Binance CEO Richard Teng has dismissed claims that the cryptocurrency exchange helped boost a Trump-backed stablecoin before former CEO Changpeng Zhao received a presidential pardon.

The claims in question relate to a $2 billion investment Binance received from Abu Dhabi’s state-owned investment firm MGX. The deal was settled using USD1, a stablecoin created by the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. 

MGX’s investment and Binance’s subsequent listing of USD1 on its exchange helped bolster the stablecoin’s usage and credibility, with some lawmakers and reports suggesting this may have influenced the pardon of Zhao, commonly known as CZ.

However, in a CNBC interview on Monday, Teng rejected the notion that Binance — the world’s largest cryptocurrency firm — had given USD1 any preferential treatment.

“First of all, the usage of USD1 [for the] transaction between MGX as a strategic investor into Binance, that was decided by MGX … We didn’t partake in that decision,” Teng said. 

He noted that USD1 had already been listed on other exchanges before Binance, adding that, as the “largest crypto ecosystem in the world,” the company regularly engages with promising new projects.

“Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. In the case of USD1, I’m glad that both parties worked it out.” 

Teng’s denials come after the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Binance not only facilitated the settlement of MGX’s investment using USD1, but also assisted in building the technology behind the stablecoin, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

The Journal also previously noted that World Liberty Financial benefited greatly from the listing of its USD1 token on Binance and a partnership with Pancake Swap — an online marketplace for cryptocurrencies said to be associated with Binance. 

Meanwhile, scrutiny of CZ’s pardon and Binance’s ties to the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial has continued to mount from opposition leaders on Capitol Hill.

Among the most prominent voices has been Sen. Elizabeth Warren, ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, who has accused Binance and the Trump administration of corruption.

In a statement last month, the vocal critic of the crypto industry said: “First, Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to a criminal money laundering charge. Then he boosted one of Donald Trump’s crypto ventures and lobbied for a pardon,” with the President later doing “his part.”

Binance did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Critics have long questioned World Liberty Financial’s open connections to the Trump administration as it seeks new partnerships and investors overseas.

According to World Liberty Financial’s website, a Trump-affiliated firm called DT Marks DEFI LLC, along with members of the Trump family, receives a major share of the platform’s revenue and holds digital tokens backing the company, known as WLFI. The firm has reportedly netted the Trump family hundreds of millions to billions in profits.

However, it also states that Trump, his family or any members of the Trump Organization or DT Marks DEFI LLC are not an “officer, director, founder, or employee of, or manager, owner or operator of World Liberty Financial or its affiliates.”

MGX’s purchase of $2 billion in USD1 tokens has also raised eyebrows after a New York Times report in September noted that it occurred two weeks before the White House signed a major agreement with the U.A.E. on access to hundreds of thousands of American microchips.

In a conversation with CNBC last month, Donald Trump Jr., the U.S. president’s eldest son and a co-founder of World Liberty Financial, dismissed the reports and broader concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

He was joined by the firm’s CEO, Zach Witkoff, son of U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who said their fathers were not focused on nor directly involved in the business. 

Zhao was forced to step down from his role at Binance in 2023 after pleading guilty to enabling money laundering through the cryptocurrency exchange.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement on Oct. 23 that Zhao had been prosecuted under the Biden administration “despite no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims.”

Trump later said he pardoned Zhao “at the request of a lot of very good people” and that he knew nothing about him.

Since returning to office, Trump has embraced the crypto sector, proposing new crypto legislation while rolling back enforcement actions that targeted crypto exchanges such as Coinbase and Ripple during the prior administration.

Speaking Monday, Teng said that Binance and the crypto industry “were very thankful” to the president for CZ’s pardon and for signaling that the U.S. will be the “global crypto capital of the world.”

As companies pour billions into artificial intelligence, HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery on Tuesday warned of a mismatch between investments and revenues.

Speaking at the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit in Hong Kong, Elhedery said the scale of investment poses a conundrum for companies: while the computing power for AI is essential, current revenue profiles may not justify such massive spending.

Morgan Stanley in July estimated that over the next five years, global data center capacity would grow six times, with data centers and their hardware alone costing $3 trillion by the end of 2028.

McKinsey said in a report in April that by 2030, data centers equipped to handle AI processing loads would require $5.2 trillion in capital expenditure to keep up with compute demand, while the capex for those powering traditional IT applications is forecast at $1.5 trillion.

Elhedery said that consumers were not ready to pay for it, and businesses will be cautious as productivity benefits will not materialize in a year or two.

“These are like five year trends, and therefore the ramp up means that we will start seeing real revenue benefits and real readiness to pay for it, probably later than than the expectations of investors,” he said.

William Ford, chairman and CEO of General Atlantic, speaking at the same panel, agreed: “In the long term, you’re going to create a whole new set of industries and applications, and there will be a productivity payoff, but that’s a 10-, 20-year play.”

Big Tech firms Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon have all lifted their guidance for capital expenditures and now collectively expect that number to reach more than $380 billion this year.

OpenAI, which set off the AI frenzy with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, has announced roughly $1 trillion worth of infrastructure deals with partners including Nvidia, Oracle and Broadcom.

Ford said that the huge expenditure that is going into the sector shows that people recognize the long-term impact of AI. This sector, however, will be capital-intensive initially, he said adding that “you need to, sort of, pay up front for the opportunity that’s going to come down the road.”

Ford warned there could be “misallocation of capital, destruction, overvaluation… [and] irrational exuberance” in the initial stages, and also added that it can be difficult to pick winners and losers at the moment.

“You’re really betting on this being a broad based technology, more like railroads or electricity, that had profound impacts over over time, and reshaped the economy, but were very hard to predict exactly how in the first few years.”

Whether or not markets are getting ahead of themselves over artificial intelligence is a hot topic for investors right now.

Last week, billionaire investor Ray Dalio said his personal “bubble indicator” was relatively high, while Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell described the AI boom as “different” from the dotcom bubble.

For Magnus Grimeland, founder of Singapore-based venture capital firm Antler, it’s clear the market is not overheating. “I definitely don’t think we’re in a bubble,” he told CNBC’s “Beyond the Valley” podcast, listing several reasons.

The speed at which AI is being adopted by businesses is notable compared to other tech shifts, Grimeland said, such as the move from physical servers to cloud computing, which he said took a decade. Added to this, AI is “top of the agenda” for leaders today, he said, whether they’re running a healthcare provider in India or a U.S. Fortune 500 company.

“There’s a willingness to invest into using that technology … and that’s happened immediately,” Grimeland said.

He described the rapid shift to AI as being substantially different from the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when unprofitable internet startups eventually collapsed and the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost almost 80% of its value between March 2000 and October 2002.

“What makes this a little bit different from a bubble and makes it very different from dotcom is that there’s really real revenues behind a lot of this growth,” Grimeland said.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said it reached $10 billion in annual recurring revenue in June. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is the amount of money a company expects to make from customers over 12 months.

Antler is an investor in Lovable, a company that enables people to build apps and websites using AI. In July, Lovable said it had passed $100 million ARR in eight months.

Another reason that the rapid adoption of AI is different from the dotcom boom is the speed at which consumers are taking to the technology, Grimeland said. “Think about how quickly our behavior online has changed, right? … 100% of my searches a year ago [were on] Google. Now it’s probably 20%,” he said.

Earlier this month, OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Atlas browser for Mac OS, with shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet falling on the news.

Asked whether there are opportunities for AI startups when large U.S. and Chinese companies currently dominate the sector, Grimeland said the big firms were “being challenged in the way they haven’t for a very long time.” He gave the example of DeepSeek, the Chinese startup that has produced AI models comparable to those from OpenAI.

“Tencent is building great AI, Baidu is building great AI, but that’s not where DeepSeek came from, right?” Grimeland said. “The AI winners of this current platform shift [are] not necessarily those big incumbents.”

As such, there are significant opportunities for smaller AI companies to become big businesses, Grimeland said, flagging firms that have “positive signals,” such as a good founding team, growth in the lifetime value of a customer and a reduction in the cost of delivering a product.

– CNBC’s Dylan Butts, Ashley Capoot, Alex Harring and Jaures Yip contributed to this report.