OKX founder Star Xu just thrust a 12-year-old scandal back into the spotlight, accusing former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao of falsifying contracts during his stint at OKCoin. Xu points to a still-available YouTube video from 2014 that logs into an accountant's QQ chat, revealing two versions of an employment contract—v7 and v8—sent on December 16, 2014, with v8 adding a controversial six-month termination clause. This bombshell drops as Binance grapples with fresh compliance headaches, including key staff departures in financial crime monitoring roles.

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The video timeline exposes stark details: at 1:35, chat records show attachments for both contracts, v7 at 15:17 and v8 at 19:29, followed by passport scans and public QQ accounts. Xu dismisses CZ's old defense—that an OKCoin employee hacked his QQ to fabricate evidence—as unbelievable. Back then, CZ claimed infrequent QQ use and blamed a hire by Xu for the forgery, detailed in a 2015 Reddit post. This feud, rooted in CZ's abrupt exit from OKCoin to launch Binance in 2017, underscores how early crypto rivalries still haunt today's giants.

Binance's compliance rebuild falters amid these echoes. Fresh from its 2023 guilty plea on U.S. sanctions and money-laundering charges, Binance pledged robust reforms, but 2026 sees monitoring staff jumping ship. Xu's tweet cleverly links the past deceit to present instability, stirring debates on leadership trust in an industry racing toward mainstream adoption. Regulators watch closely as such historical baggage could influence ongoing oversight of exchanges like Binance and OKX.