Binance: Changpeng Zhao, warned that his company may “technically disable Wazirx portfolios.”

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has warned that his company could “Disable Wazirx portfolios at the technical level“, advising anyone with funds on the Indian crypto-currency exchange to move them to Binance. The warning came in the wake of numerous tweets from CZ and Wazirx’s founder regarding Binance’s acquisition of Wazirx.

Binance warning: transfer your funds

The conflict between crypto exchange Binance and Indian crypto exchange Wazirx has escalated. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) tweeted on Friday, advising anyone with funds on Wazirx to transfer them to Binance. He warned, “We may technically disable Wazirx portfolios“.

If you have funds on WazirX, you should transfer it to Binance. Simple as that.

We could disable WazirX wallets on a tech level, but we can’t/won’t do that. And as much debates as we are enduring, we can’t/won’t hurt users. 🙏

– CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) August 5, 2022

The dispute between Binance and Wazirx began when India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED) froze Wazirx’s bank assets as part of its money laundering investigation.

After the ED announcement, Binance’s CEO quickly denied that his company had acquired Wazirx – nearly three years after the two exchanges announced the acquisition.

While Zhao claimed that the acquisition of Wazirx “was never completed“, Wazirx founder Nischal Shetty disagrees and maintains that his exchange was indeed acquired by Binance.

Binance vs. Wazirx: Who owns what?

Attempting to prove that Binance owns Wazirx, Nischal Shetty tweeted that Binance owns the Wazirx domain name, has root access to its Amazon AWS web hosting servers, owns all the crypto assets and receives all the crypto profits.

“We could shut down WazirX” – Proves you have control

“Shared access of AWS” – You have ROOT access of AWS! Anyone with root access controls AWS

“WazirX domain transferred to our control” – Good to see you confirm that

Only control now is Zanmai, why are you not taking it? https://t.co/5E4zzWiOI7

– Nischal (Shardeum) ⚡️ (@NischalShetty) August 6, 2022

However, CZ argued: “The founding team of Wazirx retained control of the platform’s operations. We (Binance) never received any data or control over users, KYC, etc.“. In response to Nischal Shetty’s tweet about Binance’s ownership of Wazirx, Zhao noted:

We do NOT have control of the trading system. You just gave the AWS login, no source code, no deployment capability. You also retained access to the AWS account, source code, deployment, etc.

In a follow-up tweet, CZ said Wazirx has been uncooperative with Binance, adding that the exchange appears to be uncooperative with the ED as well.

Fact: we asked for transferring of WazirX system source code, deployment, operations, as recently as Feb this year. This was refused by WazirX. Binance do NOT have control on their systems.

WazirX has been uncooperative with us, and looks like uncooperative with ED as well.

– CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) August 6, 2022

Regarding the ED’s investigation, Shetty tweeted that Zanmai Labs, the entity that owns Wazirx, “has been cooperating with the ED for over 7 days and has submitted all required data“. Wazirx also tweeted:

We have been cooperating fully with the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for several days and have answered all their questions fully and transparently. We do not agree with the allegations in the ED’s press release. We are currently evaluating our future course of action.