Reuters news agency accused yesterday Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world, has been mixing customer money with its own money for two years. Presumably, Binance did this so that it could use customer funds for its own purposes. But it’s still hard to substantiate, and Binance is taking advantage of that. The trading platform calls the story a conspiracy theory.
Binance: Reuters writes rubbish
In a long post on Twitter, Binance’s Chief Communications Officer Patrick Hillmann explains that the story is wrong. He calls it a negative story from a desperate journalist. He cites that Reuters does not cite any sources, except for a single “former insider.” He also notices that Reuters says it has found no evidence for the missing customer funds. According to Hillmann, this is a tactic used by the news service to cover itself legally.
Let me explain just how desperate a journalist @Reuters is to publish a negative story. The whole base of their story this morning, is that when users purchased BUSD (Paxos) from Binance, they were taken to a transaction page that had the term “deposit” on it. Users were making a…
— Patrick Hillmann (@PRHillmann) May 23, 2023
Reuters also claims that the crypto exchange’s BUSD stablecoin is not pure coffee. Binance would have used the ‘mixed money’ to buy BUSD, which would have involved more risk for investors than they are aware of. Hillmann emphasizes that users could exchange the stablecoin with Binance’s partner Paxos, which was emphatically stated.
He thinks the Reuters story is a 1,000-word conspiracy theory. According to him, Binance has been very open about “policy shortcomings” in the past. He also calls the Reuters piece “xenophobic” because it constantly makes a point of CEO Changpeng Zhao’s Chinese background.
Binance CEO silent for now
Binance CEO Zhao (aka ‘CZ’) has not yet commented on the situation. It is no secret that he considers many such situations as nonsense. In a pinned message on his Twitter page, he declares that he will focus on four points of attention in 2023, the fourth point is ignoring fake news.
Yet CZ is not completely silent either. A few days ago, before the news about Binance, he warned Elon Musk to be careful about his influence on Dogecoin (DOGE). CZ did respond to similar allegations last year about his Chinese background and said to have lived in Canada for 30 years.
