Benzinga - Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, stirred up controversy on Tuesday by tweeting about Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) Global's (NASDAQ: COIN) Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) holdings.
What Happened: CZ referred to an article that stated “Coinbase Custody maintains 635,000 BTC on behalf of Grayscale” in his since-deleted tweet seen by CoinDesk. He noted that “4 months ago, Coinbase had less than 600K,” adding a link to a four-month-old article from Bitcoinist.
The CEO of Binance made it clear that he was simply quoting “news reports.”
It should be noted that the skirmishes between crypto exchange behemoths have been responsible for much of this month's turmoil in the industry.
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Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong replied to CZ, “If you see FUD out there - remember, our financials are public (we're a publicly traded company),” with a link to Coinbase's Q3 shareholder letter. He added, “We have ~2M BTC. As of September 30, 2018, our company had ~$39.9B in BTC holdings (see our 10Q).”
CZ then removed the message, writing: “Brian Armstrong just informed me that the data in the articles is incorrect. I have deleted my previous post. Let's work together to enhance transparency in the industry.”
Twitter Remains Unimpressed: Will Clemente, the co-founder of digital asset research company Reflexivity Research, tweeted that CZ's recent Twitter post about Coinbase's Bitcoin holdings was not a good look.
“I get the argument that he’s trying to protect the industry but CZ is more than smart enough to know that exchange and custody wallets are separate.”
Twitter-based analyst, trader, and investor, 360_trader, said, “CZ just proved that he cares about one thing and one thing only: building his company. He isn’t here to look out for the industry; he deleted the tweet, as I predicted. However, now that he has been exposed as a villain, I assume that his despicable behavior will continue.”
Price Action: At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $16,224, down 2.58% in the last 24 hours, according to Benzinga Pro.
Read Next: Jim Chanos Doubles Down On Coinbase Criticism: 'It Just Doesn't Work'
Photo by Web Summit on Flickr
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