Binance

The ownership tug of war between WazirX and Binance continues

WazirX, once hailed as the largest cryptocurrency exchange based in India is caught in a web of controversies. The recent raids conducted by the Indian Enforcement Directorate on its parent company, Zanmai labs have opened an unexpected can of worms. Raids were conducted on Friday on the WazirX director following which their bank assets worth Rs. 64.67 crores were frozen by the agency. Binance, probably in an effort to distance itself from any imminent revelations that the ED raids could bring forth has disowned WazirX.

In the year 2019, it was claimed that Binance had bought WazirX. Looks like the deal was never finalized, and neither Binance nor WazirX felt the need to clear the air about the deal for almost three years. The shocking revelation was only the prologue to the Twitter war that broke out between WazirX CEO Nischal Shetty and Binance CEO Chanpeng Zao.

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The Tug Of War

The revelation by Binance CEO that the deal was never carried out raised the bar of suspicion over WazirX which is already under scrutiny. However, Nischal Shetty was not ready to be sangfroid. He went ahead to dispute the claims made by the Binance CEO on Twitter and soon it turned to a war of words between Zhao and Shetty, with neither ready to back out. Let us take a look at the tweets.

While Zhao insists that Binance does not have any “control over operations,” Shetty is only too sure about the lack of veracity of those claims. In the long Twitter thread, Shetty reminds the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world to not “confuse Zanmai and WazirX.” However, the Binance CEO emphasizes the fact that it only provides wallet services to WazirX.

Binance provides wallet services to WazirX. WazirX domain is transferred to our control. We were given a shared access to an AWS account. We could shut down WazirX. But we can’t, because…It hurts users.” 

Soon enough Shetty countered the claims made by Zhao using his own statements. The WazirX CEO took Zhao’s statement “we could shut down WazirX” as an indication of Binance’s control over the exchange. Zhao was not in the mood to back out either. He lashed out at Shetty in a counter-tweet for “playing deception wording games.”

As the war of words continued on Twitter, a Twitter user came up with a suggestion to put an end to the tug of war asking who made the majority of the fee money. The following was Shetty’s response,

Good question. Binance charges all the fees of Crypto-Crypto trading, Crypto withdrawals. Zanmai India charges INR-Crypto trading fees, INR deposit/withdrawal fees(since it operates WazirX through license obtained from Binance.” 

Let us flip through a few responses of Twitter users who were caught in the middle of this row.

Now that indeed is an important question

https://twitter.com/stablearyan/status/1555610227776823296?s=20&t=-liiHtTgdQVZjNxj_Tq6ng

Twitter has turned into a battleground these days.

Woah Woah! Lewd generalizations that nobody asked for. Somebody needs a lesson on political correctness.

The maturity we all were in search of.

Actual lesson to be learned: Racism is condemned.

Good question.

A Twitter spar is apparently the most mature way to deal with a crisis.

Professionalism left the chat centuries ago anyway