Changpeng Zhao, CEO of the crypto exchange giant Binance, has threatened to sue the blockchain-oriented media outlet “The Block” over false reporting regarding raids of the Chinese police on Binance’s office in fiery tweets.
The blazing interaction took place on Twitter when Changpeng Zhao published a tweet, saying:
“Instead of apologizing to the community for the fake headline news of the non-existent “police raid”, which damaged our reputation, and $btc price, theBlock now tries to argue if there was an office, if CZ had a meeting… who cares? Own up & apologize for your mistake.”
Zhao first spoke out against the outlet when on 21st November it published a story about a police raid on Binance’s Shanghai office. According to the original article, the office was shut down after the raid. Zhao responded by stating how Binance has had no active office in Shanghai for the past two years.
He also went on to claim that some media outlets in China are being paid to do negative publicityon Binance. Zhao later considered suing these news outlets because such negative publicity is harmful to the cryptocurrency trading platform’s reputation.
This incident lead to crypto heavyweights such as Zhao and the CEO of the major cryptocurrency TRON, Justin Sun (who rose to mainstream headlines recently when he won a lunch with Warren Buffett), to join hands and form a fund to counter false news revolving around cryptocurrency and blockchain. Known as the “FUD fighting fund,” the fund is aiming to garner more than $1 million worth of pledges.
Crypto News and Fake News
Crypto news and journalism is a volatile field. With such an unstable crypto market and ever changing landscape, the window for breaking a news story and verifying is very small, leading to a lot speculations and false reporting. A single false report can cause cryptocurrency prices to change at a drastic rate as seen before.
As in so many other fields, “fake news” has become part of crypto news jargon because of the unstable environment which is constantly changing and shifting. To counter this, many entities are experimenting with funding models.
For example, the open source cryptocurrency Dash has introduced a mechanism of allocating funds to different news outlets which constitute as 10% of each month’s new digital coins as a reward. These funds are then used to create content, research, review and cover crypto-related stories without depending on external funds, hopefully leading to better quality of content being produced.
The Block’s co-founder Mike Dudas, however, was not too happy with the idea of setting up a fund. According to him, the fund was created “presumably to wield as an implicit threat against journalists who report facts that run contrary to their business interests.”
Perhaps now it’s important for us here at AllStocks Crypto News to state that we are not being financed by any cryptocurrency company.
