OKX founder Star Xu has issued his most personal and pointed attack yet against Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, commonly known as CZ, after the latter appeared on The Block’s new daily show, The Starting Block, on June 29, hosted by Gareth Jenkinson live from Abu Dhabi.
During the interview, CZ was asked about his perspective on Star Xu and the ongoing public feud between the two exchange founders. CZ reportedly framed the rivalry as stemming from jealousy on Xu’s part, a characterization the OKX founder rejected immediately and aggressively.
Xu rejects the jealousy narrative
In a post on X, Xu tore into CZ’s framing with a string of rhetorical questions. He asked what exactly there was to be jealous of, pointing to CZ’s four-month federal prison sentence in 2024 after pleading guilty to anti-money laundering violations.
He also brought up the October 2025 crypto flash crash, when billions in liquidations hit traders across the market, an event Xu and other critics have previously linked to Binance.
Xu wrote that CZ tolerated compliance violations at Binance and even fired members of his own compliance team for investigating accounts labeled as internal. He concluded with one of his sharpest lines yet, saying he is not jealous of CZ but ashamed of him.
Xu also revisited his long-standing grievances about CZ’s conduct during his time at OKCoin, the exchange that eventually became OKX. He noted that despite claiming to have no interest in rehashing those events, CZ had mentioned him nearly 10 times in his memoir Freedom of Money, which Xu described as full of false claims and misrepresented facts.
He added that he would be willing to go through the evidence publicly with the media if CZ believed it was necessary.
A feud that dates back over a decade
The rivalry between Xu and CZ stretches back to 2014, when CZ joined OKCoin as Chief Technology Officer with a reported 10% equity stake. His tenure lasted less than a year, and his departure in early 2015 triggered a bitter contract dispute involving early Bitcoin investor Roger Ver and the management of the Bitcoin.com domain.
Both sides accused the other of contract forgery. Xu pointed to a notarized video and QQ chat logs from 2015 as evidence that CZ had altered the contract. CZ maintained that his account may have been accessed by someone else and denied any wrongdoing.
The dispute lay dormant for years but exploded again in April 2026, when CZ published his 457-page memoir, Freedom of Money. The book revisited the OKCoin chapter and also included a claim that Huobi founder Li Lin told CZ in 2025 that he believed Xu had reported him to Chinese authorities, an allegation Xu has repeatedly denied.
That round of the feud escalated to the point where CZ offered a $1 billion bet on X regarding his divorce status after Xu questioned his marital disclosures. Xu rejected the bet, calling it unprofessional for the head of a regulated company, and instead pressed CZ on whether his Binance stake had been legally separated from his ex-wife.
Latest clash comes amid Binance’s MiCA troubles
The timing of this latest exchange is significant. Just a day before the interview, Xu had criticized Binance’s framing of its failed MiCA licensing effort in the European Union. Binance withdrew its application from Greece on June 24 after reports surfaced that regulators were preparing to reject it.
CZ had described the outcome as a “loss for Europe,” claiming the application was fully compliant and that political forces intervened to block it. Xu pushed back hard, asking what exactly Europe lost and pointing to public reports that Binance had failed to demonstrate effective AML and sanctions compliance programs.
Binance is set to suspend crypto services for EU customers starting July 1, as all platforms operating in the bloc will be required to hold a MiCA license from that date forward. OKX, by contrast, secured its own MiCA approval from Malta back in January 2025.
Xu has also questioned CZ on Hyperliquid and Aster
The MiCA and memoir disputes are not the only fronts in this ongoing battle. Earlier in June, Xu accused CZ of sending mixed signals about decentralized exchange Hyperliquid. CZ had praised the platform’s technology in an interview but cautioned that its no-KYC model created regulatory risk that Binance could not accept.
Xu argued that it was contradictory, pointing out that Aster, a decentralized perpetual exchange with confirmed ties to former Binance staff and a minority stake held by YZi Labs (the rebranded Binance Labs), operates on a model closely resembling Hyperliquid’s. He accused CZ of running Aster as a shell company while publicly distancing Binance from such models.
What comes next
Neither founder has shown signs of backing down. CZ continues to position himself as a reformed industry figure through his investments in education and blockchain projects, while Xu has leaned into an aggressive public strategy of questioning Binance’s compliance credibility at every turn.
With the MiCA deadline hitting on July 1, Binance’s regulatory positioning in Europe remains uncertain, and the competitive dynamics between the world’s two largest crypto exchanges are only getting sharper.
Also Read: CZ Opens Up on Binance’s MiCA Setback, Questions STRC Complexity
