CZ says paying to smear rival exchanges undermines the attacker’s own credibility

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, said spending money to smear rival exchanges ultimately damages the credibility of the exchange behind the attack. In a post on X, Zhao said users cannot confidently entrust their crypto to an exchange that operates unethically, adding that paying to attack competitors is the best way to destroy an exchange’s own credibility while giving the targeted platform extra publicity. Zhao was responding to a claim by influencer Ruslan Khairullin, who has about 125,700 followers on X, that Binance and CZ offered $25,000 in February to have Binance and CZ smeared for a month, but the offer was declined. Meanwhile, OKX founder Star Xu previously criticized CZ, saying Zhao was framing as a good deed his voluntary compensation of about $800 million to users affected by the crypto market crash on Oct. 10 last year.