Changpeng Zhao or “CZ”, the CEO at Binance, the world’s largest digital asset exchange, has admitted that the trading platform must list new coins, regardless of whether it’s completely sure of the legitimacy of their business model, in order to remain competitive.
Zhao noted:
“If we don’t list new (decentralized finance) DeFi coins, traffic goes to other exchanges, and we become … obsolete. We provide access to liquidity, we don’t force you to buy. All coins are high risk, especially DeFi.”
The Binance chief executive even acknowledged that he doesn’t know who the founder of SUSHI is. Despite not having adequate information about the project, Binance had apparently listed the highly questionable project’s coin.
A Twitter user remarked:
“I thought you guys had listing standards? You periodically review other coins for not meeting these standards and delist them. But now you list $SUSHI with no checks and balances? I thought it was about quality, not traffic or relevance.”
“Chef Nomi,” the founder of SushiSwap, a highly-popular DeFi project, recently cashed out all his holdings. The “head chef” recently took out 2.5 million SUSHI from the non-custodial trading platform in exchange for 18,000 ETH, an amount valued at around $6 million at current prices.
Nomi also took out another 20,000 ETH, valued at about $7 million, from the same liquidity pool.
The transactions have come almost immediately after the creator of SushiSwap, a variation or fork of Uniswap (a leading non-custodial Ethereum token exchange), was heavily criticized for controlling almost half or 50% of the tokens in the SushiSwap ecosystem.
After Nomi withdrew the liquidity for the SUSHI token (which significantly reduced the amount of the tokens available to trade for Ethereum or ETH via), its price dropped considerably from around $5 to about $2.35.
While trying to defend his actions, Nomi noted:
“I wrote the migration code. I did all the audits. I coordinated the largest LP pools ever. I created a large community. I sprung up 100s of LP scam projects. All in 1 week.”
Even though Nomi still won’t reveal his real identity or tell anyone where he’s living, he claims that he has not pulled an exit scam because he’s “still here” (on social media).
Nomi even went as far as comparing himself to Charlie Lee, founder of Litecoin (LTC), one of the largest cryptocurrencies in terms of market cap that’s a Bitcoin (BTC) fork and was launched in 2011. At the height of the crypto bull market in 2017, Lee had sold all his LTC holdings because he claimed that he didn’t want anyone to question his intentions or accuse him of acting in self-interest as far as Litecoin’s development was concerned.
However, Lee has not been hiding from the public and has made many appearances on media channels like CNBC and has been actively involved in the crypto community for many years.
The crypto space remains mostly unregulated which has resulted in companies like Binance doing pretty much whatever they want, while consumers suffer.