Binance vs WazirX: Twitter battle

The conflict between global crypto exchange Binance and Indian crypto exchange WazirX is on.

The conflict began when the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) froze assets of major Indian cryptocurrency exchange, WazirX. It was presumed that WazirX was acquired by Binance in 2019. Although Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) claimed that the acquisition was “never completed.”

WazirX disagreed. Shetty (one of the WazirX founders) tweeted:

According to Binance, although WazirX transferred the domain control over to Binance, it never received shared access to WazirX’s AWS account or any control over operations including user sign-up, KYC, trading, and initiating withdrawals.

“This was never transferred, despite our requests. The deal was never closed,” Zhao insisted, stating that WazirX’s founding team, Nischal Shetty and Siddharth Menon, kept the control in their hands. According to another tweet by CZ WazirX didn’t want to cooperate so the deal never took place.

The conflict has deepened and CZ has advised to transfer funds from WazirX to Binance. “We could disable WazirX wallets on a tech level,” he twitted. Shetty replied immediately and the dispute continued.

Let’s check to see what third parties think about the conflict. Googling “Is WazirX acquired by Binance?” doesn’t really help: dozens of “know the truth” videos do not give a straightforward answer. Twitter users’ opinion vary from “Thanks @cz_binance for always having the interest of your users at heart” to “Can you first decide the truth before telling your users what they should do?” and “Why cz is backing off ??? Everyone know wazirx was aquired by binance”. Here’s CNBC-TV18, India’s Leading Business News Channel, opinion:

Although blockchain and crypto are supposed to create a fair decentralised community where everything can be checked by every member of society, corporate matters are still hidden. Unfortunately, all the information we have come across are from quarrels between two CEOs on Twitter. Sounds ridiculous, but what else can we do? By the way, who is right in your opinion?

UPD: Following the Binance path, WazirX, one of the major Indian crypto exchanges, has stopped deposits of USDC, USDP, and TUSD. As the company stated in a blog post, “WazirX will implement BUSD Auto-Conversion for users' existing balances of USDC, USDP, and TUSD stablecoins at a 1:1 ratio to enhance liquidity and capital efficiency for users”.This announcement sounds quite surprising after this ridiculous twitter battle between Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao and one of WazirX founders Nischal Shetty over the fact whether Binance owns WazirX or not. No clear answer was found… Seems that this announcement gives us a kind of a hint about who was right back then.