[Feature] CZ: Crypto’s Saviour or Villain-in-Disguise?

Ever since the Binance and FTX war, two names have been popping up everywhere: Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and Changpeng Zhao (CZ). While SBF has been painted as crypto’s latest king of villains, CZ has come out of it triumphant. Just as SBF has many personas, CZ too has numerous monikers ranging from saviour of crypto to FTX Killer, crypto’s corporate raider, the true villain, and more.

CZ’s tweet on 6 November started it all, and he tweeted two days later refuting he “somehow orchestrated this whole thing”. However, the damage had already been done. In under two weeks, the battle concluded with CZ winning the war, and SBF going from poster child of crypto to crypto villain.

Another tweet on 6 December saw him clarifying rumours such as "CZ wants to be savior of crypto", "CZ’s tweet destroyed FTX", and so on.

His latest tweet on 9 December (at the time of writing), which had nothing to do with the debacle, was about TradFi.

Can he be lauded as a hero of sorts for exposing a scam aka SBF? Perhaps? Perhaps not? Doing so brought all the SBF’s wrongdoings to light but at the same time, brought down the crypto economy. Maybe after raining ‘justice’ on one crypto exchange was not enough, CZ went on to target another but with a different result.

He pointed the gun (metaphorically) at Coinbase with a now-deleted tweet on 22 November.

The very next day or rather, the wee hours of the next day, the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong indirectly responded with a series of tweets.

In just three minutes, CZ deleted his tweet. Some call out CZ for trying to instigate things or cry wolf when there is none. Co-founder of Reflexivity Research Will Clemente; Founder and CEO of IBCgroup.io Mario Nawfal; analyst, trader, and investor 360_trader, and trader and investor Bob Loukas shared their responses on Twitter thereafter.

So is CZ trigger-happy or is he genuinely trying to make the crypto economy a better place for all? What is certain is that everyone is watching his next move.