Binance Co-Founder Yi He Hits Back at OKX CEO Star Xu Over UID Dispute

A Misdirected Transfer Ignites the Dispute

A single misdirected transfer has escalated into a public fight between two of the biggest operators in the crypto exchange business. The row began when a user on X blamed a so-called UID collision for funds they could no longer access. A user ID, or UID, is the number that identifies each account on a trading platform. Binance co-founder Yi He rejected that explanation on November 7, stating that every Binance user holds exactly one unique identifier. The transfer at the center of the complaint, she noted, had been sent to Binance Thailand, which runs a separate account system from the main global platform. That structure matters, because a deposit addressed by UID alone has no way to distinguish between regional platforms sharing one brand. OKX CEO Star Xu then entered the argument directly. In a post on X, he set out his position: identifiers under a single brand must either be globally unique, or transfers made by UID alone between different sites must be blocked outright. “The reason is simple: a UID identifies an account,” he wrote, warning that when the same number can exist on several sites under one brand while users stay free to move funds between them, a transfer can reach the wrong receiving account and the money ends up in the wrong place. Both executives, in effect, now point to design flaws that left a customer unable to recover or sell the funds in question. How the loss should be handled, and which platform bears responsibility for it, has not been stated by either side. The dispute has drawn attention because it touches a mechanism most traders never notice: the identifier that routes a deposit decides which account receives it, and a mismatch at that step leaves a holder with little recourse.

@star_okx · X post

Post on X.

View on X

An Older Grievance Resurfaces

The tension between the two platforms did not start this weekend. On November 4, Xu accused Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) of deflecting blame onto others after the recent hack. He also took aim at CZ for finding time to trade barbs with Elon Musk while the crisis was still running its course. Yi He’s answer arrived the following morning. She shared a trader’s warning against using OKX’s DEX mode, the platform’s decentralized trading interface, for tokens on BNB Chain, the blockchain at the center of Binance’s Web3 ecosystem. Decentralized interfaces of that kind let users trade from their own wallets rather than through custodial balances, so a token that cannot be sold inside the mode leaves the holder with few options short of moving it elsewhere. That risk is why the trader’s advice singled out one specific mode rather than the platform as a whole. The shared post amounts to a claim that assets routed through OKX’s decentralized mode on BNB Chain can end up stranded. The clash lands at a difficult moment for Binance. The company is still working through the fallout of a hack valued at $6.3 billion, and on November 7 it confirmed that Chief Financial Officer Kaiser Ng is leaving his post, with Justin Yek named as the new finance chief. A change in the finance leadership, on top of an unresolved security incident, leaves the exchange fielding questions on several fronts at the same time. Public sparring between the two executives has become a recurring feature of the past week rather than a one-off exchange. That the heads of rival platforms chose this window to attack each other’s product design shows how openly the competitive fight among the industry’s largest firms is now being waged.

@star_okx · X post

Accused.

View on X

Account Design, Not Custody, Is the Fault Line

What stands out in this exchange of posts is that neither side alleges a breach of cold wallet storage or any loss of custodial funds. The complaints concern routing: which identifier a deposit uses, and which interface a trader selects. Xu’s November 4 post and his weekend argument remain the clearest public record of where each side stands, and neither company has moved past the argument to explain how the affected user gets made whole. With Binance managing a $6.3 billion hack recovery and a finance leadership change at the same time, the question of who pays when user funds go astray is being contested in public rather than settled.