CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao announced that all projects applying to list on Binance shall disclose if they have any direct or indirect relationships with Sequoia. Upon this, those projects planning to get enlisted on Binance are confused.

Zhao dropped a tweet at the night of May 7^th saying,

“We may soon require all projects applying to list on Binance to disclose if they have any direct or indirect relationships with Sequoia.”

Many are wondering who is Sequoia. Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm, and it is one of a very few venture capital funds willing to invest in cryptocurrency boldly. According to public information, Sequoia has invested in several cryptocurrencies including Filecoin (FIL), Orchid Protocol, IOSToken (IOST), Ontology (ONT), etc. As per data on coinmarketcap, Ontology and IOSToken are among the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, ranking 28th and 51th respectively.

Binance is one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, with trades covering 300 crypto currencies. In the past 24 hours it has traded over $2.1 billion in cryptocurrencies, according to coinmarketcap.com.

The two companies are recently in a tit-for-tat dispute. The venture capital fund was seeking to fund Binance in exchange for an 11% stake, valued at about $80 million. However, the discussion broke down in late 2017 when crypto market boom sent Binance to the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Binance’s stockholders reevaluated the deal and concluded that the exchange was worth much more than that.

As the deal fell through, Zhao began seeing other investors and soon another VC firm, IDG Capital, partnered with Binance at valuations as high as $1 billion. Sequoia thus filed a suit against Zhao in March, alleging that he violated an exclusivity agreement when he entertained IDG’s offer. Zhao denies the allegations.

It’s apparent that the tension between the two companies might further escalate upon this announcement.

Binance’s co-founder He Yi responded that there shall be no more speculations and they uphold laborious acts conducted by these entrepreneurs, saying

1. The requirement for disclosing information is a neutral news;
2. The existence of this industry is to disrupt the traditional financing model, so that entrepreneurs don’t have to be on their knees to start a business;
3. Binance values the project itself not its name or background.

While CEO of Huobi Li Lin Leon seems to welcome projects linked to Sequoia to list on Huobi, saying projects invested by world-famous VC like Sequoia might get plus points if listed on the platform. Huobi is currently the third largest cryptocurrency exchange by 24 hour transaction volume.