Binance, the largest crypto exchange on the planet and once a beacon of honesty/transparency in the industry, is now being accused of insider trading and market manipulations.
In the aftermath of founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao’s reign, CEO Richard Teng has certainly taken the company towards an entirely different direction.
Now CZ is one of the most respected people in the industry. He became known for being completely transparent with the industry, a trait his fellow founder, Yi He, seemingly also exhibits.
Yi He with Changpeng Zhao. Credits: Yi He
But the community doesn’t seem too confident in Richard at all.
Is Binance manipulating the market?
What triggered the allegations was two NEIRO tokens which saw their value skyrocket by over 700% collectively within 24 hours of its listing on Binance barely three days ago.
And get this, 78% of NEIRO were distributed to insiders way before the launch. Bit odd, isn’t it?
NEIRO was inspired by Akita Neiro, a rescue dog linked to Atsuko Sato, the original owner of Kabosu, the Dogecoin dog.
As Cryptopolitan reported earlier, there are over 20 versions of these tokens in the market right now.
These tokens were spread across more than 400 wallet addresses. The insiders have already sold about $9 million worth of these tokens.
Also, an unnamed address bought a lot of the tokens just before the official listing announcement. The address netted over $500,000 in unrealized profits soon after.
Binance introduced a USD-margined NEIROETH perpetual contract on September 6. This contract allows traders to leverage their positions up to 75x.
The introduction of such a high-leverage trading instrument has been criticized as it could make market volatility even worse than it already is.
That could potentially cause huge losses for retail investors.
Critics argue that Binance’s actions count as market manipulation, especially after finding out that TRON founder Justin Sun also promoted NEIRO before its listing.
Justin doesn’t have the best track record in the community.
Yi responds to allegations
Yi was quick to react to the accusations. She started by acknowledging the community’s anxiety, before pointing out that bold investments used to yield high returns in crypto’s early days.
But as the crypto market develops, this is becoming harder to achieve. With large financial institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity entering the market, we are seeing crypto operate “more closely to the stock market.”
According to Yi, Binance’s sole mission is to serve billions of users and become a foundational infrastructure for the future of blockchain. She added that:
“When we aim to drive mass adoption, we need to balance ideals with reality. Binance’s products have expanded beyond trading to include Earn, Square, Pay and the Web3 Wallet. Our goal is to make blockchain technology accessible to everyday people. Bubbles will burst, but products that genuinely meet user needs will change the world and create history.”
She proceeded to say that Binance lists projects that actually matter to users, projects that have staying power, and make sense from a business standpoint.
They’re all about what the users want, and they genuinely pay attention to their feedback. She pointed out that Binance has listed a few meme projects that are more decentralized and have smaller market caps.
Out of the original batch of over ten projects, Yi said a lot didn’t make the cut, either because they didn’t meet their compliance standards or their tokens were too concentrated in distribution.
She promised the community that they’re taking their criticisms very seriously and that:
“If it is found that there is a suspicion of information leakage or insider trading, Binance will immediately initiate judicial procedures to transfer relevant personnel to the judicial organs, and serious cases will face criminal responsibility.”
As for Richard, however, he has been too busy at Singapore Token2049 to address the community.
This comes as the community is counting down the days until CZ gets out of prison, which is on September 29th.
