Don’t Fall a Victim of Dirty Games in Cryptoland (UPDATED 4)
After Cryptonews.com discovered on Tuesday that potential OKEx clients are being redirected to their competitors, Binance Launchpad, Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, claims they have nothing to do with this.
(Updated on April 10, 07:50 UTC: updates throughout the entire text.
Updated on April 10, 09:18 UTC: a new comment from OKEx has been added (in red).
Updated on April 10, 15:43 UTC: a new section “Owner emerged?” has been added.
Updated on April 11, 12:48 UTC: The “Owner emerged?” section has been updated.)
As reported, if you are to type in okjumpstart.com into your browser, you would not visit OK Jumpstart, major cryptocurrency exchange OKEx’s token sale platform. Instead, you would land right on – the Binance Launchpad, the competing token sale platform, owned by another major exchange Binance, homepage.
As Binance did not reply to our request for comment yesterday, their CEO, commenting on the news via Twitter on Wednesday, said he “can assure you that domain is not owned by anyone at @binance.”
He suggested that this might be the work of a domain squatter.
Domain squatters are people that buy generic, top-level domains early on, preventing anyone else from doing it. That way, they can essentially profit for reselling it, as they would (as one might conclude by now), sell it at a much higher price.
Meanwhile, Andy Cheung, Head of Operations at OKEx, told Cryptonews.com that the company would not consider an offer to buy this domain, if people are trying to make money this way.
As for who purchased the domain, everyone’s guess is as good as any. It was created almost a month ago – on March 12th, 2019, the very same day when OKEx announced their new platform (its first token sale is set to happen today.) According to data from Whois, a public search engine for domain information, the website was supposedly registered by someone from the city of Chengdu, the capital of the Chinese province of Sichuan, via West263 International Limited, a Hong Kong-based registrar company.
Owner emerged?
Meanwhile, later on Wednesday, an individual that goes under the name of Zekun Tong said on Twitter that he owns the domain and “use it without malice, just to pay tribute to this new model”.
Later, Zekun Tong changed destination of all three domains as a proof of ownership.
As for the huobiprime.pro and huobiprime.co domains, both are apparently for sale for USD 1,000 each, while the contact person for potential suitors is VanTong96.
Huobi Prime is a token listing platform, owned by cryptocurrency exchange Huobi Global.
OKEx maintains, however, that they have never gone public with any sort of website dedicated to the platform.
“We’d like to stress that the mentioned website isn’t our official one and for any further information of OK Jumpstart you can refer to https://www.okex.com/activity/jumpstart,” OKEx spokesperson told Cryptonews.com. The spokesperson declined to comment on what, if anything, the company intends to do in this case.
