Crypto Impact Awards 2025 Gave CZ and Bitget the Night

CoinGape named Changpeng Zhao Best Web3 Founder at the Crypto Impact Awards 2025 on January 29, 2026. The same livestream handed Bitget three trophies, with Bitget Wallet’s marketing chief sitting on the jury that helped pick them.

CoinGape said the program rewarded measurable outcomes, regulatory alignment, and product traction. The founder prize still went to the Binance founder whose U.S. money-laundering-program case had been wiped by a full pardon dated October 21, 2025.

Changpeng Zhao Won Founder of the Year After a Pardon

Zhao, the Binance founder known as CZ, took Best Web3 Founder of the Year for “leadership and ecosystem impact,” CoinGape wrote when it posted the list. Binance itself did not appear among the listed centralised-exchange winners, which went to Bitget, LBank, PrimeXBT, Coinbase, and Gate.io.

The Justice Department’s Zhao clemency grant on record lists a sentence of four months in prison and a $50 million fine, entered April 30, 2024 in Western Washington, for failure to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program. The warrant in United States v. Zhao, 23CR00179RAJ-001, is a full and unconditional pardon signed October 21, 2025.

THE CZ PATH TO THE FOUNDER PRIZE

1. April 30, 2024: Receives a four-month prison term and a $50 million fine for the AML-program offence.
2. October 21, 2025: Receives a full and unconditional presidential pardon.
3. December 26, 2025: Community voting opens on the awards board.
4. January 16, 2026: Voting closes after 22 days.
5. January 29, 2026: CoinGape names him Best Web3 Founder of the Year on the livestream.

CoinGape posted the founder result on its own account two days later, as a winner card rather than a recap of the case history.

🏆 Crypto Impact Awards 2025 – Winner Announcement

Congratulations to Changpeng Zhao @cz_binance 🎉
Winner of Best Web3 Founder of the Year

👏 A milestone worth celebrating. pic.twitter.com/C2Trkfknj0

— CoinGape (@CoinGapeMedia) February 2, 2026

Rachel Conlan, then Binance’s chief marketing officer, sat on the six-person jury. On the stream she framed the night as a celebration of shipping, not of slide decks.

What I love about awards like this is that they don’t just celebrate ideas, they celebrate execution. They celebrate the builders, the teams, the projects that are actually moving blockchain forward in the real world.

Rachel Conlan, Chief Marketing Officer at Binance, Crypto Impact Awards ceremony

The ceremony ran online only, on YouTube and Streamyard. CoinGape TV later left the recording up as a 38-minute VOD.

Three Bitget Trophies and a Seat on the Jury

Bitget was the consumer-stack winner of the night. The exchange took Best Centralized Exchange, Spot. Bitget Wallet took Best Software Wallet. Gracy Chen, Bitget’s chief executive, took Best Business Woman of the Year.

BITGET’S HAUL

• Spot exchange: Bitget wins Best Centralized Exchange, Spot.
• App wallet: Bitget Wallet wins Best Software Wallet, ahead of the hardware prize that went to Ledger.
• Executive prize: Gracy Chen wins Best Business Woman of the Year.

Jamie Elkaleh, chief marketing officer at Bitget Wallet, was one of the six jurors. CoinGape’s own write-up first called him a wallet CEO, then listed him correctly as CMO on the jury roll. The overlap is on the record either way: a Bitget Wallet marketer helped judge a ballot that included Bitget Wallet, while the parent brand and its CEO also won.

That does not prove the panel rubber-stamped its own shop. It does mean the night’s biggest corporate sweep arrived with a colleague in the room. CoinGape said an “integrity review” sat between jury scores and the announcement. It has not published recusal logs for Elkaleh on the Bitget categories, or for Conlan on the founder prize that went to Binance’s founder.

Who Judged the Crypto Impact Awards 2025?

Winners were not a pure fan poll. The official 27-category awards board lists a six-step path: nominate, eligibility check, people’s choice vote, jury review of evidence, an integrity review, then the announcement. Self-nominations are allowed and encouraged. The board displays 30K+ total votes and a voting window of December 26, 2025 to January 16, 2026.

CoinGape named six jurors. Two run crypto PR firms. One runs an RWA platform that competes in the same trade as the RWA winner. Two are marketing chiefs at large exchange brands whose founders or sister apps were in the mix.

THE SIX JURORS

Sachdev and Yap are agency chiefs. The same night, Outset PR won Best Marketing Agency of the Year and Chainwire won Best PR Wire. Outset PR later said the marketing field had six nominees, Silicon, GrowForce, CLPR Agency, Coinbound, MarketAcross, and Outset PR, and that Outset took the most votes. Rival PR bosses scoring a PR ballot is ordinary for this circuit. It is also the circuit admitting what the trophies are for: distribution.

Jeremy Ng, who founded RWA platform OpenEden, told the stream he had selected Securitize in Best RWA Project. He said tokenisation only scales when it matches existing legal and operating rules, and he pointed to Securitize’s work with large asset managers including BlackRock. A juror who competes in RWA publicly backing a rival is cleaner than a silent vote. It still shows how small the room was.

Hyperliquid and Securitize Matched a Hard Year

Strip out the founder prize and the Bitget cluster, and several other results line up with how 2025 actually traded. Hyperliquid won Best DEX, Crypto Futures and Derivatives, after a year when on-chain perpetual venues took a real bite out of centralised order books. Coinbase won Best Institution-Friendly Crypto Exchange of the Year, which matches the compliance lane it has spent years buying. Ledger won Best Hardware Wallet. Tempo, the payments chain, won Best Debut Blockchain of the Year.

FUNTOKEN won Best Crypto Token of the Year. NAORIS Protocol won Best DePIN Project. Crypto Garden won Best Crypto Community. Those three look more like mobilisation contests than market-share contests, which is what a people’s-choice layer does when self-noms are in play.

OTHER NIGHT-OF WINNERS

BestChange’s aggregator win is the one result this site has already unpacked in a BestChange aggregator trophy write-up, including the rebuild the site did in 2025. The rest of the board is the usual mix of exchanges that buy ads, tools that farm votes, and a few names that would have won a quieter, meaner ballot too.

Winners Get a Badge, Optional Trophy, and Press

The awards are a media product with a public rulebook. CoinGape’s FAQ on the board says there is no physical gala. Winners get digital badges as part of a media package, a slot in the January magazine, and “PR coverage across 50+ media outlets,” plus newsletter and social campaigns. A physical trophy can be made and shipped worldwide for an extra fee.

THE BOARD’S OWN COUNT

• Categories: 27, grouped as companies, projects, wallets, exchanges, and people.
• Votes: 30K+ total votes displayed on the awards board.
• Window: December 26, 2025 to January 16, 2026, then a January 29, 2026 livestream.
• Jurors: 6 named reviewers, plus a stated integrity pass before names go public.

CoinGape launched the awards in November 2025, per its own timeline, and used the first edition to feed Block of Fame, its branded-content arm. That is not a secret, and it explains the tone of the night better than any speech about execution. Brands that already spend on crypto media walked out with assets they can paste onto a homepage. Brands that do not spend still needed community turnout for 22 days of voting.

Public conversation after the stream followed that use. Bitget Wallet folded Best Software Wallet into a Tokyo speaking slot within a week. NAORIS kept citing Best DePIN months later. CoinGape’s own winner posts drew polite congratulations and almost no argument about the jury. Naming CZ founder produced a shrug, not a fight. The market treated the trophies as badges to syndicate, which is what the 50-plus-outlet promise is built to do.

CoinGape Already Ran the 2026 Sequel

By July 2026 the same publisher had already closed a second cycle, the Web3 Innovation Awards 2026, with a fresh board of 2026 Innovation Awards winners. That round listed 32 categories, 180+ nominees, 7 jurors, and 17K+ community votes. Securitize and Crypto Garden showed up again. The format survived its first year by becoming a calendar, not a one-off verdict on 2025.

The 2025 edition still stands as a finished result. Hyperliquid, Securitize, Coinbase, and Ledger are defensible names for that year. CZ’s founder trophy, Bitget’s three-item sweep beside a Bitget Wallet juror, and a PR-heavy panel awarding PR shops are also on the same scoresheet. CoinGape asked the industry to celebrate execution. The scoresheet shows who already knew how the machine works.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a completed awards program and is for information only. It is not investment advice, a rating of any token, exchange, wallet, or agency, and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or use any of the named products. Readers who are weighing a crypto account, token, or service should consult a qualified financial adviser and, where needed, a licensed lawyer in their jurisdiction before acting. Names, vote totals, and category winners reflect the awards board and CoinGape’s announcement as published for the 2025 edition and can be revised by those organisers.