Binance Securities Lawsuit 2026: Pardon Didn't End It

Start with the confusion driving a lot of bad takes online. When President Trump pardoned CZ in October 2025, it wiped out his personal federal criminal exposure tied to Binance's money-laundering guilty plea. That's real, and significant for CZ individually. But a pardon is a criminal-law tool — it has zero legal effect on civil lawsuits against Binance the company, which is a separate legal entity from its founder. The unregistered-securities class action at the center of this story, originally filed back in 2020, was never a criminal matter. It alleges Binance sold billions of dollars in tokens to US investors without registering them as securities. The pardon didn't touch it, and coverage that treated October's news as "Binance's US legal chapter closed" got ahead of the facts.

Here's the actual news. On February 26, Southern District of New York Judge Carter denied Binance's motion to compel arbitration in Lee v. Binance — the revived Chase Williams case alleging unregistered token sales, sent back to life by the Second Circuit in 2024. About seven weeks later, on April 14, U.S. District Judge Roy Altman in the Southern District of Florida made a similar call in Sizemore v. Zhao — a separate unregistered-securities class action against Binance, Zhao and celebrity promoters — ruling that neither Binance nor Zhao could compel arbitration on an agreement they never signed. Then on August 19, the Eleventh Circuit weighed in via mandamus, backing a third arbitration denial in a case brought by eight crypto-theft victims. Three different courts, three different case types, one consistent conclusion: Binance's terms-of-service arbitration clauses aren't shielding it from these claims. That's a pattern, not a fluke, and patterns are what move a case toward trial.

Lee v. Binance is the one to watch. With arbitration off the table in SDNY, the case is positioned to move into class-certification briefing — the stage where a court decides whether individual token buyers' claims can be combined into one mass action. That's the outcome Binance spent years trying to avoid: a certified class covering billions in alleged unregistered sales carries far more financial and reputational weight than scattered individual claims. Binance isn't out of moves. It has appealed the SDNY arbitration denial to the Second Circuit (case No. 26-744, filed in March), and that appeal is still pending with no ruling date. If the appeals court reverses Judge Carter, arbitration comes back into play and the case could shrink dramatically. If it doesn't, class-certification briefing proceeds largely as planned.

Plaintiffs' lawyers and the investor class have the momentum right now — three wins in one year is a strong signal for a case that sat dormant for years before its 2024 revival. Binance's legal team, by contrast, is fighting on multiple fronts at once: SDNY, SD Florida, and a Second Circuit appeal, with no single ruling that ends the exposure. CZ himself is comparatively insulated. He's said publicly he doesn't plan to return to day-to-day Binance operations, is focused on his venture fund YZi Labs, and current CEO Richard Teng — in the role since November 2023 — is the one steering the company through this. That separation matters for how the story should be read: this is increasingly a Binance-the-company problem, not a CZ problem.

Don't expect resolution this year. The realistic path is incremental: the Second Circuit rules on Binance's appeal at some unspecified point, SDNY moves toward class-certification briefing in Lee v. Binance over the next six to twelve months, and Sizemore v. Zhao grinds forward separately in Florida. None of that is a settlement or a verdict — it's procedural groundwork for a case that could still take years to resolve. The scenario that breaks this bearish-for-Binance trajectory is a Second Circuit reversal that revives arbitration and shrinks the case to a narrow pre-2019 subclass. The scenario that compounds it is class certification proceeding largely intact, discovery surfacing new claims, and the theft-suit pattern from the Eleventh Circuit spreading to other courts. Either way, this is a legal-exposure story, not a price story — BNB's price action is being driven by exchange-adoption momentum, not litigation, and it has shown no measurable reaction to any of this year's rulings, and there's no reason to expect that to change based on litigation timelines alone.