Nearly 1,700 UK investors are trying to make Binance and Changpeng Zhao answer in London for derivatives they say should never have been sold to retail customers.
Changpeng Zhao has spent much of this year trying to turn the page. He served four months in a US federal prison in 2024, received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump in October 2025, and released a memoir in April called Freedom of Money. Now almost 1,700 British investors have filed a High Court claim against Binance and CZ personally, seeking up to £150 million over leveraged crypto products they say were sold without proper authorization.
The Financial Times reported that the claim targets Binance Holdings, Zhao, UAE-registered Nest Exchange, and unidentified people said to operate the Binance platform. The investors allege Binance entities sold unauthorized derivative products to UK retail customers between late 2019 and 2020, in breach of the Financial Services and Markets Act. That date range matters. The FCA's later retail ban on crypto derivatives took effect on January 6, 2021, but the lawsuit is not simply a complaint about what happened after that ban. It goes to whether Binance had any right to offer those products to ordinary UK customers in the first place.
If you traded on Binance then, this is the part that cuts through the usual crypto fog. These were not plain spot purchases of bitcoin or ether. The claim is about leveraged products, the kind that can wipe out a retail account quickly when price moves against you. According to the FT, some claimants say they lost tens of thousands of pounds, while others say the losses ran into the millions. One named claimant, Tomas Sutas, reportedly lost more than £100,000.
KP Law is coordinating the action after being instructed by hundreds of affected customers. Binance has not admitted the claim and has said it will defend itself. That is exactly what you would expect it to say. The harder question is whether a London court accepts the claimants' argument that a platform built for fast offshore growth crossed a line when it sold complex products into a regulated market.
The FCA's own history with Binance is not flattering. In June 2021, the regulator warned consumers about Binance Markets Limited and said the firm could not carry out regulated activity in the UK without prior written consent. Binance Markets Limited later cancelled its FCA permissions, with the cancellation completed in May 2023, leaving it unable to provide regulated activities and products in the UK. Those steps were real, but they did not put money back into the accounts of traders who say they had already been hit.
That is why this lawsuit matters beyond the headline number. Regulators can publish warnings, restrict permissions, and update registers. A private claim asks a simpler question: who pays if a court finds the products should not have been sold? For Binance, that is a very different problem from another compliance notice gathering dust on a government website.
CZ's personal position makes the case sharper. His US case ended with a guilty plea tied to anti-money-laundering failures, a $50 million personal fine, and Binance's $4.3 billion settlement with American authorities. The White House pardon erased the federal conviction's legal consequences, but it did not erase the business record that courts, regulators, and customers can still read. His memoir may present the Binance story as one of resilience and user protection. A lawsuit from nearly 1,700 users makes that a harder story to tell cleanly.
Frankly, Binance's best argument in public has always been scale. It became the world's largest crypto exchange by moving faster than the institutions around it, listing products, entering markets, and letting regulators catch up later. That was the bet. The London claim is part of the bill for that bet, because financial law does not disappear just because a product is wrapped in crypto language and sold through an offshore exchange.
The case is also a useful warning for the rest of the industry. The 2019 to 2020 boom was full of platforms treating retail access as proof of demand and regulatory silence as permission. You cannot build a serious financial business that way forever. FTX made that painfully obvious in one form. Binance is now facing a different version of the same reckoning, one focused less on collapse than on the legal status of products customers were allowed to trade.
None of this decides the lawsuit. Binance will fight it, and the claimants still have to prove their case in court. But the direction is clear enough: the old defense that crypto lived somewhere outside ordinary financial rules is wearing thin. In London, the question is now being asked in pounds, names, dates, and losses.
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