The crypto world has seen its fair share of plagiarism, with most of it coming from shitcoin projects ripping off the successful work of big-name cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks. We’ve seen Justin Sun scrape huge sections of the Tron whitepaper from existing papers and try to pass it off as its own. However, Binance has just entered the history books as one of the biggest crypto organizations that has completely plagiarized documentation.
As Binance launched its brand-new futures testnets, the documentation is a clear word for word copy of the BitMEX documentation. BitMEX quickly spotted the plagiarism and called Binance out for it on Twitter.
Congrats on the Testnet Futures launches @binance. Glad to see you enjoyed reading our documentation as much as we enjoyed writing it! pic.twitter.com/lLzcLcX6t4
— BitMEX (@BitMEXdotcom) September 4, 2019
CZ Responding Quickly
As always, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhou (CZ) proved to the world that he doesn’t sleep and quickly responded to the Tweet from BitMEX. CZ replied with his usually witty humor and admitted fault. He then said that it was left over from the acquisition process and that Binance will fix or update it as soon as possible. With CZ admitting Binance was at fault, it could hint at further similarities between the Binance futures and BitMEX platforms – with most of the tech likely being very similar. If the previous owners of the futures platform coped BitMEX word for word, there is a good chance they also scraped parts of the publicly available code too.
Shame on us. ? Sorry about that. Missed this in the DD process before the acquisition (didn’t read the BitMex docs ourselves). Will fix/remove ASAP.
The official docs of Futures A platform (developed internally) are here: https://t.co/TPjvYgB2hr for your review.
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) September 4, 2019
Here Come the Memes
We’ve seen it time, time, and time again with Ripple. As soon as a company makes a mistake, the crypto meme lords are circling the battered project like sharks on the hunt. It wasn’t long before we saw brilliant memes mocking CZ and Binance for the schoolboy error. The text is word for word identical with the content on BitMEX – bar the project name, of course. Fortunately, it’s just a testnet and this is the point of a testnet – to find the flaws and fix them for the mainnet launch.
New BitMex? pic.twitter.com/GVYFILllr7
— Robert Anderson – KD9NIY (@silvertooth6876) September 4, 2019
Hopefully, CZ has learned his lesson that the hungry wolves and eagle eyes of the crypto troll community will spot any issues or plagiarism – maybe Binance should hire someone to check content in the future. The brand-new Binance futures platform is looking like it could be one of the best features that Binance has ever launched, right behind its new lending operation. There are bumper rewards on offer for testnet users, including up to 10,000 BNB tokens, so head over and check it out – and that copied content while you’re at it!