On November 18th, one of the most popular asset exchanges, Binance, filed a defamation lawsuit against Forbes Media LLC and two journalists. According to Binance, Forbes published an article, “Leaked ‘Tai Chi’ Document,” accusing the exchange of establishing a corporate scheme to deceive and take part in money laundering.
According to the Forbes article published last month, the document is a scheme laid out to evade bitcoin regulators and siphon revenue from a US entity back to Binance. The assumption was that the company’s executives viewed the document’s slide show. Harry Zhou, Co-founder of Koi Trading, apparently created the document. He is supposedly a former employee of Binance, as reported by Forbes.
The crypto exchange cleared all rumors by disputing the claims as false and defamatory. Charles J.Harder, its attorney, said that they were false statements, and the company never created such a document, ‘ Tai Chi,’ nor administered the corporate scheme described in the article. Binance stated that Harry had never been an employee of the company.
Binance Attempts to Reach out
The exchange has earlier reached out to Forbes through a letter ordering retraction of the claims, but the latter refused. An editor’s note said that the Chief Compliance officer had earlier sent an email to Forbes verifying that Zhou had worked for the company.
Binance included these ‘false claims’ in the lawsuit. Forbes said that it would stand with their reporting. The exchange had no other choice but to file the lawsuit to see the truth prevail and protect its reputation.
Victorious Defamation Suit
Binance is a currency exchange that provides a platform for trading different cryptos. A few years ago, it was the largest cryptocurrency exchange internationally in terms of business volumes.
Changpeng Zhao, aka CZ, who initially created high-frequency trading software, founded the company. Initially, the company was in China but later moved due to tight crypto regulations. Binance has always tried to fight against money laundering. In 2018 it made a new partnership with Chainalysis to improve its ability to detect suspicious transactions.
The plaintiff has the task of proving that the defendant told misleading information disregarding the truth. It takes a lot of effort to come out victorious in a defamation lawsuit against media organizations as the bar has been set high. Binance alleges to have lost millions following the defamatory statements. Material damage is another element of a victorious defamation suit.