CZ's Memoir Reignites Contract Forgery Battle with OKX's Star Xu—Old Wounds Won't Heal

Changpeng "CZ" Zhao's newly released memoir has detonated an old feud with OKX founder Star Xu, pulling long-buried accusations back into the spotlight and raising serious questions about credibility in crypto's earliest days.

The Memoir Provocation

Released April 8, CZ's Freedom of Money revisits contested events from his time at OKCoin, including alleged contract disputes and claims that rivals deployed "fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD)" to undermine Binance's emergence. More provocatively, the book alleges that Huobi founder Leon Li told CZ in 2025 that he believed Xu had reported him to authorities years earlier—a claim Xu flatly denies.

The book's framing is strategic: CZ positions himself as the target of coordinated attacks from competing exchanges seeking to slow Binance's explosive 2017 rise, including alleged last-minute funding withdrawals during its ICO. This narrative extends into the 2020 custody crisis, when OKX (then OKEx) halted withdrawals for five weeks while Xu faced reported "soft arrest" in China. CZ suggests Xu "alone held the keys" to exchange wallets, contrasting this with Huobi's continued operations during Li's detention—implying better wallet architecture at the latter.

Xu's Counteroffensive

Star Xu came out swinging, posting a series of X threads calling CZ "a habitual liar" and disputing multiple memoir claims. More damaging: Xu resurfaced OKCoin's 2015 rebuttal and a notarized video purporting to show evidence of contract forgery.

The video, still publicly available, allegedly depicts an OKCoin accountant's QQ account being accessed before a notary, showing CZ sending two versions of a Bitcoin.com agreement (v7 and v8) on December 16, 2014. The controversial v8 included a six-month termination clause absent from v7. CZ's defense at the time? He rarely used QQ, and another OKCoin employee may have logged in and fabricated the chat history—a defense Xu openly mocked as implausible.

The Original Evidence War

OKCoin's accompanying 2015 Reddit statement went further, accusing CZ of forging Roger Ver's signature on the v8 contract, inflating his technical contributions as CTO, running unauthorized trading bots, and waging a public campaign of "lies and desperate nonsense" after his departure.

Xu disputes the memoir's characterization of his role at OKCoin, the Roger Ver contract dispute, alleged market manipulation involvement, and even claims about his "current marital status." He argues the 2020 custody incident was misrepresented: complaints against major crypto exchanges don't determine enforcement outcomes, and Li "shouldn't believe this kind of nonsense that defies common sense" about being reported.