detention and boarded a private plane within 26 minutes.
Interactions and Rivalries
The memoir talks about CZ’s interactions with former SEC Chair Gary Gensler. He wrote that he once offered Gensler an advisory role at Binance, which Gensler declined. They later met for sushi in Tokyo in 2019, which seems like an odd detail to include.
On Sam Bankman-Fried, CZ recalled that SBF asked for billions during the 2022 crisis. He wrote that SBF made the request “as if he were asking for a bologna sandwich.” That’s quite a comparison, honestly.
There’s also a passage defending Trump’s handling of classified documents. CZ wrote that he would give a bonus to an employee who took company files to read in the bathroom. When someone quoted that line on X, CZ replied simply: “make sense, right?”
The Community Response
What’s really interesting is how the crypto community reacted. Within hours of the NYT report, CZ himself framed it as free advertising. “NYT is advertising my upcoming book already, for free,” he wrote on X. He added that the Times obtained “a very early draft, without permission.”
His lawyer, Teresa Goody Guillén, said the NYT was “writing based on material that is neither in CZ’s book nor in his words.” But the damage—or perhaps the promotion—was already done.
On X, multiple users echoed CZ’s characterization. The dominant reaction was that the critical NYT report actually served as free book marketing. Chinese-speaking users started debating how to translate “Freedom of Money”—whether it means financial freedom or monetary liberty. Some noted its resemblance to Li Xiaolai’s book “The Road to Financial Freedom.”
Memecoins and Publication Plans
The buzz even triggered a memecoin. A token called “Freedom of Money” surged to an $8.3 million market cap. On-chain analyst EyeOnChain flagged three wallets that had accumulated tokens before the NYT report. They turned a combined $8,600 investment into $781,000 in unrealized gains.
CZ had actually preemptively addressed this possibility back in January. When he posted about the Chinese title 《$币安人生》, he explicitly stated he holds no related memecoins. “This is not related to any meme tokens or listings,” he wrote at the time.
The memoir has been in the works since at least March 2025, when CZ revealed a 114,000-word draft. It’s since been condensed to roughly 97,000 words across 300 pages. He’s choosing to self-publish simultaneously in English and Chinese, saying traditional publishing would take too long. All proceeds will go to charity.
During the writing process, CZ hinted that the book would explore whether FTX was connected to the Terra/LUNA collapse in May 2022. But he ultimately held back, writing that he “never saw hard evidence.”
So what started as a newspaper exposé turned into what many are calling the year’s best free book promotion. The memoir is expected in the coming weeks, and now more people are talking about it than ever before. Sometimes publicity works in strange ways, I suppose.
