During his time at the helm of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency firm, former Binance boss Changpeng Zhao, who will be sentenced in the United States later Tuesday for money laundering, perfected the humble executive look.

At parties, on stages and in meetings, he was rarely seen without his black polo shirt, emblazoned with the insignia of his firm — complemented by the corporate logo tattooed on his arm.

It was vital to cement the myth of a boy who came from hardship in China and once flipped burgers for a living in Canada — before making a fortune still estimated in the tens of billions.

“I’m a small entrepreneur,” and a “normal guy”, the man known in crypto circles as “CZ” told AFP in 2022 when comparing himself to Elon Musk, whose buyout of Twitter (now X) Zhao later backed with $500 million.

Yet there was little normal about Zhao’s leadership of Binance, a company that largely cornered the crypto-trading market before careening into a slew of charges including sanctions busting and illegal trading. 

Zhao, who founded Binance in Shanghai in 2017, emerged as the most visible figure in crypto after his great rival Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in 2022 for masterminding a giant Ponzi scheme.

During his rival’s downfall, Zhao was there to twist the knife, first suggesting he might buy FTX before very publicly withdrawing.

A year later, it was Zhao’s turn for contrition.

He pleaded guilty to violating US anti-money laundering laws and agreed to step down as Binance CEO, the authorities announcing later that the firm would pay a $4.3 billion settlement.

– True grit? –

The legal cases painted a picture of Zhao as a ruthless operator pursuing growth at all costs.

It was a far cry from the folksy legend he had fostered, which had become almost mythical in crypto circles.

Zhao’s early life in China was scarred by hardship when his parents were sent to the countryside for a dose of peasant reality — a common punishment for those suspected of having capitalist sympathies during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

They emigrated to Canada in the late 1980s, where young Zhao worked at a McDonald’s and a petrol station to help the family survive, according to his own account of his life and a blog from 2020 on the Binance website.

This instilled “drive, grit, and initiative” into the young man and helped to create a “crypto leader”, the Binance blog said.

Zhao’s nomadic childhood informed his adult life, which has seen him crop up everywhere from New York to Tokyo.

The official legend has it that he caught the bitcoin bug during a conversation around a poker table in Shanghai in 2013, starting Binance in the Chinese city a few years later.

Beijing’s crackdown on crypto hastened his departure from China and he began his voyage through various jurisdictions, establishing a raft of complicated corporate structures on his way.

For years, he kept regulators at arm’s length by refusing to commit to a single jurisdiction for Binance’s headquarters, repeatedly saying it was a “complex issue”.

The stance made him a popular figure among crypto purists who loathe any form of regulation.

– ‘Good old times’ –

But the whiff of scandal finally got too strong for US market regulators, who labelled Binance’s compliance regime a “sham” and accused Zhao of orchestrating a “secret plot” to help VIP customers evade the law.

Then the law enforcement authorities came knocking.

Among other complaints, they accused Binance of failing to stop payments to the Islamic State militant group and other banned organisations in Iran and North Korea.

Unlike Bankman-Fried, Zhao was quick to admit guilt and avoid a high-profile trial.

But prosecutors are asking the court in Seattle to dole out a three-year prison sentence to Zhao.

In response to his troubles, Zhao has fallen back on his everyman persona.

He launched a start-up in March called the Giggle Academy that he said would aim to bring free education to underprivileged children around the world.

“Start up mode all over again. Like good old times,” he wrote on X in early April, just weeks before he was due to be sentenced.

Among the subjects he is aiming to teach? Blockchain, AI and finance.

G7 ministers agreed a timeframe Tuesday for phasing out coal-fired power plants, setting as a goal the mid-2030s, in a move hailed as significant by some environmentalists but slammed as “too late” by others.

The Group of Seven two-day meeting in Turin was the first big political session since the world pledged at the UN’s COP28 annual climate summit in Dubai in December to transition away from coal, oil and gas.

The G7 commits to “phase out existing unabated coal power generation in our energy systems during the first half of 2030s,” the final statement from energy and climate ministers read.

However it left some wiggle room, saying nations could follow “a timeline consistent with keeping a limit of 1.5-degrees-Celsius temperature rise within reach, in line with countries’ net zero pathways”.

It also preserved a place for coal power if it is “abated”, meaning its emissions are captured or limited by technology — something panned by many as unproven and a distraction from cutting fossil fuel use.

The G7 brings together Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and US. 

Negotiations over a fixed date were reportedly tricky. Some countries, and many environmentalists, had been pushing for a 2030 limit, but Japan — which relies heavily on coal — was reluctant to set a date.

The leaders of the G7 countries will produce their own statement after a summit in southern Italy in June.

– ‘What about gas?’ –

The 2015 Paris Agreement saw countries agree to cap global warming at “well below” 2C above preindustrial times — with a safer limit of 1.5C if possible.

To keep the 1.5C limit in play, the UN’s climate expert panel has said emissions need to be slashed almost in half this decade, but they continue to rise.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said that to reach net zero emissions by 2050 — a key milestone to limit global warming — advanced economies should end all generation by unabated coal-fired power plants by 2030.

Italian Environment and Energy Security Minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin said the talks had been “intense” but showed the G7 had “grasped” climate change.

Luca Bergamaschi from the Italian climate think tank ECCO said the G7 had taken a “decisive step forward” in translating the Dubai agreement into national policies.

The World Resources Institute hailed the commitment as “a beacon of hope for the rest of the world”.

But Oil Change International said the G7 “have failed” their first post-COP28 test, while the Climate Analytics policy institute said “2035 is too late”.

“Many of these countries have already publicly committed to phase out dates ahead of 2030, and only have a small amount of coal capacity anyway,” Jane Ellis from Climate Analytics said in a statement.

She also pointed out it was “notable that gas has not been mentioned”, despite it being the largest source of the global increase in CO2 emissions in the last decade.

Germany — Europe’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — is unwilling to wean off gas, as is G7 host Italy, which is investing in new domestic gas facilities.

– ‘Capable of contributing’ –

The G7 ministers did say they will scale-up battery storage “more than sixfold” by 2030, to support electricity grids powered by renewable energy sources.

They also tackled the thorny issue of plastic pollution amid a heated debate over how to best design a treaty addressing the scourge. 

Plastic waste is now found everywhere from the summits of mountains to the ocean floor and in human blood and breast milk. 

Broadly, the debate is between whether to focus on reducing production, or boosting recycling.

The ministers said they “aspired” to reduce and if necessary restrain the global production of plastic, and renewed their commitments to end plastic pollution by 2040.

Climate watchers are pushing for more funds for adaptation to climate change and energy systems for developing countries, and all eyes will be on the G7 finance minister’s meeting in at the end of May.

The ministers in Turin stressed efforts to raise money to help poorer countries deal with climate change should include “those countries that are capable of contributing”.

Under a UN climate treaty signed in 1992, only a small handful of high-income countries that dominated the global economy at the time were required to pay climate finance — not including China, which has since become wealthier, and is now the world’s largest polluter.

“By making it clear that we were calling on other countries to contribute, we want China to join us in this direction,” Franck Riester, the minister representing France on climate issues, told AFP.

Choreographer Sahil Kumar found fame showcasing folk dances on TikTok, but his profile has been dormant since the video he posted four years ago supporting India’s decision to ban the platform.

The world’s most populous country offers a glimpse of what the social media landscape could look like in the United States next year, should a move to block local access to the Chinese-owned short video app goes ahead.

Several local copycats tried to fill the void left by TikTok’s departure — prompted by a wave of nationalist fervour that followed a border clash between Chinese and Indian troops — but the biggest beneficiaries of the decision were YouTube and Instagram.

Kumar and many other content creators eventually flocked to those US-owned platforms, but few were able to replicate their earlier followings.

“It is difficult to recreate the success elsewhere, because I haven’t got the same engagement on any other platform,” Kumar, 30, told AFP from his studio in Rohtak, a short drive south of the capital New Delhi.

“It takes years to grow an audience on Instagram and especially on YouTube,” he added.

Kumar was an engineer by training but ditched white collar work when he found an audience for his dance routines on TikTok, eventually garnering more than 1.5 million followers. 

His newfound celebrity netted him paid opportunities to choreograph dance numbers for other influencers on the platform and music videos featuring Indian celebrities. 

But his career was derailed in June 2020 after a deadly clash far from his home on the Himalayan frontier dividing India from China.

– ‘India comes first’ –

Twenty Indian and four Chinese soldiers were killed in the encounter, the deadliest face-off between the two nuclear-armed neighbours in half a century, and two weeks later the app vanished from Apple and Google’s online stores. 

The official government order mandating the removal made no reference to the incident or even China, only saying that TikTok had engaged in activities that were “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India”.

Kumar said in his final video on the platform that he agreed with the ban, urging those watching to follow him over to Instagram and YouTube.

“They must have thought thoroughly before making this decision,” he said in a short speech to camera. “India comes first.”

Four years later, just under 94,000 people follow him on Instagram — a tiny fraction of his earlier audience — and he laments that his chances to make money have dried up.

“For us, the work stopped,” he said. 

TikTok arrived in India years after other established social media platforms, but quickly became a national phenomenon.

A year before it was kicked out of the market, the platform said it had more than 200 million users in India — one out of every seven people in the country. 

– ‘Everyone was helter-skelter’ –

“Every influencer, every personality trying to build an online following had to tap into the platform whether or not they liked it,” Viraj Sheth, co-founder of influencer marketing agency Monk Entertainment, told AFP.

“As soon as we got the news of TikTok getting banned, everyone was helter-skelter.”

Several local tech start-ups attempted to capitalise on TikTok’s disappearance by rushing their own short-form video apps to market.

But it was established US platforms that eventually proved best primed to triumph in the new market.

In the first year after the ban, Instagram saw about six million short videos from India posted each day to Reels, its own interface attempting to match TikTok’s content model. 

That compared to 2.5 million videos posted each day to Indian video sharing platform Moj, according to local media reports.

Market tracker Statista estimates that more than 362 million people in India use Instagram and 462 million more use YouTube — which rolled out Shorts, its own TikTok rival, the same year as the India ban. 

That compares to a total audience of 250 million people across manifold homegrown video apps, according to estimates by Redseer Strategy Consultants published last November. 

“When TikTok was banned, we were all expecting that there will probably be some other app which will come and take over,” Amiya Swarup of professional services firm EY India told AFP.

“But you know, it’s still the Instas and the YouTube Shorts which are still really ruling in terms of short-form videos.”

While that had been beneficial for their respective parent companies Meta and Google, Sheth of Monk Entertainment said some influencers had struggled to make the transition.

TikTok’s endless-scroll interface and algorithm are renowned for both matching audiences with the content they want to see and boosting niche content creators, but Sheth said its rivals require a different formula for success.

“You probably didn’t need to show personality on TikTok as much,” he said. “On a platform like Instagram, that’s not something that replicated that well.”