It should be noted that Elon Musk has not often mentioned the cryptocurrency industry lately, but he has done so nonetheless. In particular, in the second half of October, he reacted to the rise of the coin market by publishing the following image.

Funny how Bitcoin ended up hitting exactly the $69,000 mark. Here is a chart of the cryptocurrency on the Binance exchange, where you can see the peak of the coin.

A four-hour chart of Bitcoin’s exchange rate

Criticism of Binance from Ilon Musk

The first tweet about what’s going on was published by Ilon in response to a Coindesk account post tagged Zhao’s account.

Hey, what’s going on with your customers who hold DOGE? Kind of a murky story.

Half an hour later, the Tesla CEO responded to the official Binance account with a link to a Twitter thread explaining the problem. It turns out that due to technical glitches during the next platform update, old DOGE transactions were forwarded to 1,674 users. The incident was local only to Binance, as the exchange uses its own wallet for the altcoin.

Representatives of the trading platform said that they are solving the problem with the developers of the DOGE network, with Binance will still need to rebuild its wallet completely, which is associated with a delay in withdrawals of coins. Those who received old transactions are being asked to give coins back.

As a result, some users of the Binance exchange faced an inability to withdraw their DOGE cryptocurrency. To do so, they were asked to "redeem" a certain amount of coins. Naturally, this problem is a bug and does not correspond to the current state of affairs, but users are already suffering because of it. And this is exactly what Elon was unhappy about.

Musk was not satisfied with such an answer, and he said that DOGE holders on Binance must be protected from “problems that do not depend on them. Zhao himself joined the discussion a little later, leaving a very ironic comment regarding a similar incident that recently occurred with Tesla. We are talking about problems with the company’s software in October this year, when the manufacturer recalled around 12,000 cars in the US.

Binance CEO Changpen Zhao

Here’s Changpen’s response to Ilon’s statement.

Ilon, we are aware of the glitches with the latest version of the Doge wallet. We are communicating with the developers. We apologise for any possible inconvenience caused.
Oops, what happened here?

Ilon responded here too – and in a slightly critical manner as well.

I don’t use the Binance exchange (I tried, but it was too long and complicated to register), so I personally haven’t had any problems. I’m just bringing it up for other DOGE holders.

Zhao eventually recommended that Musk use the U.S. arm of the Binance exchange, which also has Dogecoin. On top of that, the crypto-billionaire admitted that he overreacted to Ilon’s remark because of the mention of the word “murky”. That is, he essentially decided to refute any possible accusations of the exchange’s lack of transparency and did so in a harsh manner. In the end, however, all ended well.

Meanwhile, Binance is gradually coming to centralize its corporate structure. According to Decrypt, the exchange has incorporated three firms in Irish jurisdiction: Binance (APAC) Holdings, Binance (Services) Holdings and Binance Technologies. This was done after long-standing pressure from financial regulators on Binance, as they did not like the decentralised governance structure of the company.

Dogecoin exchange rate over the past 90 days

Zhao himself also made the following statement on the matter.

When we first started, we relied on the principles of decentralisation – no headquarters, working globally without borders. Now it has become clear that running a centralised exchange requires a centralised legal structure within it.

Binance is likely to make Ireland “its home” by registering its key facilities here. Hopefully, this will have a positive impact on the business of the exchange and the crypto market as a whole. Still, the market certainly doesn’t need volatility right now – especially with the volatility of Bitcoin, which continues to bounce between $55,000 and $60,000.


We believe that Musk's criticism is unfounded, because in fact, the exchange is not asking users for any fictitious sums, but only for a refund of mistakenly accrued money. Accordingly, this is indeed a bug that will surely be dealt with in the near future. So, for now it is better to be happy that the exchange is working rather than raise not the most urgent problems.