The Twitter exchange between WazirX co-founder Nischal Shetty and Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao over the ownership of the Indian crypto exchange grabbed a lot of headlines in the first week of August.
WazirX was reportedly acquired by Binance in 2019, and ever since then, the Indian crypto exchange has been referred to as “Binance-owned”; however, to everyone’s surprise, CZ took to Twitter to claim that the acquisition process never went through and Binance has no ownership in the Indian crypto exchange.
2/ On 21 Nov 2019, Binance published a blog post that it had “acquired” WazirX. This transaction was never completed. Binance has never – at any point – owned any shares of Zanmai Labs, the entity operating WazirX.
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) August 5, 2022
CZ said that Binance only provides wallet services for WazirX as a tech solution and WazirX is responsible for all other aspects of the exchange, including user sign-up, Know Your Customer (KYC), trading, and initiating withdrawals.
Shetty countered CZ’s claim in another tweet thread claiming that Binance indeed owns the Indian crypto exchange WazirX and that the parent company, Zanmai Labs, only operates crypto and Indian rupee pairs in WazirX on a Binance license. Binance, on the other hand, operates crypto-to-crypto pairs and processes crypto withdrawals, which can be verified by the companies’ terms of services.
The two co-founders went back and forth for the next couple of days accusing each other of misrepresenting certain facts.
2/ Original deal included sale of WazirX Technology (IP)
Same Technology was then licensed to Zanmai by Binance for INR market
Post licensing:
Binance operates crypto-crypto trading, crypto deposit/withdrawals
Zanmai operates INR-Crypto trading, INR deposit/withdrawal
— Nischal (Shardeum) ⚡️ (@NischalShetty) August 6, 2022
Based on the tweet exchange between the two co-founders, it is clear that there was indeed an acquisition deal, to begin with, but Shetty claimed the deal was for the technology transfer and not the whole company, and this is the reason WazirX technology is owned by Binance, while Zanmai Labs operate only crypto/INR pairs using a Binance license.
When Cointelegraph reached out to Binance to get some clarity on the acquisition deal, the exchange denied Shetty’s earlier claims that the exchange operates crypto-to-crypto trading pairs. A spokesperson from Binance told Cointelegraph:
“Binance does not operate crypto-to-crypto…
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