Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of crypto exchange BitMEX, has been granted a pardon by U.S. President Donald Trump, a White House official confirmed Friday.

Trump also pardoned Hayes’ co-founders at BitMEX, Samuel Reed and Benjamin Delo, as well as senior employee Greg Dwyer and BitMEX’s operating entity, HDR Global Trading, a BitMEX spokesperson said. CNBC first reported the pardons, which the White House said were signed on Thursday.

In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) brought charges against BitMEX, its three co-founders, and its first employee, Dwyer, accusing them of violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). Prosecutors alleged BitMEX advertised itself as a place where customers could use its platform virtually anonymously, without providing basic know-your-customer (KYC) information. All four individuals eventually pleaded guilty and were sentenced to fines and probationary sentences. The exchange itself pleaded guilty to violating the BSA last year.

Hayes faced two years of probation; Delo spent 30 months on probation and Reed 18 months on probation. Dwyer got 12 months of probation.

In a statement, Delo said he and his colleagues had been “wrongfully targeted.”

“This full and unconditional pardon by President Trump is a vindication of the position we have always held — that BitMEX, my co-founders and I should never have been charged with a criminal offense through an obscure, antiquated law,” he said. “As the most successful crypto exchange of its kind, we were wrongfully made to serve as an example, sacrificed for political reasons and used to send inconsistent regulatory signals. I’m sincerely grateful to the President for granting this pardon to me and my co-founders.”

Hayes just said “thank you” on X (formerly known as Twitter).

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered BitMEX to pay $100 million for violating the Commodity Exchange Act and other CFTC regulations in 2021, separately from its DOJ settlements.

Attorneys representing Hayes, Delo and Reed did not immediately return requests for comment.

The reported pardons come just a day after Trump granted a pardon to Trevor Milton, the former CEO of Nikola Motors who was previously convicted of fraud in 2022. In January, Trump made good on long-standing promises to pardon Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, who was 11 years into a draconian sentence of double life in prison plus 40 years, with no possibility of parole. Since Ulbricht’s pardon, former FTX CEO and convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried has been angling for his own pardon, attempting to curry favor with the Trump administration and appearing on Tucker Carlson in an unauthorized jailhouse interview that landed him in solitary confinement.

Former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who pleaded guilty to the same charge as Hayes and served four months in prison last year — making him not only the richest person to ever go to prison in the U.S., but also the only person to ever serve jail time for violating the BSA — has denied reports that he, too, is seeking a pardon from President Trump.

But, Zhao admitted in a recent X post that “no felon would mind a pardon, especially being the only one in US history who was ever sentenced to prison for a single BSA charge.”

UPDATE (March 28, 2025, 20:40 UTC): Adds Delo statement and White House official.

UPDATE (March 28, 21:06 UTC): Adds Hayes.

UPDATE (March 29, 04:15 UTC): Adds Dwyer and HDR.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. House of Representatives should have the actual text to debate on Wednesday of a bill that would regulate stablecoins, according to a key lawmaker pushing that legislation, which should get the House ready to potentially catch up with a parallel Senate effort.

Rep. Bryan Steil, the Republican who leads the crypto subcommittee within the House Financial Services Committee, said at a Wednesday event in Washington that the bill would be unveiled before the day is out. The Senate has already recently advanced its own version of the U.S. stablecoin oversight legislation through the Senate Banking Committee.

Both bills would set up guardrails for the issuance of digital tokens that are based on the value of steady assets — almost always the U.S. dollar — and the major historical sticking point was over how the issuer would be regulated by states and federal agencies.

A House stablecoin markup — a session in which a relevant committee debates amendments and decides whether to move a bill to the overall House floor — should happen “in the very near future,” Steil said. House lawmakers, including Rep. French Hill, the chairman of the full committee, are working to “close the gap” with the Senate, Steil said.

The stablecoin effort in Congress, which cleared the House during the last session but was stymied in the Senate, is the narrower and potentially easier of the two major crypto bills the industry hopes become law this year. The other is legislation that would regulate how the digital assets markets function in the U.S., and how the assets and transactions would be governed. That one is significantly more complicated, but Steil outlined how this Congress is in better shape to get it done.

“We now have a very different political landscape,” he said. “We maintain a very pro-crypto House of Representatives,” he added, with “really good working relationships with a number of Democrats,” and a similar situation in the Senate.

He said the market-structure bill should get a House hearing in early April.

The speaker list at the Washington event, hosted by the Digital Chamber, reveals how much more connected to Congress the industry is this year. More than a half dozen U.S. senators were set to appear, and almost a dozen members of the House, including multiple Democrats.

The crypto sector has already seen momentum on Capitol Hill in the early days of the congressional session, with big bipartisan support in an effort in both the House and Senate seeking to erase an Internal Revenue Service rule targeting decentralized finance (DeFi). The Senate Banking Committee also easily advanced a stablecoin bill with supporters from both parties.

South Korean financial authorities are planning sanctions against crypto exchanges who are operating illegally in the country, business newspaper Hankyung reported on Friday.

The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) classified a number of exchanges who are not registered as Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) as targets for sanctions, according to the report.

The exchanges targeted – BitMEX, KuCoin, CoinW, Bitunix and KCEX – have been found to be operating Korean-language websites without reporting to FIU. For that reason, they are classed as illegal businesses, as per the country’s regulations.

“We are currently reviewing blocking access to unreported overseas exchanges that are providing services to domestic investors through consultation with the Korea Communications Standards Commission,” an FIU official said, accordinh to the report.

“We are organizing damage cases and related data to strengthen communication between authorities, and we expect to see tangible measures taken within this year.”

BitMEX, KuCoin and CoinW did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

Last month, South Korean crypto exchange Upbit was prohibited from allowing new customers to transfer assets to its platform for three months due to non-compliance with its obligations as a regulated provider.

Read More: Crypto Exchange Bithumb Raided by South Korean Prosecutors Over Embezzlement Allegations: Report