It’s unusual for chief executive officers to be held criminally responsible for financial misconduct at their firms.

Equally eye-opening is the significant discrepancy in sentences handed down recently against the leaders at a pair of cryptocurrency exchanges.

The founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, was sentenced to four months in prison last month after pleading guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the Bank Secrecy Act. Compare that to the outcome for the founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March for misappropriating billions of dollars and defrauding investors.

Why the wild disparity in their sentences? Of course, it has a lot to do with the differing nature of their cases—Bankman-Fried was found guilty by a jury on seven criminal counts, while Zhao pleaded guilty to only one.

Both cases also held significant monetary ramifications: Binance agreed to pay $4.3 billion across resolutions with several agencies, including the DOJ, while Zhao personally paid $150 million. Bankman-Fried agreed to forfeit $11 billion as part of his punishment.

I argue the performance of the compliance teams at the two firms was as big a contrast as the penalties earned by their respective founders. Competent compliance is the biggest reason why Binance continues to operate, while FTX was forced to enter bankruptcy proceedings in November 2022 and will never reopen.