TL;DR Breakdown
- Binance exchange lack of physical appearance is a problem.
- Nobody knows City where executives of the exchange live.
- Lawyer alleges the mystery is for exchange to avoid regulators and litigation.
- Binance may be planning to establish a headquarter now.
Number one crypto exchange by market capitalization, Binance exchange is yet to establish its physical corporate location. Alongside this, the exact location of top executives of the exchange firm remains unknown.
Yi He, a co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange, lists her location as Mars. Binance’s chief growth officer, Ted Lin, identifies his location on Twitter as “decentralized.” Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao doesn’t include any location at all in his Twitter profile.
Lawyers from Davillier Law Group expressed all these concerns in a Class Action Lawsuit filed in a federal court in Prescott, Arizona.
Davillier said they could not track down Lin or Zhao despite hiring a private investigator, an ex-Marine bounty hunter. The investigator reported that despite an “exhaustive” search, he “was unable to definitively ascertain even in which country Changpeng Zhao, Yi He, and Ted Lin were located.” Zhao could be in Taiwan or possibly Singapore, the investigator said. Yi, He might be in Malta. Lin was said to live in Dallas, but the investigator couldn’t confirm that.
Binance exchange avoiding regulators or dodging litigation?
The murk surrounding their whereabouts, wrote Davillier lawyers George Wendt and Alexander Kolodin in a Nov. 15 filing to U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich of Prescott, is consistent with Binance’s deliberate efforts to obfuscate its corporate location “to avoid regulators and dodge litigation.”
However, the exchange since its establishment in 2017 shifted its headquarters to Japan and then Malta, with a holding company registered in the Cayman Islands and recent reports of a new base in Ireland.
Binance has repeatedly emphasized its decentralized operations, with its executives touting the company’s international reach.
“No one knows exactly where Binance is headquartered or where its officers may be found,” the Davillier lawyers said. “The individual defendants have gone to ground and are international ‘ghosts.’”
Binance responds to physical location brouhaha
In the exchange’s Defence, Zhao, who has made numerous public appearances, has explained the standpoint of the firm.
Zhao, at a cryptocurrency conference in 2020, when the interviewer asked the Binance exchange CEO where the company is based, said ‘Well, I think what this is is the beauty of the blockchain, right, so you don’t have to … like, where’s the Bitcoin office because Bitcoin doesn’t have an office.’
Recently, the exchange is said to be looking at establishing a physical base and changing its ‘decentralized’ standpoint after many crackdowns from regulators in different countries.
