India’s ED action on WazirX & controversy with the Binance exchange

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The action of the ED (Enforcement Directorate) on the Indian crypto exchange WazirX resulted in a controversy about the ownership of the Wazirx exchange.

WazirX is a popular Indian crypto exchange, which was acquired by the Binance crypto exchange in 2019 officially. Reportedly WazirX helped or maybe mistakenly facilitated fund transactions to the Chinese betting-related companies’ accounts, which was a part of money laundering.  However this case is not new but the matter got into huge heat when Indian agency ED froze the $8 million funds of WazirX, as a part of this investigation. 

On 5 August, Nischal Shetty, co-founder of WazirX crypto exchange, tweeted that WazirX is fully under the control of Binance and only Wazirx token controller team Zanmai Labs is under the control of him and other Co-founders. 

In response, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said that only particular things are under the control of Binance exchange but all major things like user’s fund withdrawals request and KYC control systems are still under the existing team or Wazirx, despite Binance asked for all these things to take over WazirX fully.

Further Binance CEO responded to the claim of  WazirX founder Nischal and said that Binance asked for all source code like trading system operation but WazirX never provided such things to Binance. 

At last, Binance CEO said that WazirX directly refused to provide the source code of the platform, which was not better cooperation with Binance exchange so there are chances that WazirX might not cooperated with the Indian investigation department but here Binance will support & help ED in this case. 

These types of controversial statements & discussions among these two crypto exchange founders is creating fear among the Wazirx exchange users. Reportedly many people have already started to withdraw their funds from WazirX.

Read also: Soon begin processing cash withdrawals, says Voyager