The Binance founder has also detailed some personal and
business-related challenges he had to overcome from the Chinese
government, even before the launch of Binance in 2017.
Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has hit back at 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 Thursday 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 is in reference 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, which he 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.
Websites such as Scam Binance allege that Chen
at one stage owned 93% of the shares in both Bijie Tech and Binance,
among other things. CZ stated that such rumors originated from an “old
campaign that a competitor launched via an anonymous microsite.”
“As
a result, both she and her family have been targeted and harassed by
the media and online trolls. Had I known how much of a negative impact
this would have on her life, I never would have asked her to do what
seemed like such an innocuous step at the time,” he said.
Links to China
CZ
also strongly denied the claims that his company has close links to
China and its government, and even went as far as discussing some of his
troubling personal and business-related experiences with Chinese
authorities:
“The greatest challenge that Binance faces
today is that we (and every other offshore exchange) have been
designated a criminal entity in China. At the same time, our opposition
in the west bends over backward to paint us as a ‘Chinese company.’”
CZ
is of the view that the ill-intended inferences come from the fact that
he, along with a few other Binance employees are of Chinese ethnicity,
making Binance “an easy target for special interests, media, and even
policymakers that hate our industry.”
“The inference is that
because we have ethnically Chinese employees, and perhaps because I am
ethnically Chinese, we are secretly in the pocket of the Chinese
government,” he said.
Views to that effect have been expressed by the media as recently as of Tuesday, 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 operating their services within India through illegal means.
Chinese-infiltrated
narratives continue to spread despite Binance never being legally
incorporated in China and never operating like a Chinese company
culturally, said CZ.
CZ added that Binance has subsidiaries in a number of countries, such as France, Spain, Italy, UAE and Bahrain, and has grown a team around the globe, adding that “we are active in pursuing top talent, no matter where they hail from:”
“Over
the past two years, as we expanded into Europe and the Middle East and
recruited a more senior leadership team, Binance’s executive team is now
more heavily dominated by Europeans and Americans.”
“Our
broader employee base is even more globally distributed. Despite these
facts, some people insist on calling us a ‘Chinese company,’” he added.
Having
fled from China to Canada at 12, CZ later returned to start a company
in 2015, but was later shut down by the Chinese government:
“Two
years before Binance, I started a company called Bijie Tech, providing
exchange-as-a-service platforms to other exchanges. We got 30 clients on
board, and business was good [...] Unfortunately, in March 2017, the
Chinese government shut down all such exchanges. All of our clients went
out of business.”
CZ said that he brought a few past
Bijie Tech employees in to launch Binance in July 2017. However, the
Chinese government again effectively shut it down six weeks later by
issuing a memorandum stating that crypto exchanges were not allowed to
operate in China, adding:
“They then blocked our platform
behind the Great Firewall. At this point, most of our employees left
China. Only a small number of customer service agents remained by late
2018.”
Related: Binance CEO sues Bloomberg subsidiary alleging defamation
Binance was legally incorporated in Cayman Islands in 2017, but currently has no formalized headquarters.
As
of October 2021, Binance had accumulated an estimated 28.6 million
crypto users, making it the world’s largest centralized crypto exchange.
In November 2021, a former Binance executive said the company is worth over $300 million.
source link : https://cointelegraph.com/news/cz-hits-back-at-claims-binance-is-a-chinese-company
