WazirX – Binance controversy, What’s truth & Who owns WazirX
Let’s start this from the beginning, Everything was working fine between WazirX & Binance until on 5th of August 2022, the day when the Enforcement Directorate (ED) raided WazirX’s director’s account and froze funds approximately worth 65 crores.
ED searches the Director of WazirX Crypto-Currency Exchange & freezes its Bank assets worth Rs 64.67 Crore for assisting accused Instant Loan APP Companies in laundering of fraud money via purchase & transfer of virtual crypto assets.
— ED (@dir_ed) August 5, 2022
And after a few hours of this tweet from ED, Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, tweeted that they do not own any equity in the WazirX exchange. In 2019, Binance published a blog stating that they have acquired WazirX, anyone in the whole world who understands the English language will get the same meaning, and in India, not just the users but even the WazirX employees started to call WazirX as Binance backed WazirX.
After the ED raid, Binance made an edit to that blog also and added that the deal was never finalized, first thing if the deal was never made, What drugs did the PR & content team of binance do while publishing this blog? And second thing if this was posted by mistake why did no one clarify it for this long?
How did it all start? Why ED raided WazirX
I searched this on google and found a lot of articles mentioning the same story of some anonymous Chinese instant loan apps, ED raided WazirX as WazirX comes under the list of 16 Fintech companies who are suspected to be involved in money laundering, these apps provided an instant loan to Indian users and took heavy interest and if someone defaulted they charged, even more, they moved all the money from the Indian market via the route of WazirX – Binance gateway.
I got nothing else, but here is one more tweet of ED from 2021, where it is mentioned that ED sent a notice to WazirX for FEMA act violations, but WazirX denied that they didn’t receive any notice.
ED has issued Show Cause Notice to WazirX Crypto-currency Exchange for contravention of FEMA, 1999 for transactions involving crypto-currencies worth Rs. 2790.74 Crore.
— ED (@dir_ed) June 11, 2021
The Twitter fight between CZ & Nischal Shetty
When CZ tweeted that they do not own WazirX and do not have any equity in the WazirX company, every Indian user got shocked, my thoughts were like is this a multiverse, everyone is in panic. People were waiting for the response from Nischal Shetty to have some clarity, Few hours later Nischal tweeted that Binance owns WazirX in his tweet.
And here the story began, Who owns WazirX, WazirX owner is now equivalent to Satoshi Nakamoto, haha.
According to Nischal’s tweets, Binance owns the WazirX platform, and in India, Zanmai labs is having a license from WazirX to facilitate CRYPTO-INR trading else everything all the Crypto – Crypto trading is facilitated by Binance, and as well as the crypto withdrawal and deposits too.
This is tooo much to handle.
Nischal tweeted and mentioned everything in his tweets that he has all the proofs to show that Binance owns WazirX and all this seems to be true also because in the past binance has published a blog stating that Binance owns WazirX, also here is a tweet in which CZ himself has written that Binance owned WazirX.
CZ’s tweets are creating contradiction, and hence as of now, in my opinion, WazirX has the upper hand and also user’s support.
The next day i.e. on the 6th of August, both CZ & Nischal tweeted and asked the users to transfer the funds on Binance & WazirX respectively. According to CZ user’s funds are always safe with Binance and the same opinion of Nischal for WazirX.
Anyways, those who have used both platforms knew that both of these platforms are good, while Binance is the largest centralized exchange globally, WazirX is a reputed exchange in India.
But this ownership thing needs to be resolved quickly as between the fight between two organizations the innocent users are suffering.
Can WazirX operations be halted in India?
According to the tweets, one thing is sure, Binance can anytime halt WazirX operations in India, but nothing is certain, Nischal’s tweet stated that Binance has the access to root AWS servers of WazirX and anyone with access to root AWS servers can stop it.
WazirX and Binance both will never want to lose users’ trust so as long as something very big hits them, they will not be willing to halt anything.
Let’s just hope for a quick resolution.
