CZ Battles EU Regulators and Floats Satoshi Bitcoin Freeze in Same Week

Changpeng Zhao, or known as CZ in the Bitcoin and crypto space, is simultaneously fighting on two fronts. A regulatory body’s authority that deny his ex-exchange access to 450 million EU consumers and a protocol-level intervention that would freeze an estimated 1.1 million Satoshi Bitcoin.

The Hellenic Capital Market Commission (HCMC) rejected Binance’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) license application, which would strip the exchange of EU-wide passporting rights before the June 30, 2026, authorization deadline.

Binance has decided to withdraw its MiCA licence application in Greece and pursue authorisation in another EU Member State.

— Binance (@binance) June 24, 2026

Both confrontations place CZ at the centre of the same structural question: who holds legitimate authority to change the rules governing billions in crypto value when systemic risk is the stated justification? The answer, in Europe and on-chain, is proving equally contested and consequential for exchange operators, long-term holders, and compliance teams monitoring either jurisdiction.

HCMC Rejection and the MiCA Passporting Trap: How a Single National Regulator Can Shut Binance Out of 27 Markets

MiCA’s single-license framework was designed to eliminate the regulatory fragmentation that previously forced crypto firms to negotiate with every EU member state individually. A license granted by one national competent authority. In Binance’s case, Greece’s HCMC confers passporting rights across the entire bloc. As of today, Binance itself has withdrawn its Greece application.

However, Binance’s head of Europe and the UK, Gillian Lynch, told Reuters on June 24 that “Binance is not leaving Europe” and is committed to a fresh push before the deadline.

Binance remains committed to its European users and will continue to operate in compliance with applicable law.

— Binance (@binance) June 16, 2026

CZ himself framed the regulatory resistance as users being denied access to superior liquidity, a commercially pointed argument that sidesteps the AML governance questions regulators are actually weighing.

The exchange still operates in Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, and Lithuania, serving a claimed global base of roughly 300 million users. But without a MiCA passport, access to the unified EU order book and derivatives market becomes legally precarious for all of them.

EXPLORE: Binance’s EU MiCA License Battle and the Regulatory Pressure Behind It

CZ and Bitcoin Quantum Fork Proposal and the BIP-361 Precedent: Who Can Legitimately Lock 1.1 Million Dormant Bitcoin

On the Galaxy Brains podcast with Galaxy Research head Alex Thorn, CZ raised a community question. In his proposal, CZ asked if Bitcoin should establish a one-year window after a future quantum-resistant upgrade. According to him, coins in exposed addresses that remain unmoved would be locked by a hard fork.

The proposal targets the specific vulnerability class that Google Quantum AI quantified in its March research. An attack on Bitcoin’s ECDSA-based signatures could require fewer than 500,000 qubits and execute in minutes, well below projections that previously made the threat feel distant.

Also, according to research, more than a third of all Bitcoin had revealed public keys on-chain as of March, leaving those UTXOs theoretically accessible to any sufficiently powerful quantum adversary able to derive private keys from known public keys.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s holdings sit at the most visible end of that exposure. Researcher Sergio Demian Lerner’s Patoshi pattern analysis estimates that Satoshi mined approximately 1.1 million BTC in 2009 and 2010. It is known that he was using early pay-to-public-key outputs, a format that permanently exposes the public key on-chain, unlike modern address types.

CZ acknowledged the identification problem directly: distinguishing Satoshi’s wallets from those of other early miners is technically difficult, which complicates any targeted freeze. So he reinforces his framing of the proposal as a network-wide governance question rather than a surgical intervention against a single holder.

BIP-361, the draft proposal co-authored by Jameson Lopp and five other researchers, provides the formal framework closest to CZ’s thinking. It would block sends to quantum-vulnerable addresses approximately three years after activation, then void legacy signatures two years after that blocking takes effect.

EXPLORE: Quantum Computing, Bitcoin’s ECDSA Vulnerability, and the Federal Policy Response