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. CNBC first reported the pardons.

In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) brought charges against BitMEX, its three co-founders, and its first employee, Gregory 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 and Reed 18 months. 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.»

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, 20:30 UTC): Adds Delo statement and White House official.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will no longer instruct banks to get prior sign-off before they engage in crypto activities — a standard that was set in 2022 and that effectively severed institutions from the digital assets sector as they waited for approvals that never came.

The FDIC, which is the chief federal supervisor of thousands of typically smaller banks and runs the banking industry’s government backstop, had occupied a significant role in the crypto debanking saga. A courtroom fight with crypto exchange Coinbase had recently unveiled dozens of letters between the regulator and banks it supervised. In that 2022 correspondence, the FDIC had instructed them to steer clear of new crypto matters while it hashed out policies, though the agency never developed any and left bankers hanging.

The new industry guidance issued on Friday comes after President Donald Trump elevated a crypto-friendly leadership at the FDIC and other financial regulators and has directed his administration to open doors for the industry.

“With today’s action, the FDIC is turning the page on the flawed approach of the past three years,” said FDIC Acting Chairman Travis Hill, in a statement. “I expect this to be one of several steps the FDIC will take to lay out a new approach for how banks can engage in crypto- and blockchain-related activities in accordance with safety and soundness standards.”

Read More: Trump’s FDIC Chief Rethinks Crypto Guidance as U.S. Senators Probe Debanking

Banks that were once expected to get pre-approvals on crypto matters can now forge ahead, as long as they’re appropriately considering the risks.

The guidance to seek pre-approvals was a common stance across all three U.S. banking agencies, including the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC also acted recently to rescind its similar 2022 guidance, which had emerged as the digital assets sector was beset by failure and high-profile fraud, and global exchange FTX was steering toward disaster.

Read More: OCC Says Banks Can Engage in Crypto Custody and Certain Stablecoin Activities

Shares of CoreWeave (CRWV) opened at $39 apiece during the company’s debut on Nasdaq on Friday afternoon, just under its initial public offering which closed Thursday evening.

The cloud computing firm had sold roughly 37.5 million shares at $40 each, raising about $1.5 billion for its initial public offering (IPO), making it the largest tech offering since 2021. It had, however, initially planned to file the offering at $47 to $55 a share at a much higher valuation than it ultimately saw.

Nvidia, an early investor in the company, placed a $250 million order in the offering.

Some experts speculated that the stock’s debut wouldn’t see the success it had hoped for. Bloomberg Opinion US technology columnist Dave Lee, for example, pointed out the company’s large debt, reliance on just a few big customers and lack of diversity in revenue may be an issue.

“CoreWeave stands to be a bellwether for the AI industry as a whole — a must-watch stock as questions about return on investment grow ever louder,” Lee wrote in an op-ed on Friday. “Even the slightest indication of shakiness in the belief of AI sends investors into a tailspin.”

The current risk-off environment caused by the overall macro situation in the U.S., mainly due to recent tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump, which has caused a sell off in tech stocks, could also have weighed on CoreWeave’s IPO.