Bollywood-like Drama Erupts as CZ Moves to Distance Binance from India’s WazirX Exchange

cryptonews.com:

A bitter dispute about the ownership of WazirX, an Indian crypto exchange that is being probed by the nation’s law enforcers over suspected money laundering allegations, has descended into a Twitter-based face-off between the Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao and the WazirX Founder Nischal Shetty.

Binance announced that it had “acquired” WazirX back in November 2019.

The issue appears to have begun on August 5, when India’s Directorate of Enforcement (ED) wrote in a press release that it had “conducted searches on one of the Directors of Zanmai Labs,” WazirX’s operator. It added that it had “issued a freezing order” to halt activities on the firm’s bank balances “to the tune of” some USD 8m.

The ED remarked of WazirX that the firm “works from a cloud-based software [platform] (@AWS Mumbai), all employees work from home, the registered office is a two-chair co-working WeWork space, and all crypto-crypto transactions are controlled by Binance, which is again without any known office, any known employee and rarely responds to [emailed] queries.”

Shetty, who is one of the owners of Zanmai, has been vocal in his response to the ED on Twitter, claiming that WazirX is a “decentralized” body.

WazirX stated:

“We have been fully cooperating with the ED for several days and have responded to all their queries fully and transparently. We do not agree with the allegations in the ED press release. We are evaluating our further plan of action.”

But another struggle is now playing out on Twitter with Zhao claiming that Binance never fully pulled the trigger on the deal – and Shetty stating that this is not true.

The original Binance blog post, published on November 21, 2019, featured a quote from Zhao, who said at the time:

“The acquisition of