From prison to Davos, pardoned Binance founder CZ exposes a $33 trillion secret the global elite can’t hide anymore

Changpeng Zhao spoke at the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Annual Meeting in Davos this week, his first appearance on the official programme since Binance’s 2023 US settlement and his subsequent guilty plea, prison sentence, and presidential pardon.

The listing placed him squarely in WEF’s “New Era for Finance” track, including a session titled “Where Are We on Stablecoins?”, a framing that treated programmable money not as speculative crypto theater but as emerging financial infrastructure.

The invitation didn’t signal crypto’s ideological victory. It signaled something narrower and more consequential: the products Zhao helped scale have become so systemically relevant that elite conveners can no longer sideline the operators who built them.

Davos isn’t embracing decentralization. It’s absorbing the parts of crypto that look like payments networks and money-market funds.

The rehabilitation curve meets the utility curve

Zhao’s legal overhang materially diminished before Davos.

The October 2025 presidential pardon removed travel and reputational friction that would have made a high-profile WEF slot politically toxic for organizers.

More importantly, Binance operates under formal compliance monitorships. OFAC imposed a five-year independent monitor as part of the 2023 settlement, with additional DOJ and FinCEN oversight publicly reported.

For institutions that screen speakers through risk-management lenses, monitorships function as a form of legibility: they’re the same machinery imposed on systemically important banks after major enforcement actions.

Zhao is no longer just the founder of a contentious exchange. He’s become a credentialed advisor to state crypto initiatives, with formal roles on Pakistan’s Crypto Council and in a Kyrgyzstan national stablecoin partnership, where he advises the president directly.

That personal de-risking intersected with a market inflection. Stablecoin supply hit roughly $311 billion in mid-January 2026, a new peak that arrived even as broader crypto sentiment wobbled.

This suggests that real-world payment demand has decoupled from speculative price cycles.

Artemis data shows annual stablecoin transaction volume around $33 trillion, a figure now cited in mainstream coverage as Visa-scale.

Additionally, tokenized US Treasuries are close to $10 billion, becoming the gateway drug for tokenization: yield-bearing, low-volatility, institution-friendly.

When traditional asset managers start wrapping regulated products on blockchain rails, stablecoins stop being “crypto” and become part of the market structure.

WEF’s own incentives reinforced the shift. The organization has faced governance scrutiny and leadership churn. A refreshed WEF had reason to spotlight “next finance” themes and to include polarizing but central market actors to maintain Davos’s relevance as the venue where emerging finance gets socialized into respectability.

From speculation to financial plumbing

The stablecoins Zhao discussed in Davos are not the same as those of 2017.

It’s no longer a niche on-ramp for crypto trading. It’s a cross-border payments layer that governments now treat as both an opportunity and a threat. The IMF warned that stablecoins create competitive pressure on weak monetary and fiscal systems, turning adoption into a policy-enforcement lever.

Standard & Poor’s scenario analysis frames stablecoin growth as an emerging-market stability issue, specifically the risks of deposit substitution and opacity in capital flows.

Citigroup projected in September 2025 that stablecoin issuance could reach $1.9 trillion by 2030 in a base case, with a bull scenario around $4 trillion. Standard Chartered forecasts roughly $2 trillion by the end of 2028. Coinbase published a model projecting $1.2 trillion by 2028.

The spread between these estimates reflects uncertainty not about technology but about legal enforceability, settlement interoperability, and whether stablecoins become a shadow banking layer or remain tightly regulated payment rails.

Tokenization forecasts are similarly wide. McKinsey estimated in 2024 that tokenized financial assets, excluding stablecoins, could reach $2 trillion by 2030, with a pessimistic scenario around $1 trillion and an optimistic range near $4 trillion.

Ark Invest’s January 2026 report suggested tokenized assets could hit $11 trillion by 2030. The gap between $2 trillion and $11 trillion isn’t a modeling disagreement, but a bet on whether traditional finance accelerates on-chain migration or whether tokenization remains confined to niche use cases like fund shares and private credit.

The bottleneck isn’t technical capacity. It’s whether legal systems will enforce smart contracts as settlement finality, and whether banks will accept tokenized collateral in repo markets.

Compliance first, ideology never

Zhao’s presence at Davos clarified the industry’s path to mainstream acceptance. It isn’t an ideological conversion. It’s institutional assimilation.

The WEF doesn’t invite crypto founders because blockchains are philosophically compelling. It invites them when their products touch foreign exchange sovereignty, bank deposit stability, capital controls, and sanctions policy. Those are issues that map directly onto Davos’s core convening function.

The signal for the broader industry is unambiguous: compliance infrastructure is now a prerequisite for elite access.

Monitorships, audits, and formalized oversight are part of the credentialing stack that makes crypto operators legible to policymakers and financiers. The path forward isn’t “crypto vs. TradFi.” It’s “which parts of crypto get bank-like rules (stablecoins) and which parts get commodities-market rules (everything else).”

US stablecoin regulation, such as the GENIUS Act, is discussed as potentially increasing stablecoin issuers’ demand for short-term Treasuries, with second-order implications for yields and monetary policy transmission.

Market-structure legislation like the CLARITY Act remains contested, with stablecoin features such as “rewards” becoming a flashpoint for bank lobbying.

The next twelve months are less about “regulation vs. no regulation” and more about jurisdictional fragmentation: whether the US imposes strict reserve requirements while offshore issuers operate with lighter standards, and whether that creates a two-tier stablecoin system that mirrors the Eurodollar market’s historical evolution.

Who sets the rules for programmable dollars?

Zhao’s WEF appearance didn’t resolve debates over crypto’s legitimacy. It reframed them.

The question is no longer whether crypto belongs in institutional finance. The question is who writes the rules for on-chain dollars and tokenized securities, and whether those rules accelerate financial inclusion or accelerate dollarization and deposit flight in fragile economies.

Davos 2026 marked the moment when stablecoins graduated from “crypto asset class” to “contested financial network layer.”

The IMF’s concerns about monetary sovereignty and S&P’s warnings about opacity aren’t dismissals. They’re acknowledgments that stablecoins now matter enough to destabilize.

When a technology becomes a macro policy problem, it gets invited to the table: not because it’s loved, but because ignoring it is no longer an option.

Zhao’s appearance signaled that the crypto industry’s most durable products, which are programmable cash, tokenized Treasuries, and settlement rails that never sleep, have crossed into macro-finance relevance.

The operators who built those rails are being pulled into diplomatic and industrial policy conversations, the terrain where Davos has always functioned best.

The industry’s forward path isn’t decentralization winning. It’s infrastructure incumbency, and the long, grinding negotiation over who controls the pipes.