After admitting guilt to money laundering charges, Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive of Binance, resigned.

It is my responsibility to own up to my mistakes. He wrote on X, “This is best for our community, for Binance, and for me.

As announced by the Justice Department, $4.3 billion (£3.4 billion) in fines and forfeitures must be paid by Binance, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange globally.

It said Binance had helped users bypass sanctions across the world.

“Binance enabled nearly $900 million in transactions between US and Iranian users, and facilitated millions of dollars in transactions between US users and users in Syria, and in the Russian occupied Ukrainian regions of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk”, a spokesperson said.

Binance, which is registered in the Cayman Islands, is known as the world’s largest platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.