A book detonates old accounts, and CZ and Star have had another ten-year feud
By: Little Pies, Deep Wave TechFlow
Original title: A book detonates ten years of grudge, and CZ and Star go to war again
Introduction: A $1 billion bet, old contract fraud cases, reporting doubts... The two founders of Binance and OKX have unraveled an old scar at the deepest point in the crypto industry.
On April 8, 2026, Zhao Changpeng (CZ)'s autobiography “Freedom of Money” (Freedom of Money) went on sale worldwide. This 457-page memoir, from his childhood in rural Jiangsu to his four months in the US federal prison, all sales were donated to charity and topped Amazon's crypto bestseller list.
But the real explosion of this book is not that it tells an inspirational story, but rather whose name it is.
The most controversial section of the book is this: At a dinner in 2025, Huobi founder Li Lin told CZ that he had seen a screenshot showing OKX founder Xu Mingxing (Star) personally reporting him to the Chinese police, and it was this report that led to Li Lin's detention at the end of 2020.
After the bomb was dropped, Star responded by posting several long posts on the X platform, directly calling CZ a “habitual liar,” and unraveling an old case from ten years ago.
An open scolding war that continued for many days began.
Old Grudge: One contract, two versions
To understand the intensity of this war of hate speech, we have to 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 the book, Xu Mingxing tried to renegotiate his 10% share in early 2015, and CZ left the job after the two parties broke down.
The departure itself was not unusual, but what happened afterwards made the entire Chinese-speaking crypto community watch a big drama.
At the heart of the dispute was a commercial partnership CZ brokered during his tenure: he brought in Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin investor, for OKCoin, and the two sides signed a cooperation agreement on the Bitcoin.com domain. Something went wrong with this contract after CZ left. Two versions of the contract were put on the table, one with a six-month termination clause and one without. OKCoin accuses CZ of falsifying the contract, and CZ in turn accuses OKCoin of manipulating transaction volume and falsifying proof of reserves. Roger Ver later sued OKCoin for $57 million for breach of contract.
Ten years have passed, and Rashomon has never come to a conclusion about “who falsified the contract”.
This time, Star has re-opened a video of the QQ chat transcript that OKCoin notarized back then. He said the video proved that CZ sent two different versions of the agreement (v7 and v8) to OKCoin's accountant in December 2014, and the evidence of falsification was clear. CZ explained in the book that he rarely used QQ, and that other OKCoin employees logged in to his account and falsified chat history.
Two people hold their own opinions, and each has its own “irrefutable proof”. Ten years are like a day.
New Feud: Report Suspect and OKEx's “Darkest Five Weeks”
What really touched Star's pain point in “Binance Life” was the account of 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 because a private key holder “is cooperating with the investigation by the public security authorities”. The private key holder was later confirmed by Caixin and other media as Xu Mingxing. OKEx's withdrawal suspension continued for a full five weeks. OKB tokens plummeted by more than 15% within 24 hours after the news was announced. Users angrily asked “when can I withdraw money” on Weibo.
CZ describes this incident in the book, implying that OKEx's wallet system is at risk of a “single point of failure” because Xu Mingxing was detained alone, causing the entire exchange to fail. He also compared Huobi, saying that Li Lin was also under house arrest for about 90 days during the same period, but Huobi's withdrawals were never interrupted because “Huobi's wallet settings are better.”
A month later, Li Lin was also taken into custody. CZ claims in the book that five years later, in 2025, Li Lin told him at the restaurant that he saw a screenshot showing Xu Mingxing reporting him to the Chinese police.
Star's response to this accusation was straightforward: pure nonsense. He wrote on X that in the Asian crypto industry, any large-scale platform and founder faces numerous reports every year, and if the reports themselves could determine the outcome, the industry would have long ceased to exist. He also added: A person who has been in prison for four months has come out and lied to the world, which shows that the nature of a person who habitually lies will never change.
Here's an additional context: CZ pleaded guilty to charges of violating US anti-money laundering laws in November 2023. The individual was fined $150 million, Binance was fined $4.3 billion, and CZ himself was jailed for four months and released in September 2024.
Escalation: The $1 billion bet and the mystery of “divorce”
The scolding war up to this point is still in the category of “business past events.” What really got things out of control was Star burning the flames of war into CZ's private life.
Star added one item to the attack list: CZ's marital status. He questioned CZ's claims in the book and in the media that he was “divorced,” and asked CZ to show a divorce agreement signed by both parties.
Here's a piece of public information: 161 plea letters were submitted to the court before CZ was sentenced in 2024. One of them is from Yang Weiqing, who wrote, “My name is Yang Weiqing. I met Mr. Zhao Changpeng in 1999 and married in 2003. We raised our two kids together.” At the same time, Ho Yi also wrote a letter and appeared as a “working partner and mother of three children.” In other words, at least when court documents were made public in April 2024, the marriage relationship between CZ and Yang Weiqing still existed, and he already had three children with Ho Yi.
Star caught this time difference. If CZ says she is “divorced” now, when was the divorce finalized? More importantly: has Binance's shares been legally split with his ex-wife?
Star cites Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos' divorce as a reference. At the time of Gates's divorce, a separation agreement was signed with Melinda in advance, and Microsoft's SEC documents immediately updated shareholding information. After Bezos' divorce, his ex-wife Mackenzie acquired about 4% of Amazon's shares, worth about $38 billion, and everything was open and transparent.
Star's implication is clear: as a company regulated by multiple regulators, should Binance's changes in shareholding be as traceable as a publicly traded company?
CZ's response came quickly. He posted on X: “You can apologize now. I'm officially divorced. Out of respect for my ex-wife's privacy, I won't post any legal documents online. I'm willing to bet $1 billion that I was officially divorced long before today. If you accept this bet, we can get an attorney to verify it.”
He also gave Star a 24-hour ultimatum: if you don't take the bet, it means you're misleading the public.
Star's response was equally straightforward: “As the ultimate beneficiary (UBO) of a regulated company, the act of publicly proposing a $1 billion bet is hard to call professional. I'm curious if Binance's regulators consider this kind of behavior acceptable.”
Instead of taking that bet, he took the question to another place: “Have your Binance shares been legally separated from your ex-wife? It's enough just to prove it.”
Undertones of an industry's governance
Leaving aside the personal grudges of the two bosses, this scolding war reflects a problem that has been overlooked by the industry for a long time.
In the traditional financial world, changes in the marital status and shareholding structure of the founder of an institution that manages tens of billions of dollars in customer assets are all important matters that need to be disclosed to regulators and (in the case of a listed company) the public. Every detail of Bezos' divorce is documented in Amazon's proxy statement. Gates and Melinda's separation agreement was submitted to the Washington state court.
However, in the world of crypto exchanges, how many shares the founder holds, how the shares are distributed, and whether there is an intermediary or trust structure is almost entirely a black box. Binance has yet to disclose the full shareholding structure. While OKX has always emphasized that it is regulated in multiple jurisdictions, its parent company, OK Group, has an equally complex shareholding history.
The collapse of FTX has proven that when an exchange's corporate governance is fundamentally flawed, users end up paying the bill. How the personal relationship between SBF and Caroline Ellison affected Alameda Research's use of funds was one of the core questions that FTX was repeatedly questioned in later trials.
OKEx's “Darkest Five Weeks” in 2020 taught the same lesson. The founder of an exchange was detained, withdrawals on the entire platform were shut down, and the assets of hundreds of thousands of users were locked down. This kind of thing is unimaginable in the traditional financial industry.
The dispute between CZ and Star belongs to them, and outsiders have no way to judge who is telling the truth. But the problem that was unwittingly revealed in this dispute is worth more attention than the innocence of any party: when crypto exchanges have reached the size of traditional financial institutions, the transparency of their governance is still in their infancy.
The two bosses can continue to throw bombs at each other on X, but the one hiding in the crater is always the user.
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