TL;DR:
- CZ’s memoir reopened an old OKCoin dispute by revisiting a contract fight, the 2020 OKEx withdrawal freeze, and claims tied to Leon Li and Star Xu.
- Xu answered by calling Zhao a liar, disputing the book’s account, and reviving OKCoin’s 2015 rebuttal plus a notarized chat video.
- The clash has revived forgery claims, custody questions, and wider credibility disputes from crypto’s early exchange era again.
CZ’s new memoir has reopened one of crypto’s oldest disputes, dragging an OKCoin-era conflict back into view and drawing a response from OKX founder Star Xu. In Freedom of Money, Changpeng Zhao revisits a contract dispute from his time at OKCoin and argues that rivals worked to damage his reputation with fear, uncertainty and doubt. What looked like a closed chapter in exchange history has suddenly become active again, with memoir form giving old accusations a fresh platform. That matters because the quarrel reaches back into unresolved claims about forgery and credibility in crypto’s early years.
If you read Freedom of Money, please help leave a review on Amazon. 🙏
— CZ 🔶 BNB (@cz_binance) April 8, 2026
Why the dispute escalated so sharply again
The sharpest reaction came from Xu, who accused Zhao of lying about episodes in the book. He challenged the memoir’s version of Zhao’s time at OKCoin, the contract dispute involving Roger Ver, allegations of market manipulation, claims of informant activity tied to Justin Sun, and even personal details unrelated to exchange operations. The rebuttal was sweeping enough to suggest Xu saw the memoir not as selective revision, but as a rewriting of shared history. In doing so, he revived older materials that once formed OKCoin’s defense.
Those older materials are central to the renewed fight. Xu resurfaced OKCoin’s 2015 rebuttal and pointed again to a notarized chat video released at the time. The video purportedly shows an OKCoin accountant’s QQ account being accessed before a notary and displaying Zhao sending two versions of the Bitcoin.com agreement on Dec. 16, 2014, with the disputed six-month termination clause appearing only in version eight. That evidence sits at the core of the forgery allegation, because it is being used to argue that the controversial contract language did not appear in the earlier version.
The memoir also reopens the October 2020 withdrawal freeze at OKX, then known as OKEx. Zhao suggests Xu alone held the keys to exchange wallets and contrasts that episode with Huobi’s handling of Leon Li’s detention a month later. He further writes that Li told him in 2025 he believed Xu had reported him to authorities years earlier. Xu’s response shows the feud is no longer about documents, but about control, informant claims, and reputational warfare across multiple eras of exchange history. By publication time, Zhao had not publicly answered Xu’s latest posts.
