Binance co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao has given several interviews discussing the outlook for the cryptocurrency after weeks of market turmoil.
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The CEO of Binance, the largest online exchange for cryptocurrency, criticized the former CEO of the bankrupt exchange FTX and took aim at economist Nouriel Roubini.
Speaking at the Milken Institute’s Middle East and Africa Summit on Thursday, Changpeng Zhao, aka “CZ,” was asked to respond to a tweet by Sam Bankman-Fried about his “sparring partner.” CZ, head of rival exchange Binance.
“When he tweets about his sparring partner, his house burns down and all this happens, he loses focus. I didn’t know FTX had this problem or we would have sold these FTT tokens a long time ago,” CNBC’s Dan Murphy said.
“He should have been working on other things the day he tweeted that. He shouldn’t have been tweeting.”
Zhao also added details on Binance’s decision back from the deal to bail out rival stock exchange FTX in November. 9.
“To be perfectly clear [Bankman-Fried] come to me. When he came to me, I knew he was desperate. So apparently a group of people accepted the deal before us,” Zhao said Thursday.
“It didn’t take long for us to realize that there were bigger problems [at FTX] It was more than we imagined,” he added.
Asked if he thought the former FTX CEO was a criminal, Zhao said he would leave that decision up to others, but “[knew] there were lies and embezzlement of people’s money” and assessed it as “fraud”.
CNBC has reached out to FTX and Bankman-Fried for comment, but has not yet heard back.
Economist Nouriel Roubini also made headlines after he described Changpeng Zhao in an interview as one of the “seven C’s of crypto” – an unsavory list that also includes “secretive, corrupt, fraudsters, criminals, fraudsters, carnival barkers”.
Roubini described cryptocurrency and some of its key players as a “completely corrupted ecosystem” at the Abu Dhabi Finance Week event on Wednesday.
Zhao’s response to the criticism was simple: “We don’t care,” he told CNBC on Thursday.
“Negative energy doesn’t go very far in life and these people will generally remain poor,” he said, adding that Roubini was “very uneducated” and “ignorant of local customs.”
The CEO has had a busy week with speaking engagements, and on Wednesday he told the cryptocurrency “it will be fine” after announcing plans for a recovery fund for people who have hit a rough patch in the industry.
“We want today’s strong industry players to protect good industry players who may suffer in the short term,” said Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, also speaking from Abu Dhabi.
The cryptocurrency has been in the spotlight this week following Binance’s rival exchange FTX. filed for bankruptcy on Friday and price bitcoin It fell below $17,000 for the first time since 2020.
The developments have also raised concerns about the so-called “crypto contagion”. could lead to the downfall of other big industry namesLike Crypto.com. CEO of the company denied the allegations and said the platform was “business as usual”.
“There’s a lot of pain in the short term, but the long term accelerates our efforts to make this industry healthier,” Zhao said Wednesday.
