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Canadian billionaire, Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, added $9.76 billion to his fortune in a single day to reach $91.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a gain of about 12% that ranks among the sharpest one-day moves the tracker has recorded this year.
The jump, logged on Saturday, Sept. 20, takes Zhao's gain for 2026 to $41.5 billion, or 83.6%. Bloomberg attributes the increase to Binance and Zhao's controlling stake in the privately held exchange, which is the world's largest by trading volume and reported more than 320 million registered accounts as of June.
Because Binance is private, Zhao's wealth is an estimate rather than a market price. Bloomberg calculates the exchange's transaction-fee revenue from its trailing 12-month spot and derivatives volumes, as tracked by CoinGecko, and an estimate of average fees. That figure, about $5.4 billion, is then scaled to roughly $10.7 billion in total revenue and valued against the enterprise-value-to-sales multiples of listed peers including Coinbase, Circle, Gemini and Cboe Global Markets.
Why the number keeps climbing
The single biggest driver of Zhao's paper wealth this year was not a market move but a methodology change. On June 3, Bloomberg cut the discount it applies to Binance's valuation from 50% to 15%, citing reduced regulatory and legal risk. That one adjustment added about $36 billion to his estimated net worth.
Forbes, which also credits Zhao with about 90% of Binance, values him higher still. Its real-time list showed $114.6 billion on Sept. 19, and it had him at nearly $110 billion in June, ahead of Bill Gates. Zhao himself has called such figures a guess, and has objected in the past to estimates that showed his wealth rising through a crypto downturn.
Neither figure is cash. Zhao's holdings are concentrated in a private company and in BNB, Binance's own token, which he cannot freely sell without moving the market.
From prison to pardon
The rally in Zhao's fortune tracks a remarkable rehabilitation. He stepped down as Binance chief executive in November 2023 after pleading guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program at the exchange, which itself pleaded guilty and paid $4.3 billion in penalties. He was sentenced in April 2024 to four months in prison and released that September.
In October 2025, President Donald Trump granted him a pardon. Binance, run since 2023 by Richard Teng, has kept its position as the industry's largest venue throughout.
Zhao, 49, was born in Jiangsu, China, and moved to Vancouver with his family at 12. Bloomberg's index first tracked his fortune at $96 billion in January 2022, before the 2022 crypto crash and the U.S. case cut it to a fraction of that. He is now within reach of that earlier peak, at least on paper.
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