Reporting from CoinDesk described a Twitter user who was paid by Justin Sun to make "derogatory memes" against staff members of The Block. This followed Changpeng Zhao and Justin Sun being upset about The Block reporting that a Binance office in Shanghai had been raided and shut down in late 2019.
Where the feud started
The trouble began on November 21, when The Block published a story headlined around Binance's Shanghai office being shut down following a police raid, citing sources close to the matter. The article spread rapidly on Twitter, and some commentators even tied it to a sharp drop in the price of Bitcoin around that time. Binance pushed back hard: executives insisted there was no raid because, in their telling, there was no fixed Shanghai office to raid. The outlet later softened the headline, changing "police raid" to a "visit from authorities," but the damage — and the argument — was already underway. The full back-and-forth was documented by CryptoSlate as it unfolded.
Sun was involved in buying Poloniex, is the founder of the TRON blockchain network, and was CEO of BitTorrent. Zhao is the CEO of Binance and founder of BNB. The two could be considered competitors, but are closer than one might assume — Binance had held significant sway over TRON's voting system for a while.
The "anti-FUD" fund
They teamed up against The Block after Zhao denied its reports of a Shanghai Binance office existing and being shut down. During the dispute, Zhao floated the idea of a dedicated fund to fight what he called FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt — spread by paid actors in the Chinese crypto media scene. Both Zhao and Sun pledged to seed it, each offering 100 Bitcoin, worth several hundred thousand dollars at the time. Zhao also threatened to sue The Block over the story, though that particular thread went quiet afterward.
Around the same time, Frank Chaparro of The Block announced an upcoming interview with Catherine Coley, CEO of Binance.US. Commenters wondered whether the conversation would touch on the drama.
The memes
A portion of that pledged fund — reportedly around $1,000 — was used to hire a meme-maker and TRX investor to produce images mocking The Block. The meme-maker, who went by "Mustache," confirmed the payment to CoinDesk and explained his motivation in blunt terms:
Investors like me are getting hurt by rumors, and we are sick of it.
With long-term holdings in both TRX and BNB, his frustration is easy to understand — he said people in his own Telegram groups sold their BNB after the report, fearing Zhao might be arrested. CryptoCult does not condone harassment in any way whatsoever, though, to their credit, Mike Dudas and Frank Chaparro of The Block were good sports throughout, even posting some of the memes themselves.
Why it mattered
The episode became a small case study in something specific to crypto: how much a market can move on the reputation and mood around a single figurehead. Tokens with identifiable founders — BNB with Zhao, TRX with Sun — behave partly like extensions of those personalities, and sentiment can swing prices in ways that traditional markets, with more diffuse ownership, rarely see. CoinDesk explored exactly that dynamic in its coverage of the Twitter meme wars that grew out of the incident.
For a broader sense of how exchange politics and reputation shaped the market in this period, it is worth reading alongside our look at how Binance.US compared to Coinbase, which covers the same exchange's careful positioning with US regulators at the time.