On-chain detective ZachXBT was sued by "Brother Maji": over one million dollars in donations, support from CZ and Justin Sun
Original compilation: Felix
Original compilation: Felix
Last weekend, after "Brother Maji" Huang Licheng filed a defamation lawsuit against the chain detective ZachXBT, he received millions of dollars in donations from the encryption community, and public opinion almost overwhelmingly supported ZachXBT. This article will detail the beginning and latest developments of the incident .
On June 17, Huang Licheng tweeted that he had filed a defamation lawsuit against ZachXBT in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. Later, ZachXBT responded that Huang Licheng's lawsuit was baseless and he would fight back to defend freedom of speech.
And the cause of the matter should start from a year ago. Jeffrey Huang is also known as Machi Big Brother. In June 2022, an article published by ZachXBT accused Huang Licheng of launching Mithril (MITH), Formosa Financial (FMF), Machi X, Cream Finance (CREAM) and Swag Finance ( SWAG) and misappropriated millions of dollars worth of Ethereum from Formosa Financial, a defunct crypto asset management platform that Machi co-founded. For these allegations, ZachXBT also attached on-chain data as evidence. For this reason, Huang Licheng protested vigorously in the past and persuaded ZachXBT to delete negative articles to support funding, but ZachXBT did not accept this "good intentions".
"Jeffrey Huang's lawsuit is disturbing, it will be a 'David and Goliath story'. My understanding is that Huang Licheng is very rich, but I am not, and he is using his money to try to silence me. The legal defense fee for this lawsuit is likely to exceed $1 million.” Due to the huge difference in financial strength, ZachXBT released the wallet address to seek help from the encryption community.
Subsequently, ZachXBT immediately received the support of the community, and received donations of more than US$1 million from multiple encryption companies or practitioners within one day. According to Nansen data, ZachXBT’s wallet received funds from wallets associated with exchanges such as Binance, Bitfinex, Bybit, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, Uniswap, and 1inch, with multiple transactions worth between $10,000 and $50,000.
This included a donation from Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), who encouraged ZachXBT to "keep fighting" and "keep the industry transparent." The move comes as Binance and CZ are grappling with a lawsuit brought by the US SEC.
Justin Sun, founder of Tron and advisor to cryptocurrency exchange Huobi, also donated $10,000 worth of stablecoin True USD to ZachXBT, emphasizing the role of detectives in educating the cryptocurrency community.
In addition, encryption media Bankless, Coinbase Cloud protocol leader Viktor Bunin, encryption security company CertiK, Cosine, etc. also participated in donations.
The latest data from Nansen Portfolio shows that ZachXBT’s fundraising wallet address has transferred some donation tokens to the address starting with “0x 3 e 7 E”, and the net value of the remaining tokens is less than $70,000. According to ZachXBT's previous commitment, the remaining funds donated to his legal defense will be returned to the donors in proportion.
Although Huang Licheng tweeted that. "I just hope ZachXBT apologizes, and any compensation received will be donated to charity." At the same time, he sold 19 NFTs a few hours later, including BAYC, MAYC, Azuki, and the CryptoPunks series. But his lawsuit also revealed ZachXBT's name and place of residence, exposing the detective's identity to the public.
In fact, ZachXBT has been skeptical of various crypto projects and on-chain events as an anonymous well-known crypto KOL for many years, exposing bad actors, warning potential scams, sharing the root cause of vulnerabilities with crypto people on Twitter, etc.
With the ferment of ZachXBT's lawsuit against Huang Licheng, the Web3 community seems to be ready to strongly support "encryption justice messengers" such as ZachXBT, sending their assets to those who are committed to having a positive impact on encryption and did not previously demand high returns.
PANews will continue to follow up on the future direction and final results of the prosecution.
