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Blocknet reveals the questionnaire they had to fill in when they filed for listing on Binance, accusing them of "stealing" invalueable information related to the DEX development.
Only 2 days after Binance DEX’s launching, new information behind the DEX development has emerged.
Read more: Binance DEX AND Chain are now on public testnet - this is how you start
Blocknet, a second layer interoperability protocol that enables communication, interaction, and exchange between different blockchains, reveals the unusual process they had to go through to get listed on Binance exchange.
The story began when Blocknet, whose project includes a DEX, called BlockDX applied for a listing on August last year, about 5 months after Binance’s announcement of Binance DEX.
The Blocknet team was required to fill in the Binance Listing Form that contained questions about the company’s detail, project’s detail, target industry, which is a standard procedure all listing applicants must go through.
But things became unusual when Binance’s head of business, Ashley Ouyang contacted Blocknet via email with follow up questions, which the team answered and replied immediately.
A month went by without any updates from the Binance team, so Blocknet decided to send an email asking the progress of their listing application. The answer they received was “Zing” aka “None” aka no replies at all from the Binance team.
Out of curiosity and dissatisfaction, the team started to review the second part questions, which they had answered previously.
The questions contained some basic and typical questions, such as the recent update of the project, the milestone since the initial token offering, competitors review, and social media.
However, things got pretty shady when they asked the question, “Why do you choose to build your own DEX instead of leveraging those existing ones on the market? What is the rationale that DEX has been the main focus of the project?”
According to Chico Crypto on his YouTube channel, this is pretty obvious some sort of competitor research, considering that just months before, Binance announced their plan to build Binance DEX.
Moving on the next questions, it became even more obvious that the questionnaire was more than just for listing purposes.
Binance asked deeper questions, such as the breakdown of the company’s employees, project advisors, investors, and even asked for Blocknet’s private code repo so they can “have a look at your development to date”.
But it seems that wasn’t enough for Blocknet to get listed on Binance. They asked about the future plan for BlockDX, technical questions, and finally a demo for them to test Block DX.
The technical questions were also pretty detail, like the token incentive & penalty system, the minimum transaction fee rate, the service node. Looking through them undeniably felt like Binance was actually asking for Blocknet’s “help” to resolve the issues they’ve been dealing with on their DEX development.
But, that’s not all. When looking at the leaked Google form questionnaire in more details, Chico Crypto found that one of the people who asked the questions was allegedly NEO co-founder, Erick Zhang, who is also one of Binance’s angel investors.
Among the questions he asked were how to solve DNS problem in blockchain and blockchain-based storage solution, like Storj. It appears like Zhang is looking for a “quick solution” for his new storage project, the NeoFS.
While there’s nothing wrong for a business to conduct a competitor survey, it seems unethical to abuse power to achieve a goal, even in an industry with an unregulated nature like the crypto business.
In this case, Binance may have “misused” their power as the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world to get sensitive information from a potential competitor to their new business line.
That said, it is also unwise for a business to naïvely provide their sensitive information to any other business, without any prior agreement.
Blocknet can’t put all the blame to Binance by saying that their reputation as the must trustable exchange made them do that.
As a wiseman said, “If it’s your boat, it’s YOUR responsibility.”
Stick with Chepicap for more updates on the Blocknet-Binance story.
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