Written by: Xiaobing, Deep Tide TechFlow

Introduction: A $1 billion bet, a forged contract case, whistleblower allegations... The public feud between the founders of Binance and OKX has exposed one of the deepest old wounds in the crypto industry.

On April 8, 2026, Changpeng Zhao's (CZ) autobiography, *Freedom of Money*, was released globally. This 457-page memoir, which recounts his childhood in rural Jiangsu and his four months in a U.S. federal prison, saw all proceeds donated to charity and topped Amazon's bestseller list in the crypto category.

But the real explosive power of this book lies not in the inspirational stories it tells, but in the names it names.

The most controversial passage in the book is this: At a dinner in 2025, Huobi founder Li Lin told CZ that he had seen a screenshot showing that OKX founder Xu Mingxing (Star) personally reported him to the Chinese police, and it was this report that led to Li Lin's detention at the end of 2020.

After this bombshell was dropped, Star responded with several long posts on the X platform, directly calling CZ a "habitual liar" and bringing up a ten-year-old case.

A public war of words that lasted for several days was thus set in motion.

Old grudge: One contract, two versions

To understand the intensity of this war of words, we must go back to 2014.

That year, CZ joined OKCoin, founded by Xu Mingxing, as CTO. He stayed there for less than a year. According to CZ in his book, in early 2015, Xu Mingxing attempted to renegotiate his 10% stake, but the negotiations broke down, and CZ resigned.

The resignation itself is not unusual, but what followed turned into a major drama for the entire Chinese-language crypto community.

At the heart of the controversy lies a business deal facilitated by CZ during his tenure: he brought in Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin investor, for OKCoin, and the two parties signed an agreement regarding the Bitcoin.com domain name. After CZ left, the contract ran into trouble. Two versions of the contract surfaced, one including a six-month termination clause, and the other without. OKCoin accused CZ of forging the contract, while CZ counter-accused OKCoin of manipulating trading volume and falsifying reserve certificates. Roger Ver later sued OKCoin for breach of contract, seeking $570,000 in damages.

Ten years have passed, and the Rashomon-like mystery of "who forged the contract" has never been resolved.

This time, Star resurfaced a video of a QQ chat log that OKCoin had notarized years ago. He claims the video proves that CZ sent two different versions of the protocol (v7 and v8) to OKCoin's accountant in December 2014, providing conclusive evidence of forgery. CZ's explanation in the book is that he rarely uses QQ, and it's possible that other OKCoin employees logged into his account and fabricated the chat log.

The two men each have their own version of events and their own "ironclad evidence," and they've been doing this for ten years straight.

New Enmity: Whistleblower Allegations and OKEx's "Darkest Five Weeks"

What truly touched Star's heart in "Binance Life" was the narrative about the regulatory storm in China in 2020.

On October 16, 2020, OKEx (the predecessor of OKX) suddenly announced the suspension of all digital asset withdrawals, citing that a private key holder was "cooperating with a police investigation." This private key holder was later confirmed by media outlets such as Caixin to be Xu Mingxing. OKEx's withdrawal suspension lasted for five weeks, and the OKB token plummeted by more than 15% within 24 hours of the announcement. Users angrily questioned on Weibo, "When can we withdraw our money?"

In his book, CZ describes this incident, implying that OKEx's wallet system has a "single point of failure" risk, because Xu Mingxing's detention alone caused the entire exchange to cease operation. He also compares it to Huobi, saying that Li Lin was also under house arrest for about 90 days around the same time, but withdrawals on Huobi were never interrupted because "Huobi's wallet settings are better."

A month later, Li Lin was also detained. CZ claims in the book that five years later, in 2025, Li Lin told him at a dinner party that he had seen a screenshot showing Xu Mingxing reporting him to the Chinese police.

Star's response to the accusation was straightforward: pure nonsense. He wrote on X that any sizable platform and founder in the Asian crypto industry faces a massive number of whistleblower complaints every year; if complaints alone could determine the outcome, the industry would have ceased to exist. He added: "A person who spends four months in jail and then comes out lying to the whole world proves that a habitual liar's nature will never change."

Here's some background information: In November 2023, CZ pleaded guilty to charges of violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws. He was personally fined $150 million, Binance was fined $4.3 billion, and CZ himself was imprisoned for four months before being released in September 2024.

Upgrade: The $1 Billion Bet and the Mystery of the "Divorce"

Up to this point, the verbal battle was still considered a "business matter." What truly caused the situation to spiral out of control was that Star extended the conflict to CZ's private life.

Star added CZ's marital status to his list of attacks. He questioned CZ's claims in his book and in the media that he was "divorced" and demanded that CZ produce a divorce agreement signed by both parties.

Here is some publicly available information: Before CZ was sentenced in 2024, 161 letters of mitigation were submitted to the court. One of them was from Yang Weiqing, who wrote: "My name is Yang Weiqing. I met Mr. Zhao Changpeng in 1999 and we married in 2003. We have two children together." At the same time, He Yi also wrote a letter, referring to herself as "a business partner and the mother of three children." This means that at least as of April 2024, when the court documents were released, CZ's marriage to Yang Weiqing was still in effect, and he and He Yi already had three children.

Star capitalized on this time lag. If CZ says he's "already divorced," when was the divorce finalized? More importantly, has the Binance equity been legally divided with his ex-wife?

Star cited the divorce of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos as a reference. When Gates divorced, he and Melinda signed a separation agreement beforehand, and Microsoft's SEC filings were subsequently updated with shareholding information. After Bezos' divorce, his ex-wife MacKenzie received approximately 4% of Amazon's shares, worth about $38 billion, all in a transparent and publicly disclosed manner.

Star's implication is clear: as a company regulated by multiple regulatory bodies, shouldn't the changes in Binance's founders' shareholdings be traceable like those of a listed company?

CZ's response came quickly. He posted on X: "You can apologize now. I am officially divorced. Out of respect for my ex-wife's privacy, I will not post any legal documents online. I'm willing to bet $1 billion that I was officially divorced before today. If you accept the bet, we can have a lawyer verify it."

He also gave Star a 24-hour ultimatum: if he didn't accept the bet, it meant he was misleading the public.

Star's response was equally blunt: "Publicly making a $1 billion bet as the ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) of a regulated company is hardly professional. I wonder if Binance's regulators consider this behavior acceptable."

He didn't take the bet, but instead steered the conversation elsewhere: "Have you legally separated your Binance shares from your ex-wife? That's all you need to prove."

The underlying governance of an industry

Putting aside the personal feud between the two bigwigs, this war of words reflects a problem that has long been ignored by the industry.

In the traditional financial world, for an institution managing hundreds of billions of dollars in client assets, changes in the founder's marital status and equity structure are significant matters that must be disclosed to regulators and (if it's a publicly traded company) the public. Every detail of Bezos's divorce is documented in Amazon's proxy statement. Gates and Melinda's separation agreement was filed in a Washington state court.

However, in the world of cryptocurrency exchanges, the number of shares held by founders, how equity is allocated, and whether there are nominee or trust structures are all largely a black box. Binance has never publicly disclosed its complete equity structure. While OKX has consistently emphasized its compliance with regulations in multiple jurisdictions, the equity history of its parent company, OK Group, is equally complex.

The collapse of FTX has proven that when an exchange has fundamental flaws in its corporate governance, it is ultimately the users who pay the price. How the personal relationship between SBF and Caroline Ellison influenced Alameda Research's use of funds was one of the core questions repeatedly asked during FTX's subsequent trial.

OKEx's "darkest five weeks" in 2020 served as a similar lesson. The detention of an exchange founder brought the entire platform's withdrawals to a standstill, and the assets of hundreds of thousands of users were locked—something unimaginable in the traditional financial industry.

The feud between CZ and Star is between them, and outsiders have no way of judging who is telling the truth. But the issue that this dispute inadvertently exposed is more worthy of attention than the innocence of either party: while crypto exchanges have reached the size of traditional financial institutions, their governance transparency is still in its infancy.

The two big shots can continue to bombard each other on X, but the ones hiding in the craters are always the users.