WazirX founder and CEO Nischal Shetty has confirmed that the Indian crypto exchange’s dispute with Binance has escalated to formal litigation. This has raised concerns among investors of WazirX who worry about its future.
During a recent interview he had with TheStreet Roundtable host Mehab Qureshi, Shetty revealed that the long-running ownership dispute between WazirX and Binance has moved into litigation.
“End of the day, I think it’s now gone into a stage of litigation,” he reportedly claimed.
Ownership dispute between WazirX and Binance
During the conversation, Shetty reiterated that WazirX was sold around late 2019-early 2020, following a public announcement at the time.
However, what followed were conflicting claims, which saw both sides publicly disputing ownership of the platform. Binance denied holding any stake in WazirX. However, the Indian exchange claimed to have all the legal documents proving otherwise, which is how the ownership dispute began.
As things stand, Shetty claims the dispute is at a “he said, she said” stage, which makes the outcome of the litigation much more important.
When Shetty was asked whether Binance reached out to WazirX following the hack that shook the platform in July 2024, Shetty declined to comment, claiming the matter is under sub-judice.
This is the latest development regarding the case, whose origins can be traced to the year 2019, after the crypto company announced that Binance had acquired it.
What did Shetty say about custody dispute with Liminal?
During his talk with TheStreet Roundtable host Mehab Qureshi, Shetty also addressed its dispute with Liminal, a digital asset custody and wallet infrastructure platform designed to help institutions, crypto exchanges, and digital asset businesses securely manage and store cryptocurrencies and tokenized assets.
After the initial shock of the July 2024 hack that rocked WazirX by targeting its multi-signature wallet and resulting in a loss of over $230 million, the exchange blamed Liminal, claiming it was linked to Liminal’s multi-signature wallet infrastructure. It also pledged to migrate all remaining assets to a new multi-signature wallet, promising full transparency by publishing a list of all new wallets post-migration.
Things got interesting when Liminal issued a counter-statement on October 22, 2024, denying responsibility for the breach. It claimed that 75 days after the hack, WazirX still held more than $175 million in assets on its platform, with roughly $50 million still under WazirX’s control via Liminal’s infrastructure.
While in a conversation with TheStreet Roundtable host Mehab Qureshi, Shetty confirmed that the exchange had indeed been using Liminal’s software for custody infrastructure, but WazirX itself was always the primary point of contact for users.
Shetty claims the exchange used Liminal’s technology for multi-key security with address whitelisting, ensuring that transactions could only be approved for preapproved wallets.
“This was done so that even if all the devices of our team members got compromised, there’s a third party that would do the final check before authorizing a transaction,” he said.
WazirX has claimed the cyberattack occurred through an external website used for fund management, not its own servers or hot wallets.
“The cyber attack was not on the infrastructure, like the service of WazirX,” Shetty said. “It was a website that we were using for managing these funds, and through that website, the cyber attack happened”.
According to him, the exchange had limited visibility into what happened “behind the scenes of a different website” and is awaiting further details from Liminal.
“We only know our part. We have three laptops that were interacting with our website. Now we don’t know anything beyond that,” Shetty stated.