Financial Times: Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has been hiding ties to China for years

According to the Financial Times, internal documents from Binance show that the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has been hiding its ties to China for years.

The documents, which fell into the hands of Financial Times journalists, reveal the instructions of the exchange’s CEO Changpeng Zhao to employees. One of the main instructions is to conceal the company’s activities in China, including the presence of an office there that was used at least until 2019, and cooperation with a Chinese bank to pay salaries to employees.

The FT article comes on the heels of the news that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has filed a lawsuit against Binance for allegedly illegally servicing U.S. customers and intentionally avoiding regulation.

The idea that Binance is a Chinese company is not new. There are many supporters of the so-called conspiracy theory online who claim that Binance is a «criminal organization» of China and belongs to its government. Bill Hagerty, a representative of the US Republican Party, has repeatedly stated that Binance is cooperating with the Chinese government. The senator is convinced that the platform has close ties with the Communist Party of China, but Binance management carefully conceals this information.

Both the exchange’s officials and its founder Changpeng Zhao have repeatedly denied this information. «Two years before founding Binance, I started a company called Bijie Tech. We had 30 clients and the business was going well. However, in March 2017, the Chinese government shut down all exchanges, including ours. All of Bijie Tech’s clients went bankrupt,» Changpeng Zhao explained back in September.

As you know, the exchange was recognized as a criminal organization in China, so, according to Binance employees, any cooperation is out of the question. «People think about the exchange’s ties with the Chinese government only because of our nationality: I and some other Binance employees are Chinese,» the platform’s head emphasized.

According to one version of the conspiracy theorists, the exchange is actually run by Chinese resident Guangyin Chen. Some users believe that Chen is the secret owner of both Binance and Bijie Tech (a company founded by Zhao in 2015, which went bankrupt in 2017). However, according to Changpeng Zhao, Chen is an acquaintance of his who once ran one of Bijie Tech’s offices and was in China, and now Guangyin Chen works for Binance. Due to her long stay in China for work and management of the Bijie Tech office, conspiracy theorists believe that Chen is the Chinese government representative who runs the exchange.