Changpeng Zhao's new memoir, drafted in 15-minute bursts on a federal prison tablet, has reignited a decade-old dispute with OKX founder Star Xu over a disputed 2015 employment contract — and a reported claim that Xu personally turned in Huobi's Li Lin to Chinese authorities.
Changpeng Zhao's new memoir has reopened a decade-old dispute that most of crypto had long since filed away as Chinese exchange folklore. Freedom of Money, released globally on 8 April, is a 457-page account of Binance's rise drafted in 15-minute bursts on a federal prison tablet during Zhao's four-month sentence. Most of the book reads as origin story and charity pledge. The parts that have set crypto Twitter alight are the ones where Zhao names names — specifically, OKX founder Star Xu and a 2015 contract Zhao says was forged.
Zhao joined OKCoin, the predecessor to OKX, as chief technology officer in mid-2014 and held a 10% equity stake. His tenure lasted less than a year. In the memoir, Zhao writes that he left in early 2015 after Xu attempted to renegotiate that stake, and that OKCoin produced a modified version of his contract adding a six-month termination clause he never signed. Roger Ver, who was also involved in OKCoin's early financing, has separately supported the forgery claim over the years. Xu's position is the mirror image — that it was Zhao who forged the document.
None of this is new. What is new is Zhao putting it in print under his own name, with his own memoir imprint behind it, and going one step further. Zhao claims in the book that Li Lin, the founder of rival exchange Huobi, told him over dinner in 2025 that he had seen a screenshot showing Xu personally reporting Li to Chinese authorities — a report Li believes led to his detention in November 2020. Li was picked up at a public event on 28 November 2020 and held in a form of soft detention for roughly 90 days.
Xu's response came on X within hours of the book hitting shelves. He called Zhao a "habitual liar" whose "nature never changes," and posted a video he says shows the conflicting contract versions. He then escalated — pressing Zhao on whether his stake in Binance had been legally separated as part of a finalised divorce, a point Xu suggested had never been verified in public.
Zhao's counter-move was pure Zhao. He offered to bet Xu one billion dollars, or any amount Xu chose, that the divorce had in fact been finalised, saying the agreement could be verified by lawyers under confidentiality. He declined to publish any of the documents. Xu rejected the wager outright, citing compliance constraints tied to running a regulated exchange, and the thread fizzled without either side producing the paperwork that would actually settle anything.
The feud itself is not especially consequential. Neither man is going to lose business over it; Binance remains the largest exchange in the world by volume and OKX has quietly rebuilt its institutional book since leaving the United States. What the exchange matters is what it reveals about the memoir as a document. Zhao has said publicly that he wrote Freedom of Money partly to correct the record, partly as therapy, and partly to raise money for Giggle Academy, his post-prison education project. Putting the OKCoin contract saga and the Li Lin allegations in the book turns it into something closer to a legal instrument — and it hands Xu a specific, datable set of claims to deny.
It also complicates the broader rehabilitation narrative around Zhao, who pled guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations in 2023, was sentenced to four months in prison in 2024, and received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump in October. Since the pardon, Zhao has mostly kept to charity announcements and Binance strategy. A book that picks fights with two of the most powerful figures in Chinese crypto history is a different register entirely.
Whether any of the specific allegations will be tested in court is a separate question. Xu has not filed anything. Li has not commented publicly on the dinner Zhao describes. And the forgery dispute itself is now more than a decade old, which in most jurisdictions makes it a closed chapter regardless of who was right. What Zhao's book has done is force both sides to restate their positions on the record — and in Xu's case, on video. The evidence that would actually resolve any of it, though, is still sitting in the same place it has been since 2015: with the lawyers, and not the public.
