A federal judge in Seattle ordered Changpeng Zhao to serve four months in custody for Bank Secrecy Act breaches that occurred during his tenure as chief executive of Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume. The sentence fell well short of the three year term prosecutors requested and exceeded the probation Zhao’s attorneys proposed.

Zhao resigned from the company in November after pleading guilty to one count of failure to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. The plea agreement required Binance to pay $4.3 billion in penalties, one of the largest corporate settlements tied to criminal misconduct by an executive. Zhao separately agreed to pay $50 million, a sum equal to roughly 0.1 percent of his personal fortune, which Bloomberg estimates at just under $40 billion.

Prediction market Polymarket had listed a sentence of fewer than six months as the most probable outcome at 41 percent probability. Odds for the Department of Justice’s requested three year term stood at six percent.

The sentence arrives amid a surge of enforcement actions against cryptocurrency executives and companies. Sam Bankman-Fried, former chief executive of FTX, received a twenty-five-year sentence for fraud and money-laundering convictions. Federal prosecutors arrested the founders of a Bitcoin wallet service last week on charges of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments. The Securities but also Exchange Commission continues to pursue litigation against multiple token issuers and exchanges for offering unregistered securities, with recent subpoenas directed at projects built on the Ethereum network.