When Islamic State needed to move and disguise its money, it turned, US prosecutors said in 2023, to the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange: Binance. So too did al-Qaida, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which used the platform to help bankroll its operations in the years leading up to the 7 October attack in Israel. Binance was not accused of directly financing these groups, but prosecutors found that it knowingly allowed its exchange to function as a conduit – enabling extremist organisations to shift funds, evade scrutiny and frustrate investigations.

At the centre of it all was Binance’s founder and chief executive, Changpeng Zhao. By 2024, the self-styled “king” of crypto had fallen from grace, pleading guilty to money laundering charges and entering prison, while Binance agreed to pay a record $4.3bn penalty for its role in facilitating terrorist financing. The case was hailed as a rare victory for regulators willing to take on the industry’s biggest players – and for victims of the violence linked to those financial flows. Among them were the families of US citizens killed on 7 October, who are now suing Binance in a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of “pitching itself to terrorist organisations”.

But in late October, Donald Trump announced that he was pardoning Zhao. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, framed the decision as a corrective to what she called the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency”, insisting that Zhao’s crimes had produced no “identifiable victims”.

It was a familiar refrain, dressed up for a new audience: that corruption is somehow a “victimless crime”. The claim is absurd. Terrorist organisations do not exist in a vacuum. They depend on white-collar criminals capable of building and maintaining secretive financial pipelines. The victims of bombings, shootings and mass casualty attacks are, all too often, also the victims of bankers, executives and financiers who made that violence possible.