OKX CEO Star Xu’s objection was about accountability as much as money. After Binance founder Changpeng Zhao described roughly $800 million in post-crash compensation as voluntary, Xu argued that presenting it as generosity overlooked the wider damage investors and the crypto market had suffered.
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What Xu objected to
Reports of Xu’s October 12 remarks say he rejected the idea that Binance’s payout should be treated as a reason for self-praise. His criticism focused on the contrast between a payment to affected Binance users and a market event that reports described as causing much broader losses.
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That is an argument about how exchanges should talk about compensation, not proof that Binance was legally required to pay a particular amount. The available reporting says Zhao characterized the roughly $800 million as voluntary and said the exchange had no obligation to provide it; it does not independently establish the legal question.
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Why the $800 million and $19 billion figures are not directly comparable
Reports put leveraged liquidations during the October 10, 2025 crash at about $19 billion.
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30 That figure describes liquidated positions across the market. It is not a measure of losses suffered only by Binance customers, and it does not show how much of the event Binance caused.
The compensation figures also appear in different forms. Some reporting describes roughly $800 million in compensation, while other accounts list more than $328 million in direct compensation alongside a $300 million goodwill program.
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33 The supplied reports do not fully reconcile those categories with Zhao’s roughly $800 million figure, so they should not be added together or treated as interchangeable without further detail.
Competing explanations for the crash
Xu has been reported as blaming Binance’s handling of USDe and the use of leveraged trading around it for worsening the damage.
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26 Binance, by contrast, attributed the crash primarily to macroeconomic stress, high leverage and thinning liquidity. It said about 75% of the day’s liquidations occurred before the reported index deviations for USDe, BNSOL and WBETH around 21:36 UTC.
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That timing is relevant but not conclusive on its own. If most liquidations came before the reported deviations, those deviations would be unlikely to have started the majority of the sell-off; timing alone cannot determine whether they amplified losses later. The available sources show competing accounts, not an independently established verdict on the full chain of causes.
The dispute, in context
The clearest supported takeaway is that Xu challenged the framing of Binance’s compensation: he argued that describing it as voluntary generosity missed the scale of the broader harm.
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5 The roughly $19 billion liquidation figure gives context for his criticism, but it does not establish that Binance was responsible for all those liquidations or that the payout should be measured against the entire market total.