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CZ, the CEO of Binance, offered help to a user whose bitcoin was stolen from a wallet.
Changpeng Zhao has shown for some time now that the use of his social profile has played a key role in the community’s involvement in the use of the exchange.
In fact, he admitted to spending as much as 20% of his time curating his Twitter profile and responding to users.
So it is not surprising that he responded to a tweet from Eric Savics saying that he will ask the team to intervene to help him.
Savics is the host of the Protocol Podcast, and a few days ago he tweeted that he lost all his savings in bitcoin due to a phishing attack.
In fact, he downloaded the KeepKey app from Google Chrome store to save the seed of his wallet, without knowing that this app was actually fraudulent. Once the seed was inserted on the app, the criminal used the seed to steal 12 BTC from his wallet, in which Savics kept all his savings in bitcoin (about $110,000).
CZ’s response was:
“Sorry to hear about your loss. Will ask the team to put that receiving address in the blacklist. If you can provide details on how the phishing worked, it will help others too”.
In a subsequent tweet CZ added that Binance cannot censor the Bitcoin blockchain, and although users expect them to fight fraud on their centralized platform, they simply cannot do so on the DEX.
So what can Binance really do in this case?
As CZ said, they will probably have no choice but to blacklist the destination address to which the BTC stolen from Savics were sent, just as they have done in the past and will continue to do in the future for addresses involved in other illegal activities, in order to prevent these BTC from being deposited on the centralized exchange.
On the other hand, however, they can’t do anything on the decentralized exchange, because not being centralized there is not a single authority able to intervene to insert addresses in a blacklist.
This practice is actually common to practically all the main exchanges in the world, with a significant difference: in the case of Binance, its most well-known spokesperson, CZ, interacts with users on social networks.
It is likely that he chose to answer Savics because he is the host of the Protocol Podcast, as it doesn’t happen often that CZ responds via Twitter to any user.
The impact of his personal network is remarkable, which certainly helps Binance continue to be one of the most widely used crypto exchanges in the world.