Binance CEO Chang Peng Zhao (CZ) has responded to critics and conspiracy theorists who claim that Binance is a Chinese “criminal company” that is “secretly in the pocket of the Chinese government.”
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has responded to critics and conspiracy theorists who claim Binance to be a Chinese-based “criminal entity” that “secretly [belongs] in the pocket of the Chinese government.”
CZ’s response to critics came from a Sept. 1 blog post via Binance, and stems from a Twitter spat with a former Washington Post journalist who asked him; “While I have you here, who’s Guangying Chen?”
He explained that the question was referring to a conspiracy theory alleging that his personal friend and Chinese national Guangying Chen is the secret owner of Bijie Tech (a company he founded in 2015) and possibly also Binance.
However, CZ explains that Chen is a colleague of his that he met through a friend, who was hired to “manage the back office” at Bijie Tech before re-hiring her again at Binance, adding that conspiracy theorists then linked her as a secret owner of the firms given that she was one of the few to have initially remained in China.
Even before Binance was launched in 2017, the founder of Binance explained some of the personal and business challenges he had to overcome from the Chinese government.
Websites such as Scam Binance claims that Chen once owned 93% of the shares in both Bijie Tech and Binance, among other things. CZ said that such rumors stemmed from an “old campaign that a competitor launched via an anonymous microsite.”
CZ strongly claims that his company has close links to China and its government, and even went as far as to discuss some of his troubling personal and business-related experiences with Chinese authorities.
CZ considers the ill-intended inferences come from the fact that he, along with a few other Binance employees are of Chinese background, making Binance “an easy target for special interests, media, and even policymakers that hate our industry.”
Views to that effect have been expressed by the media as recently as Aug. 30, with a Fortune India article describing Binance as a “Chinese-origin[ed] crypto exchange”, which claimed Binance and other Chinese-linked centralized crypto exchanges were “invading” India by freely running their services within India through illegal channels.
Although Binance has never been legally incorporated in China and does not culturally function as a Chinese institution, stories of Chinese influence continue to circulate, CZ said.
Binance has subsidiaries in several countries, including France, Spain, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, and has built a team around the world, and “we are active in pursuing top talent, no matter where they hail from.”
CZ, who fled China to Canada at the age of 12, later returned to open the company in 2015, but it was later shut down by the Chinese government:
CZ said it recruited some of its last Bijie Tech employees to launch Binance in July 2017, but the Chinese government shut it down again six weeks later, issuing a memo saying no crypto exchange was allowed to operate in China.
Binance was legally incorporated in the Cayman Islands in 2017, but currently has no official headquarters. As of October 2021, Binance has amassed 28.6 million cryptocurrency users, making it the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange in the world. The company will be worth more than $300 million by 2021, a former Binance executive said in November.
Leave a Reply